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:

• The OpenText 2.0 strategy consists of several product components - the more traditional compenents come from the LiveLink (for internal collaboration approaches) and Vignette (for external approaches) product. On top OpenText offers an updated version of the FirstClass groupware and messaging solutions. Besides traditional groupware and messaging functionality it provides a social network feature that brings a web-based social application towards the OpenText document and content world underneath.
• Like the other big players with ECM background this approach (1) provides a holistic and integrative view to the enterprise (if integrated the right way!) and (2) enhances the 1.0 document-/content-related business process by social information - but (3) is therefore also limited to the boundaries of these content/document object and the structuring of the information by business processes (in contract towards to the more flexible wiki information structure).
• Craig Hepburn points out the importance of the cultural background of companies - in this he sees also the main difference between E20 projects (and the E20 adoption in general) in the US and in Europe

For the full interview watch this:

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This is a short notice that there’s now a video of an interview I did several weeks ago with T-System MMS’ Frank Schoenefeld on the topic of Enterprise 2.0, adoption challenges and outlook for Enterprise 2.0. Then his book was still in the making, but he’s finished now and I will try to get my hands on it ASAP.

Björn published the video on the German-based ECM WORLD weblog - I embedded it here directly (but be aware it’s in German!)

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Frank Schoenefeld is a deep thinker on Enterprise 2.0 and his contained views and perspective is doing the field a good service. Moreover he’s got first-hand experience as T-System’s MMS experimented a lot with internal social software, and has evolved quite a bit since then. See for example Franz Patzig’s account of the changes he’s seen while coaching them with their internal BarCamp-alike, Open Space unconference initiatives. So, even when he’s a CTO by title, there’s much to learn from him on questions of implementation and utilization of internal collaboration platforms, and we’re glad to have him amongst the speakers at the upcoming E20SUMMIT.

Update: There’s also a long interview with him at besser 2.0 too, but it’s in german language again.

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:

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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?

The last two days there has been some discussions (see here and here) about the announcement regarding the alliance of Hinchcliffe & Co with Michael Krigsman’s Asuret for a so-called “Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0” service offering. As Dion Hinchcliffe was in Munich until today I took the chance of interviewing him what this buzz is all about - and we talked about this new approach as the next stage in the maturity lifecycle of E2.0 consulting service. But here we go - make your own opinion about it:

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What do you think about the approach? Is the “proactive risk monitoring and governance” (as I would call it) the missing point for securing the success of E2.0 initiatives?

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:

1. Unveiling & associating information & knowledge (Knowledge Management 2.0):
   This is about working collaboratively on a state of externalized business knowledge e.g. project/process documentation, service issue/process documentation or sales-orientated product & market documentation. Giving access and authoring as well as sharing possibilities to the crowd creates the chance of someone adding not expected, but very valuable information towards the knowledge base and therefore enhancing it.
2. Support conversation & communications flow (Internal Communications 2.0):
   This is about the exchange and open discussion of new opportunities, ideas or gained knowledge throughout conversational systems as weblogs or microblogging infrastructures. This supports the distribution and ventilation of new ideas throughout the company - eventually reaching out to people that can give valuable feedback to ideas.
3. Supporting & enhancing ad-hoc collaboration (Collaboration 2.0):
   This is about supporting ad-hoc initiated team working to solve issues and problems that go beyond the pre-defined scope of problems or issues. As this would have been solved in offline circles of expertise so far Enterprise 2.0 approaches allow this to be solved on in a digital Enterprise-wide manner.
4. Supporting the learning organization and providing a market of ideas (Innovation Management 2.0):
   This is about interconnecting business entities with people and information about their tasks, interests and competences. Community-of-practices are a common tool for this approach though in times of social software this would rather implemented by an internal social network that is giving even a broader access to people and the relevant information flows within the enterprise.

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!

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!

Last week there was another Enterprise 2.0 related event in Germany - the DMS EXPO. Martin and Thorsten Zoernert discussed the event and the open question to be addressed by the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT already here and here (unfortunately only in German!). One of the featured speaker at the conference of DMS EXPO was Stefan Pfeiffer, the German market manager for the IBM Lotus-brand. He is an well-known market expert on the topics of ECM/DMS as well as E20 - as he is in this business already quite a while. As IBM is a sponsor of our event I thought it might be of interest in having a short interview with him about Lotus Connections, the views on the German E2.0 market and his expectations for our event. And as we did this quite interactive on Facebook - I am happy to share his answers here with you also publicly.

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Crossposted from my posterous-Blog

A nice updated slideshow of Adidas’ Christian Kuhna on their implementation approaches and lessons learned. Found via George Dearing who cheekily talks about “intranet rejuvenation” - that is indeed one reasonable thing to expect when stepping into Enterprise 2.0 - refactor some of the existing stuff (see DMS Review: E2.0 braucht ECM), while not leaving the fast lane (quick experimentation and learning, small pieces loosely joined rather than a biggy project, fast speedboats beating slow moving-and-turning ships et al.)