Bonding the Enterprise 2.0 Community
6 Aug
As the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT is a European conference, we certainly need to discuss the multi-cultural challenges of introducing E 2.0 in international companies. Last year, Craig Hepburn from the UK hosted the panel consisting of E 2.0 experts from all over Europe: Bertrand Duperrin/France, Mark Masterson/Germany, Emanuele Quintarelli/Italy and Dr. Frank Schoenefeld/Germany.
Here is last year’s video of the session:
In the following I have listed the aspects that I found most remarkable and interesting in this discussion:
This year, Bertrand Duperrin will be the host for the discussion on how to overcome cultural boundaries for Enterprise 2.0. An interview with him on his views and expectations for this year’s Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT is about to follow soon.
15 Jul
At the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 in Milan, Mark Tamis from Net-7 and Esteban Kolsky from ThinkJar talked about “A new era of customer engagement with Social CRM”. Their point of view on this complex matter is the following:
Why is the social customer becoming an important subject these days? Simply because people trust other people – even if they do not know them or only know them from the Internet – more than any company. Instead of watching a company’s ad and then buying the product, potential customers are turning to friends to ask for advice or post a request in some relevant online forum to find out about other people’s experiences. So, instead of seeing the product you want to sell through the eyes of your company, you now have to see it through the eyes of the customer.
Therefore, they say, the new business model is going to be twofold: In addition to focusing on internal Enterprise 2.0 operations, external aspects have to be included as well - namely the social CRM (client facing operations). Thus, the new business model must be a hybrid of both internal and external communities. This means that employees and customers have to work together very closely in the near future as customers want to become part of the process themselves. So after evolving into a social enterprise, the next step will be a “collaborative enterprise” where there is major interaction with the ecosystem (customers, employees, partners, suppliers, channels).
According to Mark and Esteban, the following things have to be taken into consideration:
Of course, this is a very long and time-consuming process. And according to the presenters, a company first needs to be entirely E 2.0, before developing into a collaborative enterprise. Many companies are already at different stages in this process and the crucial point is always the maturity of the company: The change in the mentality is a long way to go.
A more detailed insight on Mark Tamis thoughts is provided by him in his blog.
So much about the presentation in Milan. Social CRM is currently a very trending and highly debated topic among the evangelists. The integration of the customer in the business process is also not a new topic (see the discussions about mass customization). But the integration of socially interacting customers is a new one that is relevant to various fields of business processes such as communications, marketing, sales etc. Each of this disciplines are experimenting in the one or the other way with the social web - a holistic view on this topics must be the end solution but is still far away from yet being realized.
Or do you think differently?
17 Mar
Recently we have been quite busy in preparing and organizing events that did not leave time to systemize and arrange my collected thoughts about all those discussions and informal exchanges I had with experts and practioneers in the field of Enterprise 2.0 during the last months. Today I am quite locked to nothing more than accompanying Bertrand at his pre-conference workshop for our E20 FORUM in Paris tomorrow. This leaves time to sort out my ideas that are turning around my head already for weeks.
It’s about the emergence of the E20 idea within the corporations. A lot has been said and written about the necessity and potentials of the new forms of collaborations and communications by using social software. Quite a few contributions have even predicted a big bang of change in the enterprise world. Others have criticized this vision and labelled the E20 thingy a “crock”. The truth is - as always - in the middle because E20 - as so many other business innovations - is not emerging in one step but is dependent on a cultural change within the corporation that again happens slowly.
So to explain the state of E20 we have to take a differentiated view on the different stages of the E20 emergence in the corporations. For each stage I see different people being involved in the diffusion process of this idea. They have different motivations regarding the E20 subject that serve more or less towards the big vision of E20. But they all contribute their share towards the diffusion process of this idea. Therefore I’d like to compare the diffusion of this idea with the dissemination of a virus:

(0) At some point someone is initiating some social software projects in the corporations - mostly under the radar of any strategic decision. These projects are mostly departmental projects with a small group of co-workers involved. There are quite some examples in which the IT departments started using some kind of wikis for documentating IT projects. In other examples some tinkerers (and yes I am not talking about the Generation Facebook but about tinkerers because I do not think it is a matter of age!) have installed or introduced some kind of social software e.g. microblogging service as Yammer in their departments. According to the image of the virus dissemination I’d like to describe this stage as “localized infections”.
(1) At the second stage I have observed quite a lot of companies in which the communications department came along the Web 2.0 thingy in the first place. Quite a lot of them have perceived this Web 2.0 thingy as a new way of communication format - in the terms of using social software to get people more involved into the messages corporate communications wants to send out. This in mind they might install corporate blogs to initiate discussions and feedback channels or add wiki or social networking functionality to the intranet in order to centralize the knowledge capturing and sharing. In regard to my analogy to the virus dissemination I’d call this the “first outburst” - as these initiatives have created quite a lot of attention within the enterprises. But in the long term most of these project could not gather any critical mass of participants because they have been set up as top-down initiatives to improve the impact of corporate communications and not been used to enhance the information flow. But we must not underestimate the effects of these projects. Because even they might have failed or not as supportive for the E20 vision in the long run, they are important for the further dissemination of the E20 virus - as they show the strategic relevance of social software within the corporation. This said these project will be indirectly supportive towards the growth of the grass-rooted projects.
(2) Eventually the growth of some of these grass-rooted projects will call the attention towards the department that is in charge for the organizational development. They will analyse and try to “decode” the effects of these projects. Eventually they might realize the business value generated by the improved information flow and the enhanced knowledge sharing within these projects. They might try to take over the control of these initiatives and turn them towards a corporate initiative. This is the point at which steering committees are been created and the subject of E20 becomes a strategic issue. But though there are thoughts about the enterprise-relevance most of the enterprises in this stage will not reorganize completely at this point. Because the realized business value is mostly generated “above the flow” and not “in the flow” of the business value chain. And as the enterprise is driven primarily by the success of the value creation in the line of business and not by some kind of enhancement in collaboration and information flow - only service companies that are primarily dependant on knowledge sharing for the business lines will succeed with the E20 thingy already at this point. Examples are for example CSC or Booz Allen Hamilton.
(3) Therefore the next stage in the diffusion process I see within those projects that deploy social functionalities towards the IT systems of the line of businesses. Examples for this I see in the Business Innovation Community project of Daimler (that is an open innovation platform installed by the business development department), the social enhancement towards CRM processes as well as the emergence of “personal learning networks” promoted by HR departments. According to my analogy I would call this stage the “virus variations” stage as in most cases there are more than one department that start a strategic E20 initiative.
(4) Finally as each of these different initiatives grow towards strategic relevance the management board eventually sees the demand to “streamline” the initiatives in order to effectively balance the benefits on the enterprise level. At this point they will approach the crossroads of the E20 success or failure as the “streamlining” can be organized as a top-down centralization of the projects which will kill the grass-rooted movements of each project. Or - the “streamlining” will lead towards a deconstruction of the business model because the management board as well as the corporation is “viciously infected” by the idea “to let loose” and “to open up” in order to gain new business value.
As a result the enterprise might eventually reach the final stage of a new form of organization that I do not want to describe at this point - as it would be quite hypothetically as I have not come along enough examples that resemble this stage.
To reply upfront to the critics of the above describe sequence of diffusion stages - there is no statistical evidence to this image, it is only a personal observation and conclusion towards the different stages of E20 infection. It might be an answer towards the question why the “big bang theory” won’t work for this kind of projects because the E20 thingy is a cultural change that must emerge slowly to all parts of the corporation and leads eventually towards a change of the business model.
Looking forward to any comments.
28 Jan
As we have already experienced in the discussions at E20 SUMMIT Frankfurt there is only little knowledge about the state of E20 projects in Europe. We want to change this - with this blog, the related events and now some research initiatives. As I am a passionate researcher by heart (that was my obsession before I entered the event organization sphere!) I have set up a first shot - questioning the external perspective of the state of E20 with a research on E20 consultants. And as we are preparing the E20 FORUM / Paris I am starting the research by limiting it towards a French but also Belgium perspective.
So here we go - behind the following URL below you find a Google form with some questions about the state of E20.
I would like to encourage every French consultant (from the one-man-show towards the members of the big consultancy firms) to take part in this research. The conducted data will handled anonymously. The research is set up as an open source project - so we will share all the results from the research and grant free access to the results to everybody after closing it.
Please retweet, re-post and spread the word to everybody. We need at least a 100 returned forms to be somehow valid and representative.
In order to assure the authenticity of the answers we have built in a little hurdle for the participation. Though we do not relate your answers to your person we want to know who is taking part and what is his/her background. Therefore we ask you to request a “research ID” at research (at) n - sight (dot) de that is queried in the last question on the questionnaire. Only the returned forms with a identified “research ID” will be counted!
UPDATE / Feb 02: In order to give you an incentive to take part in the survey we’d like to announce a raffle of 2 free tickets to the E20 FORUM / Paris among all participants of the survey by Feb 15th.
26 Jan
It’s been a while that I have been posting things on this blog. And even the new year is already quite some days old but still I am happy to see all these E20 initiatives and discussions from last year still being around and even more initiatives and discussion being on its way. The change has just begun and as from my feedback to projects in Europe the fossilized structure of organizations are breaking up - cover by cover.
The discussions around the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT in Frankfurt showed that though people are not talking very loudly about their projects there are quite a few E20 initiatives going on in European companies. As said before these projects are not always initiated at the highest C-level but they are also not running anymore totally under the radar of the C-level management. Lots of projects have gained quite some recognition within their company but still struggling to be an Enterprise-wide approach towards a new way of Enterprise organization and collaboration. There are only a few showcases that have reached this level.
But still - from my perspective 2010 will be the year that E20 enters the state of Enterprise importance more globally and recognizably. Why? Because the changes from the markets - both the economic situation as well as the customer-driven expectations - will force the management to rethink the way the enterprises are doing business, are organized and are securing their positioning within the markets. This will support projects that change enterprises to a more “outside-in” approach and help stirring up the innovation process (as this is number one competitive challenge today). As Enterprise 2.0 initiatives have demonstrated its supporting effects for these objectives in small projects within the enterprises, the c-level management will come back to these projects to be tried out in the large. This means the biggest challenge for E20 initiatives in 2010 is first to get the recognition for these effects within the organization and second to provide adoption schemes that are capable to guarantee the results for the large.
For us and our conferences we will therefore focus further on the success factors for adoption as well as how to install an effective E20 change management within the organization. First conference to discuss these next steps is the Enterprise 2.0 FORUM in Paris on March 18th with a bunch of exciting case studies - just have a look at http://e20forum.fr. To do the groundwork for this conference I will compile some more insights towards the French E20 market within the next posts (mainly summarizing the great work of Bertrand, Julien, Cecil and other French E20 afficionados). So let’s get ready to rumble!
9 Nov
Recently, OpenText has announced very loudly an “integrated approach to Enterprise 2.0″ (see this page). As Craig Hepburn, Director of the Social Media Strategy at OpenText Web Solutions Group, is part of our upcoming conference I was quite eager what this buzz is all about.
We talked about 30 mins about the solution approach, the market and its development. Here are my notes to the interview:
For the full interview watch this:
31 Oct
I have done a short online video interview with Gonzalo Higueras from blueKiwi and Yan Neugebauer from Prisma EDV yesterday. Unfortunately we have had some technical problems regarding the quality of the recording for the desktop sharing and therefore for the demo (well, I guess Skype is not the best solution for that).
Anyway - the video still gives a good idea of what blueKiwi is about: It’s a kind-of enterprise microblogging solutions like Yammer or Communote. But as in comparison to the other approaches it differenciates in terms of structuring and organizing the discussions. While Yammer is very much focussed on group discussions and the idea of Communote is centered around a semantic tagging approach of micro discussions, blueKiwi (from perspective) is very much focussed on the discussions of ideas/issues/documents. So I would say this is more suitable to use cases where the motivation is to initiate some specific innovation processes - where as the other two approaches are better off for enhancing a general flow of communications within the company.
Another aspect that was pointing out by Gonzalo is the integration possibilities with document management systems (while this is very interesting the standardization of this approach has to be checked!). At this point the developments in the solutions market will be very interesting - as big players with strong DM background as IBM, Microsoft, Open Text and ORACLE are strongly pushing into this.
So here we go with the video:
28 Oct
I was linked this morning towards an article of the BusinessWeek that is discussing some statements of Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee about the preferable model of relationship for internal social applications.
SocialText CEO Eugene Lee argues that Twitter might be a better model than Facebook for next-gen communications within companies, so-called Enterprise 2.0. Facebook’s trouble? Reciprocal friending. The problem, he says, is that employees on corporate social networks start collecting friendships of execs. “Because the Rolodex is public, it becomes a matter of VP trading cards.”
A preferable model for corporate relationships, he says, is Twitter, where people lend their attention, not necessarily their friendship. In SocialText’s Twitter-like corporate offering, Signals , more people are likely to “follow” the CEO—assuming he or she has anything interesting to Tweet.
Despite the sales context of this statement I cannot agree more on this. As the objective of social apps within the enterprise is to increase transparency we need to inhibit any situation of asynchronous information. And refused reciprocal relations create asynchronous information. So "following" shows already my interest and my "trust" as well as recognition of any kind of "authority" of the followed person - but to refuse someone "following" me is to hindering him/her to get information he/she is interested in.
On the other hand there might be staff members that share some kind of "non public" information e.g. some R&D folks - how to proceed with these. Are the enterprises already ready for the full transparent information flow? Especially as the non-transparent competitor next door is just waiting to expose some competitive information and advantages?
What are your thoughts on this?
15 Oct
What is Enterprise 2.0 all about? IMHO - this is the most asked question when talking about this topic. As several bright heads have said before instead of theoretically talking about the Enterprise 2.0 vision we need to talk about use cases and case studies that show and unveil the power of this so-called “social business“. At the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT we have defined four different use cases that are going to be discussed along different best practices presentation. And while setting up an explanation of these use cases two days ago I ran along this nice post of Larry Hawes discussing the “nexus of business process & ad-hoc collaboration” that led me to an idea of a more broader view on the topic to be discussed in the following.
In his post Larry Hawes refers to post of Sameer Patel discussing the difference between ECM systems and social software:
ECM enables controlled, repeatable content publication processes, whereas social software empowers rapid, collaborative creation and sharing of content. There is a place for both in large enterprises. Sameer’s suggestion was that social software be used for authoring, sharing, and collecting feedback on draft documents or content chunks before they are formally published and widely distributed. ECM systems may then be used to publish the final, vetted content and manage it throughout the content lifecycle.
This relates to my understanding why enterprises need such thing as social software - because they need to change and to innovate in order to be more competitive in their markets. Consequently they have to discover new opportunities, ideas and information that is describing or representing these. And as a result from the organizational perspective companies need some kind of “reframing” of their business model.
Inspired by the post of Larry Hawes I would therefore describe the difference between established enterprise business applications and Enterprise 2.0 on a dimension of how the application is supporting the “reframing” process (I am explicitly not talking about “change” or “transformation” here because IMHO “change” is a consciousness thing needed to be done before and “transformation” might go far beyond the needed “reframing” in order to be up-to-date to customer and market expectations).
On this dimension established enterprise business application are “securing the precedent”. They support the planning-and-control-organization of the current operations by registering and certifiably documentating business incidents. The applications provide insights towards the historical status-quo of the business operations and can be distinguished by the business entity it is focussing on. On the one side there are established and defined processes and on the other side business-relevant data and unstructured information that have to be managed throughout their lifecycle.
If we take the scenario of Larry Hawes regarding the customer service issue there are business incidents - commonly in the sphere of knowledge working - that exceed these pre-defined processes and information structures. For these incidents the staff needs to move beyond the status-quo of defined processes and stored information. Former approaches to this used special methodologies like delphi studies and artificial intelligence toforcast the future in order to discovery new opportunities. At this point - social software offers a new approach - as it provides a way of harnessing the collective power of a interconnected setting of people to discover and ventilate new ideas - by externalizing and opening up data about information chunks, knowledge and process execution towards the crowd.
In regards towards this dimension of “reframe” I hence distinguish two further steps: first the “discovery” and second the “exchange”. This takes account of the idea of the learning organization that focuses on enhancing its systems to continually increase the organization’s capacity for performance. It also supports a phrase I first came along in a presentation of Lee Bryant: “It’s all about managing feeds & flows, and not objects“.
Along with the differenciation of business processes and business information, it helps again to keep apart four different use case scenarios of Enterprise 2.0:
Just to be clear the above mentioned use cases are not directly linked to technological solutions but certain social software concepts fit better to the one or the other use case. Therefore wiki solutions provide a good approach towards the collaborative knowledge work. While weblogs and microblogging solutions are better in giving access to the flow of information. And social networks provide advantages for supporting collaboration and the learning organization.
At the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT we will discuss different best practices for these four use cases and I will sum up my insights regarding the fit of this matrix towards the practical use out there in a post after the conference. But before this I would be very interested in your thoughts on this!
7 Oct
While we are still far away from the maturity stage of Enterprise 2.0 in terms of numbers of realized projects, the discussion about the Enterprise 2.0 topic becomes more matured and leads finally beyond talking about the chances and opportunities. This might be a sign of the on-going economic crisis and its urge for a more specific discussion about this topic (see the call for the Reality Check 2.0), but it might also be a result of the emergence of the now gained insights from the first best-practices in this field. The exchange of experiences is a very supportive means for this - as enforced by initiatives like the 2.0 Adoption Council , E20Cases.org and others.
This said - I think it’s time to consolidate the topics to be discussed in regards to improve and enhance Enterprise 2.0 projects. From my research for setting up the conference program of the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT - I identified 5 key topics for project leads to take care of:
1) There is only one goal to be achieved: collaborative performance.
Yes - we can talk about changing the our world but at the end of the day we live from what we have achieved on a set of goals.
Keeping this in mind it is the results orientation that is driving a project to success. While the measurement of the return of Enterprise 2.0 activities is more complex than with ordinary business processes it is not unfeasible. 2.0 systems are depending on group dynamics that are not always measurable at first sight (as for example in the case of indirect network effects). Therefore we need new approaches to measure the effects. But in the end it’s all about "performing" as stated in Bruce Tuckman four-stage model called Tuckman’s Stages . In conclusion of this is that the development of a collaborative performance measurement is firstly the key to the argumentation for Enterprise 2.0 initiatives as well as the "steering" wheel for the success of the project.
2) Keep the interaction alive and kicking with participation & community management
As already said the 2.0 world is depending on group dynamics realized by social software systems that increase transparency on what other group members are doing and ease the way of participation. So changes and transformation is indirectly caused by interactions within the group. The facilitation and guidance of the group’s interaction process is one of the keys to Enterprise 2.0 effects. It is and will never be guaranteed just by the installation and implementation of technology. The management of this facilitation and guidance is a strategic task of the project and therefore highly important as discussed in Dion’s post on "Community Management: The ‘essential’ capability of successful Enterprise 2.0 efforts" . The conception of the participation & community management is the operational structure for this kind of projects.
3) Set the right environment variables to new forms of organizational schemes and leadership models.
As we are talking about a new way of operational structure within Enterprise 2.0 activities we also have to have a look at the organizational structure. While the traditional organizational structure is based on the concepts of bureaucracy best-practices of Enterprise 2.0 initiatives show that they are better off if they are structured by the ideas of adhocracy . This implies new forms of organizational schemes and models of leadership.
As taken from the Wikipedia the concept of adhocracy leads to the following characteristics of the organizational setup that have to be discussed:
- highly organic structure
- little formalization of behavior
- job specialization based on formal training
- a tendency to group the specialists in functional units for housekeeping purposes but to deploy them in small, market-based project teams to do their work
- a reliance on liaison devices to encourage mutual adjustment, the key coordinating mechanism, within and between these teams
- low standardization of procedures, because they stifle innovation
- roles not clearly defined
- selective decentralization
- work organization rests on specialized teams
- power-shifts to specialized teams
- horizontal job specialization
- culture based on democratic and non-bureaucratic work
4) Be aware of the complexity of changing the game
As derived from the first three topics the implementation and adoption of Enterprise 2.0 concepts within the organization implies a cultural change process at some level (dependent of the scope of the project!). Therefore the management or (as some may say no to a cultural change management) better the facilitation of the process of a cultural change is another key to the success of these projects.
I would like to cite Stuart French at this point :
The key here is that while culture is not a “thing” to be managed, it is certainly undergoing constant transformation. As mentioned earlier, the real power of a cognitive view of culture comes from a change of perspective. If we can learn to see that cultural issues are complex and highly contextual and that intra- and cross-cultural interactions are actually collaborative, mutual learning experiences (Holden, 2002, p.54), then managing both the opportunities and pitfalls simply becomes an issue of knowledge management, specifically networking, knowledge sharing and collaborative (or organisational) learning (Holden, 2002, p.52).
So therefore adoption is a reciprocal process of a) the guidance and governance of the interaction from an organizational perspective while letting people the freedom to take up the group action from a personal perspective and b) the feedback of the outcome of a).
Matthew Hudgson has put together a great diagram of the "Meta theory of social computing tools adoption within Enterprise 2.0".
5) Discuss the scope of Enterprise 2.0 beyond blogs & wikis
While the scope of the discussions around Enterprise 2.0 is mainly focussed on facilitating the generic collaborative processes within the enterprise we have to look beyond this to get the big picture.
Susan Scrupski has drafted a first scene of what has to be viewed in a conjoint way:
These are my takes from my research. As a conclusion I would say it is still a long way to go before we can clearly write down a handbook on Enterprise 2.0. But the discussions are getting more focussed on theses key topics and with the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT on Nov 11 & 12 we are trying to support this as we have chosen these topics to be the underlying themes of the sessions within our Expert Talks Track .
But tell me what are you thinking about this?
PS for those that may be interested in coming to the E2.0 SUMMIT: Get your ticket now and register with a 200 EUR discount on the full conference pass until Oct 11 with the promotional code "e2open200". http://www.e20summit.com/registration.html
UPDATE: Updated Susan’s diagram with the final version!
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