Interesting Enterprise 2.0 Readings - Week 48 2009

C.C. Liew found the latest post with my weekly set of links via Twitter and suggested I should call it "Weekly E2.0 Links" instead. I guess his point was that I should name the weekly post in a way that more clearly communicates what it is about (even though it is broader than Enterprise 2.0). Hear, hear. I just chose to call it "Enterprise 2.0 Weekly Digest" instead. Why? Because it actually contains more than just a set of links.

"State of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Q4 2009" by the 2.0 Adoption Council (the summary below includes some excerpts from the report):
This paper and the research behind it are based on a web-based survey conducted during the latter part of October 2009. The survey was open exclusively to members of The 2.0 Adoption Council.

Of the then 100 members, 77 completed the survey. As explained in more detail in the Demographics section, despite the relatively small number of responses, the research findings represent a market milestone and represent not the opinion of the general masses, but the fact-based experiences of the market’s early adopters– the true practitioners of Enterprise 2.0.
  • More than half of the survey respondents (61%) believe the market is still in the early adoption or innovator stage.

  • In 73% if the cases, some form of management has been exercised, indicating a partial best-practice

  • Among these benefits some clearly emerged as "most popular"...Connecting colleagues across teams ang geographies (92%), Enabling access to subject experts (88%), increasing productivity (81%), capturing & retaining institutional knowledge (78%) and fostering innovation (78%)

  • Among these top 5 benefits 4 focus on knowledge management-related benefits. This is likely why ROI for many organizations is difficult to prove in hard dollars [only 18% have established ROI].

  • ...the majority (82%) of respondents indicated that their organizations are satisfied with the Enterprise 2.0 iniatiative to date.
"Enterprise 2.0: How a Connected Workforce Innovates" (an Interview with Andrew P. McAfee) by Anand Raman:
How do the new social technologies transform innovation efforts?

Companies have traditionally been very specific about who’s going to do the innovating: their designers, engineers, scientists...Those people have the credentials—the right combination of education, experience, success, failure, and so on. More recently, companies have allowed major users of their products to participate in the product-development process.

Some companies now say: Why stop at lead users? Why not let everyone take a crack at helping us develop a new product, improve an existing one, or solve a vexing problem? They no longer specify who can participate in the innovation process; they welcome all comers. Enterprise 2.0 tools are designed to help with these more open innovation processes. In fact, most new types of innovation, such as open innovation and crowdsourcing, are based on these technologies.

Does the use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies yield better ideas? Won’t a company simply drown in bad ideas?

Keep two things in mind. One, there’s no guarantee that your next innovation challenge is going to look anything like your last one. It might require a fresh perspective or skills that your existing innovators don’t possess. A company that uses Enterprise 2.0 technologies can publicize the challenge widely and collect responses from many people. Two, the community that forms around the challenge can help sift the ideas. People suggest improvements and vote on one another’s ideas, so the best ones eventually rise to the top.
Most employees have quite effortlessly switched paradigm, from “work as value” to “work as creation of value”, as it relates both to their day-to-day experience as customers and to their expectations in Enterprise world, but managers are facing a bigger challenge, as they are less and less connected with a traditional (pre knowledge economy era) role of managing teams, and expected to consider management as transformation of value. As obvious as this might be, seen from our Enterprise 2.0 heralds’ seats, we have to keep in mind that organizational and behavioral gap: from gatekeepers of business processes, managers must now dynamically harness existing knowledge to transform it into competitive advantages for their company; a tough challenge for most.
In 2015, staff will have ubiquitous access to information and functionality, delivered at the point of need, regardless of where they may be. This means going beyond the “intranet as an internal website”, a concept that has been holding back intranet teams for many years.

Ubiquitous access means unlocking the silos of corporate information, and delivering needed tools and answers to all the platforms and systems being used by staff.

  • The concept of an intranet goes away. There will always be a need for an “intranet”, a central web-based point of access that connects information and systems. The world is moving towards the web, not away from it, and this is no different within organisations.

  • Everything on the web. There have always been an enthusiastic minority who want to dump the desktop entirely, moving everything into the web. This worked poorly, and in 2015, staff will still have desktop tools, most likely running on Windows.
This vision used to be very difficult, almost impossible, to deliver. Much has changed. Point-to-point integration via web services (and the like) has become mainstream. Mobile devices have much richer capabilities. Enterprise systems are becoming more open to being tailored and connected.

The necessary integration doesn’t need to be perfect. The “good enough” principles that underpin the web are sufficient to allow staff to look up phone numbers on their mobile device, or get access to policies within call centre systems.

The goal is clear: staff have the information and tools they need, when and where they need them.
"Does driving adoption mean being off the point?" by Bertrand Duperrin:
I’ve never been that comfortable with the concept of adoption when applied to enterprise tools. More precisely when the point point was “driving adoption”.

Of course adoption is necessary. And, like every necessary thing, businesses can not afford not to drive it. Nothing but pure logic…but it can’t prevent me from feeling its sounds odd. I was slowly getting used to these words when Paula Thornton brought it back to my attention.

Let’s start with the meaning of words.

Driving : giving oneself the means that are necessary to achieve something and the appropriate indications to pilot actions.

Adoption : action of making something one’s own in a voluntary way. Supposes the benefit, sense and implications are understood.

If both are necessary, I still can’t put them together in the same sentence. The reason is obvious: if adoption implies spontaneity and a choice that’s not made under duress, driving means make people do something unnatural because if it was natural people would adopt without any external intervention.
Oscar BergEnterprise 2.0