Recently Sean and I have started refining our approach to Enterprise 2.0. Yes, we already know most of the problems within the Enterprise, and how information chaos within an organization can be turned into a advantage for companies to achieve competitive advantage in the marketplace through the use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. We also know how various principles of Enterprise 2.0, when planned and executed properly, can lead organizations to achieve the benefits that proponents of Enterprise 2.0 have been preaching.

In fact, we know so many of these benefits now, that a number of blogs online started to surface regarding the stagnation of Enterprise 2.0. The problem being that no success stories have yet to surface yet on a satisfiable frequency in my newsreader everyday. Why??? How else is a company going to penetrate into a marketplace where there are more theorist that actual practioners? How else is a C-level going to buy in to your Enterprise 2.0 pitch?

This prompted a rethink on how these benefits can be perceived. The benefits, collectively packaged, actually lead to two of the most important corporate thinking in today’s business environment.

Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) & Innovation Management

In a highly evolving market today (which also couples with highly volatile operating environments for some), organizations can no longer rely on cost-cutting to sustain growth today. With cost-cutting becoming a norm these days, organizations are finding it harder and harder to distinguish itself from competitors.

The concept of CE comes in at the angle that every employee in an organization should be innovative driven to help corporations to gain in edge in the marketplace through creation of new corporate ventures / products / business processes.

CE works in par with distributing value co-creation in an organization, as the two actually preaches about delegating innovation / value creation down the value chain internally in an organization. The creation of corporate activity, nonetheless, is very difficult since it involves a radical change in internal organization behavior patterns.

So how do you actually make an employee to be interested enough to take his/her own initiatives to innovate for the company? Can Enterprise 2.0 help ?

Enterprise 2.0 does not preach to know-it-all regarding this. However, the tools when employed with proper change management / people strategy, can be an extremely powerful enabler towards harnessing the sort of environment that encourages CE at all levels. Enterprise 2.0 preaches about “breaking the silo” and “breaking the barrier”. CE preaches at a high level, that all employees be driven to help the company drive business growth, and not only executing day to day job functions. The two ideas coincide with one another.

A transparent enterprise through the use of Enterprise 2.0 principles and technologies, coupled with an environment that promotes innovation at all levels (including reward schemes), may as well promote CE and innovation faster that you think.

Promotion of transparent collaboration and harness of corporate talents promotes CE. Higher penetration of CE fosters faster innovation. Faster innovation of new products/business processes/corporate ventures will help organizations better compete in the marketplace (or even creating new marketspace for some organizations), and potentially lead to long term sustained growth for the organization. This is a cause-effect chain that makes a lot of sense to me.

As stated in Andrew McAfee’s Investing in IT That Makes a Competitive Difference, investing in the right technology can yield a significant performance difference for an enterprise.

Apologies for the absence of blogs for the past month, as I have been busy tanning myself under the tropical hot Malaysian weather (as you can see above) as part of my wedding. I have been off Web 2.0 and work for nearly 5 weeks. A totally GOOD BREAK much needed indeed !!!!

I will be back with more posts about Web 2.0 very soooon…right now I am still trying to settle into the cold freezy weather in Melbourne.

I have recently started experimenting with MindTouch, after having read dozens of posts online about it. While being a proponent on Enterpise 2.0, the standard open source WIKI software out there today still has a lot of limitations. In fact, I am not at all over excited with WIKIs, as compared to other Web 2.0 related technologies. A WIKI seems like, well, a WIKI. It’s really hard to differentiate among the plethora of WIKI softwares out there today. There are heaps of them.

Let’s look at the basics of vanilla WIKIs without plugins/extensions :-

1. It allows version control of documents. (imagine your document manager)
2. It allows comments to be associated with documents. Hence the value add.
3. It allows effective collective sharing / collaboration on a piece of information asset across different departmental silos in an organization. (imagine no more email with 10MB attachments !!!!)
4. RSS feeds can be subscribed to various sources to retrieve updates.

While the features above are good, as a IT management consultant as well as a part-time techie, I tend to ask myself the following questions whenever I evaluate a product:-

1. How extensible is the product?
2. How customizable is the product?
3. What are the integration opportunities out there?
4. Is it technology platform agnostic/language agnostic?
5. How can I, as an Enterprise 2.0 consultant, extend beyond the original value proposition of Enterprise 2.0 to the client with this product?

The answer to 1,2 and 3 is that the product will need to be based on open architecture, leveraging either a plugin , API or a web service model for 3rd party integration. For point 4, platform agnostic meaning that it can run and be deployed on any operating system.

From a SI’s (System Integrator) perspective, the more customizable and integra-table a product is, the more enticing it is. Putting strictly my consultant hat on, that means more value proposition to the client organization.

While most WIKI software allows developers to produce plugins/extensions, they are generally not flexible enough to integrate with other information systems, not at least in a straight forward way.

So is MindTouch just another entrance into the red ocean plethora of WIKIs lying around? No.

MindTouch is fully based on a SOA architecture. It is written in C#, and uses the MONO framework to allow it to operate in all major UNIX-based operating systems out there (MAC OS X, Linux, Solaris). The SOA architecture means the hooks into the software are all fully based on web or REST services !!!! Here are few reasons why I think MindTouch will stand out compared to other WIKI systems:-

1. The web services approach allows ease of integration with external systems. E.g. A WIKI page for a technical lead showing the latest snapshot of the statistics of the number of code activity in subversion, as well as testing activity from a online test management system called Mantis.
2. This ease of integration leads to MindTouch being a powerful platform for Enterprise Mashups !!!
3. MindTouch still persists the functionality that you would typically find in a WIKI system.
4. MindTouch requires no configuration (except admin username/password) at all. It’s a simple deployment that’s done through VMWare Workstation. Plug the VM image in the workstation, click play. Dead simple.

MindTouch surely is not the conventional WIKI that we all imagine it to be. It’s much more than a WIKI. It differentiates itself with other key players by having the ability to plug and play services exposed by other information systems.

As MindTouch markets it, this WIKI does mean business !!!!! Finally, kudos to Aaron Fulkerson for releasing such a wonderful product !!!

PS: Expect a blog post on building a extension for Deki WIKI sometime in the near future.

I recently had an opportunity to attend IBM’s showcase in Melbourne. I have never really been an IBM fan, but I thought it was a good time to see where the vendor monoliths are heading in the Information Management scene.

I will be releasing a small series of 2 blogs about the event. In the first blog, I will describe how I feel generally about the event, and how it went. The second blog will focus on Enterprise 2.0 in the world of Information Management.

The Event

The event started off with a local news star (Sandra Sully from Channel 10) giving an introduction. A scenario surrounding 911 was used to portray the chaos of the news media on that day and how information anywhere, anytime is becoming an important mantra in the industry we survive in today. 

The event followed on with a speech given by Bruce McCabe from S2 Intelligence. Bruce gave a stunning presentation on the future of Information Management, as well as the latest development in the computer science world. His presentation actually validated one of my earlier projections in the industry during my earlier Web 2.0 days, where the next frontier in Information Technology will be dominated by Artificial Intelligence. The word “Semantic Web” still rings a lot of bells in my head as this is where I believe the web is heading. One of the other key things surrounding his speech was about how spatial data is increasingly adding value to organizations (think of Google Earth). Web 2.0 technologies do get a good amount of attention and coverage as well. 

There were 4 streams of sessions that ran in parallel, namely Data Management, Information Integration, ECM (Enterprise Content Management) and Business Optimization/Performance Management. I attended the ECM and Business Optimization/Performance Management streams. So here goes…..

IBM’s approach to Information Management

Two of the key themes in IBM’s sessions lied in the following:-

1. Business Automation
2. Business Opmitization and Performance Management

Business Automation is really about the automation of processes that makes an organization operate more efficiently. Business Optimization and Performance Management is about leveraging all the analytical information (typically, reports) within the firm to make sound decisions or take proactive actions before the company is heading towards a plunge or a stall point. While I have been interested in the area of BPM (Business Process Management, which is really about managing processes/process engineering)  for a while, I am really interested in the Business Optimization field. In the consulting world, we call this Business Intelligence.

Strategic Solution VS Tactical Solution

Organizations in the past have very much focused on employing tactical point solutions to solve disparate problems. This typically involved organizations investing in off the shelf solutions to cater for specific organizational needs. While this method of solving problems are cost effective in the short - medium term, it may not be sustainable in the long term, given the amount of data growth that organizations are facing today.

IBM portrays their industry solutions as strategic, rather than tactical.

Enterprise Content Management

IBM FileNet was presented in this space. ECM works very well with the idea of the “Federated Enterprise”. With the explosion of information sources lying around (think of your SharePoint instances, WIKIs, Blogs), the enterprise would surely need a way to provide a “single point of access/management” of these dispersed information sources. Let’s face it, to have a single data source storing all of the information would be too idealistic at most, if not extremely risky. IBM’s FileNet ECM promises to provide that through the ability to integrate with all the different data sources under FileNet, with the ability to provide a single holistic view of the enterprise’s information assets. Within FileNet itself, there are also mechanisms that support information asset discovery (Enterprise Search).

A Federated Enterprise has a lot of benefits. Besides it’s uniform/ease of access to disparate information sources, the ability to do this means reduced risk to the total business when entangled in legal issues. Legal warfares between organizations are not uncommon in the industry today, and an organization wouldn’t like to lose a battle unnecessarily simply because it can’t locate “x” piece of information or on time. Better management of information assets will also lead to better risk and statutory business compliance.

While a Federated Enterprise often means you can access information from a single facade, it doesn’t necessarily mean that all the information sources are consolidated. For organizations having difficulty in maintaining a “single source of truth”, a Master Data Management or information consolidation strategy in place will further complement the idea of a “Federated Enterprise”.

Business Intelligence

IBM Cognos enables client to leverage all the metric/analytical information within an organization to quickly produce timely reports. These reports can vary from simple departmental KPI reports to financial reports that are exposed to shareholders.

The information contained within these reports are vital as it help organizations sustain/monitor performance over time. This helps organizations to become proactive instead of reactive to organizational issues. Being reactive may help the business in sustaining itself, but being proactive may well not only help sustaining the business, but also to GROW it. 

IBM Cognos is also tailored to different users with different reporting needs in an organization, ranging from the C-levels all the way down to a business analyst.

In Conclusion

IBM is equipped with big arsenals to take on the Information Management world. The addition of various product portfolios through their acquisitions over the years have positioned them strongly in the Information Management market.

Although the second half of the presentation is very much product-focused, it is nevertheless an interesting experience to study how various vendors strategize within the Information Management market.

So what has all this gotta do with Web 2.0, you may ask ?? Stay tuned for the next upcoming blog…..

During a recent conversation with a mate regarding Enterprise / Web 2.0, the dreaded question of ROI came back haunting us. While being a proponent on the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 is very simple, substantiating the need for Enterprise 2.0 in terms of $$ and cents may seem difficult, for now. 

ROI/Rate of Return (for some) is a critical component in a project. It measures the ratio of money gained/lost in an investment in a project. In short, it finds out whether your project has failed (lost money) or succeeded (gain money). ROI analysis and study is a very typical part of every consultant’s job, albeit perhaps most important.

To put all this into perspective, the following thought process went through our discussions:-

1. How do we measure ROI and convince the C-levels that Enterprise/Web 2.0 will save them money?
2. The perceived benefits related to Enterprise/Web 2.0 are not yet quantifiable scientifically. In another words, the benefits are intangible and unsubstantiated.
3. If 1 and 2 above is correct, how can we ever market Web 2.0 solutions to the market strictly through the eyes of the dollar? Is there no other way rather than a ROI?  

While all the questions above are valid, I am very doubtful if a satisfactory answer can actually be found. It boils down to the philosphical question of “How do you measure the value of an idea, or tacit knowledge that has been captured in an exchange”?

Enterprise/Web 2.0 offers a whole new world of principles and tools, unto which the flow of an enterprise information landscape will change significantly. This has direct impact on the business model of an organization. Closer collaboration internally and externally will have a significant impact to the traditional way businesses have been run for centuries.

Instead of asking the above questions, I would like to propose taking a radical stance, and turn around the questions above to the following :-

1. How agile is your current business information landscape? Can you access critical information quickly?  Knowing the right person to ask for ideas is not good enough, and definitely not an efficient and agile way to capture knowledge. Useful knowledge should be available anytime, anywhere. 
2. How well are you harnessing your talents within your organization (a key metric associated would be the employee attrition rate)?
3. How well are you managing innovation, and how closely are they tied to what your customers desire?
4. With smaller niche market players appearing with more dynamic and agile business models that has the capability to erode parts of your revenue streams, can your organization afford not to keep up and protect the piece of your pie in the market segment?

I could go on and on, but I decided to stop here. In short, I think the whole ROI equation needs to be looked at when it comes to Enterprise/Web 2.0. The fundamental assumptions underlying the need of a ROI calculation as a basic quantifiable unit towards profitability calculation may need to be re-looked for substantiating Web 2.0.

As usual, most welcome to comment on what you think.

The concept of tag clouds is very powerful. I often refer to the tag cloud together with tagging folksonomy as a starting point in categorizing and displaying information in an enterprise. Tagging folksonomy is a powerful idea that allows categorization or organization of information based on the everyday user’s perspective. The social element adds improved relevance, as opposed to information being categorized by a elite group of taxonomist in a company. Tag cloud demonstrates a “at a high level” view, the summary/relevance of the information in an information ecosystem.

TweetCloud took this one step ahead today. By studying and analyzing information exchange through the popular microblogging service, Twitter, TweetCloud builds you a cloud containing all the words that you have used in exchanging tweets with your fellow Twitters. Below is a screenshot of my TweetCloud :-

How is this useful? It shows you your most frequently used word in tweet exchanges with your peers, hence capturing and potentially exposing your characteristics/personality in these tweets. This forms a social dimension around you to your peers. In another word, it reveals even more about you in the cloud!!!!

In the above, as you can see, blog seems to be a word I have used most often when exchanging twit with my fellow twitters. Some of the words above seems to reveal that I have been twittering a lot about techie stuff, and hence perhaps reveal that I am a techie g33k!!!! There are also a few references made to some fellow twitters (and hence, exposing my relationship/weak ties within the social network implicitly).

The same idea, leveraged in an enterprise, not only help people connect, but also help people identify themselves.