26 Aralık Günü Dersimizin Konuğu: Sarper Danış

Konu: "Advertising 2.0"

Konuşan(lar):

1) Sarper Danış
2) Yüce Zerey

Dijital Reklam Dünyasında, doygun altyapısını tükenmek bilmeyen enerjisi ve özgün yeteneği ile birleştirmiş ender profesyonellerden olan Sarper Danış , bu hafta bizlere Advertising 2.0 konusunu anlatacak. Sarper'i dinlemek için ben 26 Aralık Cuma günü Saat 19.00 da Bilgi Üniversitesi Santral Kampüsü'ndeyim.

Peki ya siz?
Sarper Danış da kim oluyor diyecek olursanız:

"Sarper Danış Türkiye'nin lider interaktif ajanslarından Zap Medya'nın yönetici ortağıdır. Online reklam ve pazarlama iletişimi alanında 10 seneyi aşkın süredir çalışmakta ve danışmanlık yapmaktadır. A'dan Z'ye; bir markanın internette yaratılması, konumlandırılması, sunumu, müşteri ilişkileri, satış ve geri dönüşleri gibi konularda deneyimlerini hizmet verdiği ajans ve müşterileriyle paylaşmaktadır. Şirkete katıldığı son 4 senede, Zap Medya finansal ve fiziksel anlamda 10 kat büyümüş, interaktif alanda satınalmalar gerçekleştirmiş ve uluslararası bir şirket olmuştur.

Zap Medya'da internet ve medya stratejileri, SEO - SEM ve arge departmanlarına liderlik yapan Danış, aynı zamanda mecraya yenilikler getirme yolundaki çalışmalarını sürdürmektedir. İnteraktif reklamcılığın hiçbir zaman durmayacağı ve gelişerek süreceğini savunan ve Türkiye'de internet reklamcılığının gelişimi için fikirler üreten Danış, IAB Türkiye'nin kuruluşunda da yer almıştır.

1994 İstanbul Lisesi ve 1999 Marmara Üniversitesi Almanca Enformatik mezunudur. Eğitimi sırasında 1996-1997 senesinde Almanya - Bielefeld Üniversitesi Avrupa İşletme Bilimleri ve 1998-2000 senesinde Almanya - Lüneburg Üniversitesinde MIS eğitimleri aldı. Deutche Telekom'da pazarlama ve teknoloji, Carat Medya'da interaktif medya ve Plus v.2 Ajansı'nda interaktif proje yönetimi konularında görevler almıştır. Danış, 2004 senesinden beri Zap Medya'da çalışmaktadır.

1976 doğumlu Sarper Danış İstanbul'da yaşamaktadır."

Can Web 2.0 really work for Enterprise 2.0?

In spite of its roaring success on consumer IT desktops, considerable scepticism still remains about the value of Web 2.0 in business organisations. Can Web 2.0 technologies like wikis, blogs and social networking really help to grow a business and make the leap to Enterprise 2.0?

Like open source, Web 2.0 concepts now deserve corporate consideration

It used to be the case that open source was a momentary distraction for CIOs and IT directors. Not so any more. More companies are asking their IT leaders to apply open source to their corporate IT strategies. The same cannot yet be said of Web 2.0 technologies, but we expect Web 2.0 to creep its way into the vernacular of business software over the coming years.

The success of consumer-led Web 2.0 technologies cannot be ignored. Facebook, MySpace, blogs, RSS, mash-ups, Ajax and a myriad of other web-based technologies all now rally under the Web 2.0 banner. Some of these are now starting to show potential behind corporate firewalls to facilitate more effective forms of collaboration (beyond standard email) and provide a richer, more interactive information experience for business IT users - i.e. the two-way use of the Web that allows users not only to access information but also to express their own knowledge.

Enterprise software vendors are also starting to bake 2.0 capabilities into their applications. For example, SAP uses wikis and blogs extensively on its SDN, and Oracle has built social networking into a broad-release CRM offering.

Think of Web 2.0 not as a tool but as an information experience

While many Web 2.0 technologies are now deployed for enterprise use, they are still a long way from being mature or universal. The trick is to figure out how to take Web 2.0 ideas and use them in a business environment to interact better with employees, customers and suppliers. It's not a direct translation. IT users have distinct needs from consumers, and organisations will have to carefully target, evaluate and refine their initial Web 2.0 deployments.

In particular, we believe that companies should consider Web 2.0 not in terms of technology but as an enhanced web information experience for solving business problems. For example, instead of looking at blog-style publishing, wiki-style editing and social networking as just tools, enterprises should frame their use in business scenarios or goals, both within and outside the four walls of the enterprise - e.g. as a way to better engage with their most profitable customers or build up a stronger corporate online brand.

Importantly, Web 2.0 is also about advancing information experiences for business users, helping them to make the most of the systems and data management investments that a company has already put in place. Web 2.0 helps to make IT systems user-friendly and accessible. It allows for communities of interest to be built from crowds of business users looking at certain slices of corporate information.

Finally, Web 2.0 information experience also calls for a bi-directional link between users and information. One of the biggest benefits of Web 2.0 is the opportunity to use the activities and business domain expertise within businesses as they interact with information. Rather than being passive information consumers, users participate in its creation and organisation through tagging, commentary and ranking.

Web 2.0 remains a leap of faith for many companies, but one worth risking

Adding Web 2.0 to an enterprise context also represents a democratic and social shift for a company's IT strategy, moving control from the organisation's IT department to individual users. But traditional views of enterprise IT are still relatively conservative right now. Few companies are prepared to look outside the box at unproven Web 2.0 models, especially in tight economic times.

As with any new and evolving technology, implementing Web 2.0 tools is a risk. The risk is more pronounced given the unclear return on investment from their use - which is ultimately measured in how effectively people collaborate, as opposed to business optimisation or revenue-generating ideas.

Only when companies start to understand the information democratising benefits of these tools, the specific business case scenarios for uses of the applications, and the effort and cost of implementing them will we see wide-scale adoption.

By Madan Sheina

The Top 10 Enterprise 2.0 Stories of 2008

The enterprise 2.0 space saw good action this year. I’ve had a chance to see it up close, starting the year with BEA Systems (now Oracle) and closing out the year with Connectbeam. I think it’s fair to say that in 2007, social software was still something of a missionary sale. In 2008, company inquiries increased a lot. The burden still falls on the vendors to articulate business benefits, adoption strategies and use cases. But enterprise customers are now partners in this work.

So let’s get to it. Here are my top ten stories for the year:

1. Activity Streams

Facebook really got this going with its newsfeed, and FriendFeed took it to an art form with its lifestreaming service. In 2008, many vendors added activity streams to their applications: Connectbeam, BEA Systems, Atlassian, SocialText, Jive Software and others.  Activity streams are great for improving awareness of colleagues’ activities, and adding a new searchable object: actions.

2. Forrester’s $4.6 Billion Forecast

Forrester Research made a splash with its forecast that Enterprise 2.0 will be a $4.6 billion market by 2013. The ReadWriteWeb story about it has been bookmarked to Del.icio.us 386 times and counting. Forrester’s projections provided a solid analytical framework for the different tools, used internally and externally. According to the analysis, social networking will be the most popular tool for companies. Whether you buy the forecast or not, they remain the best-known, most visible numbers to date.

3. Oracle Beehive

Larry Ellison is fond of essentially dismissing SaaS. He does not have Oracle invest much in the trend. But Oracle did seem to embrace Enterprise 2.0 in a big way this year with Beehive, which is an “integrated set of collaboration services.”  The New York Times quotes Oracle EVP  Chuck Rozwat: “It is a product we built from scratch over the last three years.” Now since Oracle is a huge enterprise software company, there’s plenty of skepticism about the capabilities and innovation of Beehive. But there’s no denying that Oracle has the ear of the enterprise, and picks up a lot of market intelligence through its customer base. While Beehive itself may or may not succeed, the idea that Oracle came out with Beehive was a big story.

4. AIIM/McKinsey Surveys

Research and consulting firms AIIM and McKinsey each came out with surveys of corporate interest in enterprise 2.0. The AIIM survey looked at levels of awareness and interest among different Enterprise 2.0 technologies. AIIM also took a fairly expansive view of social software. The top 3 “Enterprise 2.0″ technologies in terms of corporate awareness? Email, instant messaging, search. That’s actually a funny list, yet there are lessons there for vendors and consultants in the social software industry. If those are entrenched, can you play nicely with them? One other quote I like from the report:

This study of 441 end users found that a majority of organizations recognize Enterprise 2.0 as critical to the success of their business goals and objectives, but that most do not have a clear understanding of what Enterprise 2.0 is.

McKinsey’s survey of enterprises looked at the interest in various tools as well. It also asked respondents what the leading barriers were for success of social software initiatives. Top three were: (1) Lack of understanding for their financial return; (2) Company culture; (3) Insufficient incentives to adopt or experiment with the tools.

5. Facebook Co-Founder Leaves to Start an Enterprise 2.0 Company

Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and colleague Justin Rosenstein announced they were leaving the hot consumer social network to start a new company. The new company will “build an extensible enterprise productivity suite,” with the goal of “making companies themselves run better.” Why would these young guys, sitting on top of the leader in consumer social networking, choose to exit? As I wrote at the time:

The Enterprise 2.0 market is still quite nascent and fragmented. Combine that industry profile with projected spending in the category, and suddenly you understand why these guys are striking out on their own.

Assuming they’ll be able to tap the mother ship for help, I think this was a fairly important story this year.

6. Microblogging Enters the Enterprise

Joining wikis, blogs, social bookmarking and other incumbent tools this year was microblogging . Given the way Twitter is used by Enterprise 2.0 aficionados, and is enjoying skyrocketing popularity, it’s no surprise we started seeing microblogging emerge for internal use. At the mostly consumer-focused TechCrunch50, enterprise microblogging start-up Yammer won the top prize. Other start-ups in the category include SocialCast and Present.ly. SocialText added microblogging with its release of Signals.

7. Gartner Narrows its Criteria for Social Software

Gartner came out with its Social Software Magic Quadrant in October. As SageCircle notes:

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is probably the iconic piece of analyst research. With its visibility and status, it also has enormous influence on vendor sales opportunities, especially when it comes time for IT buyers to draw up the all-important vendor short lists.

The effect of that is to establish those two tools as the de facto standard for enterprise social software inside the enterprise. To the extent corporate buyers are listening to Gartner for signals about the market, this will make it a bit more challenging for start-ups with interesting offerings that address other parts of the social software market. Yammer, for instance, won’t make it into their Magic Quadrant.

8. Enterprise RSS Fails to Take Off

RSS is one of those technologies that you know has huge value, and yet continues to struggle for awareness and adoption. Google tracks the leading “what is” searches. The fifth most popular on its list? “What is RSS?” Take that as both good and bad. Good that people want to know, bad that awareness continues to be a struggle.

Forrester analyst Oliver Young has a sharp write-up that shows enterprise RSS did not expand inside companies as many had thought it would this year. As he notes:

Of the three enterprise RSS vendors selling into this space at the start of 2008: KnowNow went out of business completely; NewsGator shifted focus and now leads with its Social Sites for SharePoint offering, while its Enterprise Server catches much less attention; and Attensa has been very quiet this year.

RSS is a great way to distribute content inside companies, but its ongoing limited adoption was a big non-story for the year.

9. IBM and Intel Issue Employee Social Media Guidelines

IBM and Intel each established guidelines for their employees who participate in social media. As I wrote, this essentially was a deputization of employees as brand managers out on the web. These market leaders were essentially saying, “have at it out there on blogs, social networks, Twitter, etc. But make sure you know the company’s expectations.” These guidelines represent a milestone in large enterprises’ comfort with social media. I expect we’ll see more of this in 2009.

10. The Recession

This affects all industries, globally, of course. And Enterprise 2.0 is no exception. Jive Software made news with its layoffs, but the effect was industry-wide. And of course, corporate buyers aren’t immune either. It’s a time for companies to hunker down, get slimmer, more focused and creative than they are in flush times. This recession will be a marvelous test for the resiliency of the Enterprise 2.0 sector.

Those are my ten. Did I miss a big story for 2008? Add your thoughts in the comments.

If you’re interested in tracking what happens in 2009, I encourage you to join the Enterprise 2.0 Room on FriendFeed. It is a centralized location for tweets and Del.icio.us bookmarks that specifically relate to Enterprise 2.0.

By Hutch Carpenter

CRM 2.0: Fantasy or Reality?

The rise of Social Computing means that customer relationship management (CRM) professionals must find innovative new ways to cope with the emerging phenomenon of "social customers." Forrester Research talked to early-adopter companies and leading CRM vendors as part of its research into CRM 2.0 strategies to understand the business tactics and the technologies involved.

Principal analyst William Band says customers are demanding that enterprises engage with them in new, more "social" ways. The technologies needed to support CRM 2.0 strategies are maturing, and early adopters are already gaining competitive advantage by forging new and tighter relationships with their buyer communities.

Key CRM 2.0 objectives include: Listening, the on-going monitoring of customers conversations with each other; Talking, participating in and stimulating two-way conversations customers have with each other; Energizing, making it possible for enthusiastic customers to help sell or make introductions to each other; Supporting, enabling your customers to support each other; and Embracing, helping customers work with each other to come up with ideas to improve products and services.

So how do you take the CRM 2.0 plunge? Band offers these recommendations:

Initiate CRM 2.0 experiments immediately. Define a near-term opportunity to apply CRM 2.0 ideas to a customer-facing challenge at your company. Build some practical experience that will break you out of out of old mindsets. Refine your strategies later as new learnings emerge. Ten years ago, Electronic Arts recognized it could not cope with the anticipated tenfold increase in customer support inquiries as the result of launching large-scale online multiplayer games. There were no commercial solutions to help at the time, so it began experimenting and developing its own solutions. Trying new ideas and discarding the old, EA actively worked to gain matter-of-fact experience by actively participating in the "virtual worlds" of its social game players.

Benchmark customer and prospect social readiness. Survey your customers to assess their Social Computing behavior and attitudes. Use Forrester's Social Technographics® as a framework for assessing whether prospects and customers are willing to comment on blogs, contribute content to online forums or wikis, or view online video segments.

Define your social customer objectives. The most important decision is not what technology to use; most important is determining who you're trying to reach, what you're trying to accomplish, and how you plan to change your relationships with your customers. At Forrester, we advocate using a systematic, four-step method for next-generation customer management strategy formation. The acronym for the four steps is POST: people, objectives, strategy, and technology.
Assess your CRM 2.0 capabilities. Undertake a self-assessment to understand how your organization stacks up compared to CRM 2.0 best practices and identify where you should focus your attention for quick wins.

Understand the social computing solutions landscape. You must learn to navigate an emerging CRM solutions landscape that includes both traditional solutions and new Social Computing capabilities.

Map out your social CRM capabilities-building plan. A CRM 2.0 plan should be tightly linked to business goals, focused on customer benefits, clearly identify the processes and constituencies that will be affected, and specify the associated information and capabilities required.
Define your metrics for success. Exceptional discipline is what sets CRM winners apart from failures. CRM 2.0 comprises both a strategy and a set of tools, but you also need to pay attention to how well you are tracking toward your goals over the long term. Establishing the right metrics is part of the discipline that leads to success.

Social technology adoption has increased tremendously during the past 12 months. Three in four U.S. online adults now use social tools to connect with each other compared with 56% in 2007. Leading CRM vendors are adding collaborative capabilities to augment the transactional business processes of marketing, sales, service, and product/service development. These technology and social changes are transforming the way all businesses operate, create products, and relate to customers.

Early adopters are already experimenting, gaining experience, and achieving early successes adopting the concepts and solutions that comprise CRM 2.0. This is not fantasy, it is a reality.
To download a complimentary copy of this report, please visit.

by CIO Zone

Will Enterprise 2.0 ever enter big organizations?

I have been reflecting lately on how Enterprise 2.0’s experimentations could be introduced in a big organization environment. There is a lot of “change management” thinking there for sure: start small, pick quick wins, build a community of supporters,… But it seems that there is also more profound forces involved as well: Enterprise 2.0 represents a real paradigm shift for process oriented organizations.

I hate to use the term “paradigm shift”, because it has been used so many times, and for quite common situations. But in this case, I’m starting to wonder if there is not indeed a very distinctive approach between the two modes that would require organization to adopt very different ways to think about their internal dynamics.

Let me first give a bit more background on what I mean by process oriented. It is obvious that many big organizations, if not all of them, conceive their production of value (be it an actual product or a service) as a succession of tasks performed by different individual in specific roles. In this approach, the actual individual fulfilling a role is quite irrelevant as long as he or she has the capacity to perform the corresponding operations. The greatness of such a design is that it tends to make production fairly predictable. The downside is that you can not use the complete value of every individual in your organization because you ask them first to fulfill roles and you miss everything they can do outside of this specific role. Plus there is also a natural tendency to accumulate slack: if you use 100% of the time of an individual in a particular role, you create a bigger uncertainty than if you ask him to operate at 70%, plus or minus a couple of percents; and thus, you become less predictable.

On the contrary, if you loosely define Enterprise 2.0 as the adoption in a production context of collaboration modes as found on the Web, you end up with a very different picture. The individuals and their abilities are at the center of this picture. People freely decide to which project they will contribute and on which part. The whole dynamic is anything but predictable. It is on the contrary very efficient to perform many projects at the same time but with no coordination of a central authority that would ex ante define which one are really worth pursuing. Projects happen not because they are dimmed important by a couple of executive roles, but because the necessary skills aggregate through the desire of each participant of contributing. You trade predictibility for an incredible speed of implementation.

Now imagine a big organization that has been defining and refining its internal processes for the past decades. That has established its recruitment and dismissal processes to constantly have a sufficient stock of resources to fill the different roles.

Imagine that you ask it to conceive itself as an internal market where resources can freely recombine to pursue emerging projects. That you promote the notion that you will, through this, greatly augment the output by loosing control on the nature of this output. Did I mention the term “paradigm shift”?

by Frederic Baud

19 Aralık Günü Dersimizin Konuğu: Alemşah Öztürk

Konu: "Viral Marketing, Story Telling, WOMM"

Konuşan(lar):

1) Alemşah Öztürk
2) Yüce Zerey

Dijital Pazarlama ALEMlerinin ŞAH'ı Alemşah Öztürk, bu hafta bizlere Viral Marketing, Story Telling, WOMM anlatacak. İnsanların damaklarında vazgeçilmez bir tat bırakan katma değerli sunumları, ses getiren ödüllü projeleri ile tanınan başarı insanı Alemşah'ı dinlemek için ben 19 Aralık Cuma günü Bilgi Üniversitesi Santral Kampüsü'ndeyim.

Peki ya siz?

Hala Alemsah kim diyenleriniz var ise, buyurun buradan:

"Alemşah Öztürk , internet Türkiye'ye geldiğinden beri bu alanda çalışıyor. 96' dan bu yana sektöre emek veren Öztürk, 2000'li yıllarda Türkiye'nin birçok interaktif ajansında Kreatif Direktörlük, yöneticilik yaptı. Uluslararası birçok başarılı projeye imza atan Öztürk, sonrasında işin marketing ve reklam tarafına da kafa yormak ve kendini geliştirmek için reklam sektöründe de çalıştı. 41? 29! adlı interaktif pazarlama ajansını kurmadan önce, Manajans JWT'da Deneyim pazarlama direktoru olarak çalıştı. 41? 29! ile beraber sektöre taze bir kan katan, farklı ödüllü projelere imza atan Öztürk, aynı zamanda başarılı bir konuşmacıdır ve Online Marketing konusunda başta Marketingist, MediaCat Workshop’ları, ve interaktif pazarlama zirveleri olmak üzere bir çok workshop, seminer ve sunum yapmıştır. Boş vakitlerinde Trendsetter dergisiyle, illustrasyonla ve bonsai ağaçlarıyla ilgilenmektedir."

Enterprise 2.0 Ready For Primetime?

Enterprise 2.0 Ready For Primetime?

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The relevance of Enterprise 2.0 in an economic downturn

Moving towards our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum 2009, a key issue has to be how these themes are relevant to the most prominent concerns of senior executives. In short, how will applying Web 2.0 and mobile technologies in organizations save money, increase efficiency and productivity, increase market share, and build profitability?

A number of recent blog posts have squarely addressed this issue, and are important reading in framing why Enterprise 2.0 must be a top priority for executives.
Susan Scrupski, talks about Reality Check 2.0 in writing about what the members of the Advisory Board for the next Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston are saying.
Mike Gotta of Burton Group says:

Some of the phrases I keep hearing:
1. Efficiency (cost containment/avoidance, streamlining, etc.)
2. Execution (all-things-lean, process refinement)
3. Effectiveness (process and people performance, measurable productivity)
4. Rationalization (of budgets, of projects, of platforms)
5. Governance and metrics to support the above. Operations (run the business) and investment to protect top/bottom line engines (grow the business) are still ok – transformation unless it maps into some of the above areas is more discretionary – a good strategist will not cut to the bone… but overall – it’s a run/grow the business more than transformation.…some savvy execs will keep a portfolio perspective and still invest in some long-term areas and not slash things to the point that when the economy rights itself they are strategically behind but they (1) may not have any choice and (2) may not get broad agreement from their peers.

I absolutely agree that the first five points are fundamental to management today, and are what are top of mind for most executives. However I disagree that transformation is or should be discretionary. Mike also makes the point that even “savvy” executives are tightly bound by market and organizational constraints. Certainly short-term survival is paramount, but beyond survival, transformation is not an option.

Over the last month or two I have repeatedly stated in media interviews and keynotes my belief that the next year or two will bring a greater shift in economic structure than probably any other time in history. A sharp downturn combined with technology-accelerated shifts in industry structure will see a rapid rise in differentiation in company fortunes. The trajectories of winners and losers will become more pronounced than ever. As such, it is an imperative to transform organizations to take advantage of those shifts.

When I spoke at a recent strategy session for a leading technology company, they said some of my ideas could have been taken straight from their playbook. For vendors, it is essential to distinguish between those companies that are simply focused on cutting and sticking with the status quo, and those that recognize the possibility and importance of shifting how they work. Ignore the former and focus on the latter.

Building on this theme, Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School, who spoke at our inaugural Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum in February 2008, has written an outstanding post titled The Enterprise 2.0 Recovery Plan on what he would do if he were put in charge of IT at one of the struggling US auto makers. He lays out a high-level plan, guided by the following principles:

• The company 'knows' the answers to our questions.
• Most people want to be helpful to each other, and to the company.
• Expertise is emergent.
• People are busy.
• Weak ties are strong.
• The ability to convert potential ties into actual ones is valuable.
• Platforms are better than channels.
• Search is the dominant navigation paradigm.
• The mechanisms of emergence should be encouraged.
• Anyone can learn the new tools, but they need to be educated, trained, and encouraged.

Andrew goes on to say

“I'm confident that the biggest and fastest bang for the IT buck at a US automaker today comes from Emergent Social Software Platforms and Enterprise 2.0.”

Which goes to another critical point: Enterprise 2.0, implemented intelligently, can not only increase worker productivity and efficiency, it can also significantly cut IT costs. While executives are afraid of new technology initiatives because they think automatically think that significant investment is required, in fact very low cost platforms can potentially replace current very expensive platforms and services.

The topic of how emerging web and mobile technologies are relevant to the most pressing concerns of the corporate world merits – and will receive – substantial attention in the period ahead. This will be a key theme at Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum.

By Ross Dawson

How to maximize collective intelligence

How to maximize collective intelligence

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Enterprise 2.0 and Innovation

Enterprise 2.0 and Innovation

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The Enterprise 2.0 Manifesto (making the case for the open organization)

I also gave this it’s own page so that it persists as a top level item…

The Enterprise 2.0 Manifesto (making the case for the open organization)

0.verview

The death of the mass-produced product for the mass-market is widely documented. The need for extraordinary customer service widely understood. We can make the kinds of organization and communication that work for individual’s passions, interests and convenience.

Changing how companies and individuals interact and work together has been talked about for years. The organization must stop being apart from customers and include customers and employees directly in business activity (also in strategy formation and product roadmaps).

Every customer should be able to engage however they want to, with whomever they want to, and so can every person in every company. Interactions are between individuals having honest conversation - there isn’t really room for the official party line and big pronouncements.

Big changes:

1. Customers are the company
2. Organizations do not communicate, people do
3. Trust depends on an ongoing dialogue
4. Customers are experts on themselves
5. Engaging involves doing; it is more than just talking
6. Sharing control is inevitable for the long term success of companies
7. Procedures are less important than people (outside factories)

1. Customers are the company

Companies that work more closely with customers will have more relevant products and have greater success. The strong dividing line between company and customer will become less distinct.

Organizations and customers need to be jointly involved in the things that matter, like strategy, direction, operations, and future product development of the company (Is there anything else you do that customers should not be involved in? Why?)

Customers want to form long term relationships with several individuals inside the organization, and ensure that the company will continue to be relevant to them tomorrow, ensuring future benefits from existing investments.

We are not simply talking about an extranet with a blog, forums, and some online support, this goes to the core of operational attitude. A real-life honest communication between customers and employees about things that matter and the availability of tools that let customers get involved with decision making, the ability to question and to challenge, and directly influence the company.

What specifically happens:

• Customers and employees share the same information
• Customers and employees understand and directly impact company strategy
• Customers and employees have a direct say in products and features
• Customers and employees point out where a company is not walking the talk and it gets fixed quickly.

Customers need to be involved “in the flow” of every business, and to self-serve at every opportunity.

2. Organizations do not communicate, people do

Individuals want to communicate directly with the person that knows facts, and receive it unfiltered. Everybody should be able to communicate with the most relevant person to get the information that they need.

Connecting is straightforward - the company needs to get out the way of individual communication - and let people get on with doing it for themselves. The challenge is getting the communication into the core of activity, rather than just extra information outside of the flow.

Customers might like to…

• Have a guest post on your extranet,
• Start a forum.
• What about live chat… …directly with the developer who wrote the code?
• And access to my documents about my projects. even the ones that I wouldn’t normally see.
• How about letting customers directly update facts themselves?
• Add a comment to the official documentation for review, update some parts of it
• Have the same information as the person on the other end of the telephone, before calling
• Can I have an RSS feed of my updates please?
• Suggest a new product feature
• Tell you how they want to work with you next year
• Assist other customers with your product
• Tell you what they want to do that is not on the above list

Whatever the means of communication, it needs to happen. If you are not talking, you are not listening.

This extends beyond simple conversations into things that directly and materially affect products, services, and what the people in the company do on a daily basis. Information behind he firewall has less value than that shared with customers.

3. Trust depends on an ongoing dialogue

Ongoing open dialogue shifts allows for long term trust. New customers can see how you work with existing customers. Existing customers can share your successful history with new customers, and point out issues that get fixed quickly for everyone’s benefit.

Placing value in the long term relationship means that nobody is just this quarter’s sales target. It seems obvious, and you have to pay-it-forward. We can have a conversation based on who we are and our aspirations - what are we going to achieve.

Staff retention, and repeat custom are obvious benefits, as is having a soul. And a sense of humor and personality.

Beyond community and chatter there is a commitment to ongoing engagement in the core business activity. Building a reputation for reliably listening and doing is a matter of trust.

Companies should be able to say

• This is how we have paid attention to what customers wanted in the product
• This is a change we made to how we work to satisfy this customer,
• This is what we will do for you

4. Customers are experts on themselves

There is no “the market”. The market is a chaotic collection of customer organizations and employees all know what they want, individually. The skill of a company is delivering solutions that satisfy the highest number of wants by getting to the patterns, and making decisions that lead to satisfied individual customers.

We need to talk directly and honestly. Sure we also need the tools to find the patterns, aggregate, and prioritize (difficult, because prioritizing is deciding what to not do). Individual connection means that we work together to deliver more value.

Surveys and market research and aggregated data, and MIS, and analytics are all useful, though less than communicating directly. Providing the tools that allow customers to influence actions means that action can be based on real wants identified by experts.

Co-creating new products, improving existing products, tuning operations and sharing strategy with customers means less guessing, and more exact-fit.

5. Engaging involves doing; it is more than just talking

Adding substantial value involves introducing the appropriate tools, committing to take action on customer and employee wants, and being honest. We need a common understanding of things that people feel passionate about, the things that they will drive through, and tell their friends about, and help each other to use.

This is difficult, worthwhile work. We expect power distribution curves and adoption difficulties. We expect it to take a while, and we expect to continually modify our tools and methods until we get it right.

6. Sharing control is inevitable for the long term success of companies

Sharing control means giving more of a voice to customers, and then acting. Acting on customer wants using real information beats guesswork. A competitive advantage exists for every company that is able to communicate with customers better. Getting the right product to market quickly, and fewer wrong guesses.

This is shared control, and pushes inwardly as well towards employees as well as customers causing real direct change inside the business, towards honesty from command and control, as well as being open to the possibility that the crowd knows better. You could be wrong now rather than having to wait until later - you don’t have to wait for the results of the survey, or anything else.

This also means that everybody has to be available to serve the customer better. If the easiest way to get this change made is for Bob to do it, we need to get Bob involved now.

7. Procedures are less important than people

In many environments procedures are a straightjacket that constrain individuals from acting in the customers best interest (submit for approval, all documents go through marketing). Knowledge workers are hired for their brains. Let them be applied for better serving customer wants.

Factories and high volume activities demand processes to ensure consistency, and where they add value to the product and customer obviously assist. We need to trust employees and customers to point out where these processes can be improved. “That is just how we work” is usually an incorrect answer.

If we can do something better then we should. If it involves circumventing broken processes and is in the customer interest great, and better still is fixing the broken procedure.

Where a procedure exists it must be the easiest and best way of doing something, and not a stick or constraint, or guideline for reigning people in.

Summary

It is fashionable to put 2.0 at the end of everything where a greater level of individualism and conversation takes place. The concepts of empowerment, engagement and providing the tools for better working are key. We don’t really mind what you call it.

Open organizations, open innovation, Enterprise2.0 - the conclusion is the same:

Giving individuals the ability to engage easily in sharing passions and interests leads to better work environments, better products and service, and a better sense of being. The individual is at the centre of these new ways of working and that should be in the workplace as well as in our personal lives.

By bretthusbands

The Auto Industry and Enterprise 2.0

A recent post from Andrew McAfee, the Harvard professor who coined the term “Enterprise 2.0,” speculated on what he would do to turn around an auto company in which the new management “will fund and fully support whatever initiatives I propose.” As someone who spent 23 years in the auto industry, the last ten of which were in developing and deploying collaborative technologies, and having been involved in the Enterprise 2.0 industry for several years, I feel compelled to respond.

It may be fruitless to comment on advice that is based on a “complete fantasy” (McAfee’s words, not mine). But, McAfee is an influential figure and many reading his post will certainly take it as practical advice for the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 in large companies. It is not.

If you are looking for principles of Enterprise 2.0 solutions then McAfee’s post is a reasonable starting point. However, if you are looking for advice on Enterprise 2.0 adoption within large companies then McAfee’s advice falls well short.

To summarize McAfee’s advice:

1. “I’d roll out as quickly as possible a single integrated suite of emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) to all employees of the company.” (he also provides a set of requirements for this platform)
2. Make the use of these tools mandatory. He would accomplish this “by announcing on the 'go live' date of the new E2.0 suite that participation will become part (10-20%?) of everyone's performance evaluation, starting in six months.”
3. He would start an internal blog of his own.
4. He would “work to create an environment in which people feel safe and free to speak the truth".”
5. Deploy a prediction market to learn which projects will be late, predict sales volumes of new vehicles, and speculate on what moves competitors are making.

I can’t argue with starting your own internal blog and I kind of like the idea of using prediction markets in large companies. But, it’s McAfee’s first two pieces of advice that are unrealistic in non-fantasy situations. Other critical pieces are missing as well.

So please allow me to follow in McAfee’s footstep and tell you what I would do if I were the new CIO in this fantasy.

In the short-term I would learn of and support current Enterprise 2.0 efforts going on within the company, whether they were company-sponsored or not.

1. Find the people in the company who are using and promoting the use of Enterprise 2.0 solutions. Perhaps this could be the topic of my first post on an internal blog (but, at least for this one, I’d send an e-mail message too). Although I think McAfee overstates the amount of experience the average person has with these tools (especially their application within enterprise situations) there is likely some people already promoting their use. Most importantly, I would look both inside and outside of IT for these champions of change.
2. I would then listen to what these people are doing, learn what has worked, and what challenges they are facing. Of course, we would form a community within the company to share our experiences and support each other.
3. Given the dire situation, these could be the people most likely to be axed. They need to be protected, supported, and eventually given the resources they need to be successful.
4. The Enterprise 2.0 solutions most likely to make the biggest difference will come from this community. Best of all, they will give me a head start and build credibility.

Longer-term I would:

1. Look for opportunities to leverage Enterprise 2.0 solutions that stand the best chance of success and plan how to develop this as a capability others can use. Stories sell change. We need stories, fast.
2. The best opportunities integrate Enterprise 2.0 solutions within the natural flow of work (as McAfee says). This may mean focusing on technologies that are less commonly used among consumers but are more appropriate for enterprise use. The community we formed when I first became CIO will help figure this out.
3. My first priority is getting something that can make a difference and is easily understood. A platform approach is something to strive for but won’t matter if these initiatives fail. Applications sell change, not platforms.
4. Most importantly, the CIO needs to build a strong relationship with other senior executives in the company. This is necessary to get their buy-in on an appropriate IT governance structure that can ensure a coordinated effort between both the business and IT sides of the company. Grass-roots adoption works (I’ve seen it and creative governance structures can allow that to happen within reasonable limits) but the home runs that make a difference also require top-down management support to ensure change gets baked into every day work processes.

In short,McAfee falls into a classic “White Knight” trap by assuming no one in the auto companies is familiar with emerging concepts like Enterprise 2.0 or has tried to implement this or similar types of change before. He also ignores the tough adoption issues that cannot be solved through mandates or technology alone.

By Larry Cannell

A new business indicator for enterprise 2.0

Traditional business is usually a vertical one: companies buy raw material, assemble them, and create products and / or services which they deliver to customers. Even Google, one of the most recent powerful enterprise, is following this model : Google buys computers, adds an algorithm, and deliver a set of services (this is of course a simplified vision, but not a wrong one). The innovation of Google relies in its business model: the core service (the search engine) is free, while the peripheral service (advertisment) is paid. But it is not a paradigme shift.

However, there are some interesting little signals of traditional industries moving from this vertical model to another one: an enterprise who manages a market place. Here are a few exemples.

• A traditional auctioner sells goods to people. Ebay creates a world wide community of people who trade together.
• A traditional bank loans money coming from its suppliers to their customer. LendingClub, like many other social lending companies (Prosper, virginmoney, zopa, ppdai, dhanax, fynanz, etc..) creates a marketplace where people loan to other people.
• A traditional major record musics from artists, and delivers it to customers. Sellaband, like many other sites (SliceThePie, spidart, indiegogo, etc…), creates a platform for people to invest into music, or film, and get revenus on the sale of the album, or the movie.
• A traditionel telecommunication operator buys products to create a network infrastructure to sell minutes, or bandwidth, to customers. Fon creates a marketplace where people do exchange their Internet access.

The underlying business is not yet huge. The social lending market was 647M dollars in the US in 2007. Not big, but it was 269M in 2006; a very good progress. Could this move amplify ? Well, there is no reason it could not, except if traditional businesses, or the regulator (when not the two..) fights againts this; the social lending space has been recently shaked: Zopa is closed in the US, Prosper halts operations, all because of non compliance to SEC regulation. Only LendingClub resists so far.

But I still believe that this move may generalize. I recently discussed with a retail brand who sells food products in many shops over the country. The trend is there: customers want fresh products coming from less than 100 miles away. Well, what happens if, economic crisis helping, people start producing fruits, vegetables, in their own gardens. What happens if the retailers becomes an intermediate between, on one side, his customers-consumers, on the other side, his customer-producers ? He then starts a local market place…

Therefore, I would propose to work on a new economic indicator of a “Enterprise 2.0″ : the ratio of the horizontal money which flows between customers, to the revenue of the company. This indicator shows how many dollars are exchanged between customers in the marketplace for one dollar of revenue.

There is a case where this indicator can be easily computed: when a company earns a percentage of a transaction, the indicator is the reverse of the percentage. If we assume that ebay is a company which earns 2,5% as an average, the ratio is 40.

Linden Lab is another interesting company: if we assume that it generated 40 M dollars of revenu in 2007 (my guess after talking to them), and if we assume the SLifers exchanged 400 Millions dollars, the ratio is 10. Not bad.

On the other side of the scale, a traditional telecommunication operator, though delivering a service which is personal communication between people, is totally unable to generate any financial flux between his customers. I once proposed to a telco to create marketplaces where customers could exchange SMS, or even trade phone minutes. The answer was “are you crazy? We do not want to see a decrease in our revenues”. For telcos, the ratio is zero…

Interestingly, in traditional business, companies who already do trading between customers want a high percentage, therefore a low ratio.

The indicator I propose does not mean a low percentage, but rather the capacity to create a dynamic marketplace between customers.

It is a totally new approach.

By Chez Serge

The Enterprise 2.0 Recovery Plan

Recent events in the news have inspired a thought experiment: I asked myself what I would do if I were put in charge of IT as part of the turnaround effort at a big US automaker. To be a bit more specific, I imagined that one of the big 3 American auto companies was taken over tomorrow by enlightened and aggressive new leadership whose only goals are to restore the company to operational and financial excellence. This leadership is enlightened (in my book) because it believes firmly in the power of IT to help businesses achieve their goals and differentiate themselves in the marketplace, and will fund and fully support whatever initiatives I propose (this is a complete fantasy for several reasons, but thought experiments aren't supposed to be constrained by reality.).

So what would I propose?

I'd be guided by a couple facts and a few principles. The first fact is that on day one I would know virtually nothing about the company's IT environment. I wouldn't know, for example, what major enterprise systems needed to be deployed, integrated, consolidated, upgraded, etc. I also wouldn't know about the health, status, and importance of the large projects currently underway. I'd set about trying to learn answers to these questions, of course, but this would be a long, slow process.

My colleagues on the new management team would be similarly in the dark on day one about other critical questions:

• Which of our current vehicle platforms under development will be hits in the market? Which will be duds?
• Are our current platform projects largely on schedule, or are they falling badly behind?
• Where are our biggest opportunities to cut costs without losing valuable capabilities?

The second fact (actually more of a very safe bet) is that the company would have a static and fragmented Intranet, and that employees would communicate with each other primarily via email. In other words, Enterprise 2.0 would not be advanced within the company, nor would it be universal.

As I got to work and tried to deliver results and benefits as quickly as possible, I'd be guided by a set of principles, many of which I've discussed in this blog:

1. The company 'knows' the answers to our questions. The knowledge required to answer them exists within the workforce. This knowledge is widely diffused, constantly changing, and not contained in the mind of any single person (As Friedrich Hayek pointed out many years ago), but it is out there. Most executives, I'm pretty sure, believe this to be true. What's frustrating them is that they don't have great ways to collect and access this knowledge.
   
2. Most people want to be helpful to each other, and to the company. I think it's self-evident that people are largely good; if we weren't, we would have wiped each other long before now. And we are to some extent wired for altruism and reciprocity. Finally, American carmaker employees have ample reason to fear for their industry, their company, and their jobs, so they have extra incentive to pitch in and help out, and to experiment with new ways to do so.
   
3. Expertise is emergent. It's logical and natural to think that all the good new product ideas come out of the design department and R&D labs, that the folk in the IT department are the best ones to help you with your computer problem, and that the engineers are the only ones who can figure out why the doors start rattling after 5,000 miles on the road. But this is not always going to be the case. The more we look, the more we see that a very effective way to solve a problem is to expose it to a highly diverse set of potential problem solvers, then let them have at it.
4. People are busy. Most knowledge workers have more than enough to do with their normal jobs, and aren't going to go too far out of their way too often, even though they do want to be helpful. This implies that any new tools need to be perceived as 'in the flow' of work, rather than 'above the flow.' There are a few ways to achieve this. One is to make the new tools extremely simple, easy, and intuitive to use, and to ensure that they're never more than a couple clicks away. Another is to 'widen the flow' so that job descriptions include 'enterprise-level helpfulness / collaboration.' A series of three posts advocating this is here, here, and here.
   
5. Weak ties are strong. Weak-tie networks are great places to look for novel information and introductions to valuable people. And social networking software (SNS) is a great tool for building, maintaining, and exploiting networks of weak ties. Instead of being a time-waster, enterprise SNS would be a powerful resource.
   
6. The ability to convert potential ties into actual ones is valuable. At present we rely primarily on human brokers and connectors to introduce us to valuable colleagues. These organizational matchmakers are extremely valuable and influential, and there aren't nearly enough of them.
7. Platforms are better than channels , for a lot of reasons. Channels like email hide information; platforms like blogs, wikis, Facebook, and Twitter make it visible, persistent, and widely consultable.
   
8. Search is the dominant navigation paradigm. People navigate online content by typing words into search boxes rather than navigating through menus. This implies that we should do everything we can to make sure search works well.
9. The mechanisms of emergence should be encouraged. For search to work well, online content needs to be heavily interlinked. So people should be given the ability to link to content they find valuable and encouraged to do so. They should also be encouraged to tag, vote, rate, and to all the other things that help identify what a particular piece of content is about, and how good it is. In addition to this explicit work people also vote on and rate content implicitly as they browse through it.
10. Anyone can learn the new tools, but they need to be educated, trained, and encouraged. I do think that digital natives use technology differently than us older digital immigrants, but we can learn. The new tools of collaboration don't require any skills beyond point, click, drag, drop, and type. They do require users to adopt a particular philosophy about sharing information and interacting with each other, and this philosophy can seem strange at first. When I first heard about Twitter, for example, I said something like "What on Earth would that be useful for, and who on Earth would ever want to use it?" Now, however, I'm a fairly frequent user, find it a really novel and valuable resource, and think that it has strong potential within the enterprise (here are my blog posts on Twitter, and here's a research report on Enterprise 'microblogging' from Pistachio consulting ).
    

So what would adherence to these principles lead me to do? I'd roll out as quickly as possible a single integrated suite of emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) to all employees of the company. This suite would include blogs, wikis (including collaborative document production tools like Google Docs), discussion boards, SNS, a microblogging tool like Twitter or Yammer, a tagging utility, prediction markets, ways to vote on good content (a la Digg) and ways to give praise or good karma to particularly helpful colleagues. Lots of vendors both big and small are working to develop such suites; for now, I'm going to assume that a complete one exists.

As I wrote earlier, SNS helps with principle #5 above, and a blogosphere (broadly defined here to include a Twitterverse) helps with #6. And the whole idea of ESSPs supports #7. To put the other principles into practice, I'd insist that:

• The tools be trivially easy to use, primarily by copying the look, feel, and user interface of the most popular Web 2.0 resources. Too many ESSPs intended for the enterprise try to reinvent the wheel, and they do so poorly. (helps with principles #4 and #10)
• All content is cross-linkable, taggable, and Diggable. (#9 and #3 and #8)
• The ESSPs contain some initial content and suggested structure, but that these are modifiable over time. (#4)
• There be few initial rules or policy statements beyond 'use your judgment' and 'highlight any behavior you find inappropriate.' (#2)
• Most platforms be available company-wide. I'd probably allow only group collaborative document production tools to have limited membership. (#3)
• Training on the tools be made mandatory for all employees (#4 and #10)

Of course, I'd also make them as device-independent as possible, and give people the ability to access them from home, the road, etc. Somewhat more controversially, I'd also make E2.0 part of every knowledge worker's job. A series of three blog posts on this topic is here, here, and here, and generated a raft of great comments. I'd introduce this change by announcing on the 'go live' date of the new E2.0 suite that participation will become part (10-20%?) of everyone's performance evaluation, starting in six months.

But what about principle #1 above, that the company knows the answers to the critical questions it's facing? This is perhaps the most important one, yet is not directly addressed above. To start to get answers, I'd set up prediction markets for the biggest projects, both IT and otherwise, within the company, letting people trade on whether they'll be finished on time, nearly on time, or nowhere near on time. These markets would very quickly provide accurate and valuable information. I'd also set up markets to predict sales volumes and competitors' moves.
I'd also start asking questions via my own blog, and listen to the comments and responses I got back. I'd work to create an environment in which people feel safe and free to speak the truth.

How would I know if Enterprise 2.0 was working well over time? The accuracy of prediction markets is easy to assess. It's also easy to conduct surveys and find out if employees like the new tools, and prefer them to previous ways of collaborating. I'd also partner with academics to design and execute research investigating whether various attributes of performance improved after the new tools went in.
But the point of having the trust and commitment of my management colleagues is that I wouldn't need to justify this kind of expenditure. If they're on board with the principles then they're on board with the investment required to put them into practice. And this investment is not huge. I'm pretty sure E2.0 wouldn't cost as much as the typical ERP project at a car company.

I used Twitter to float this idea before writing this post, and a number of people responded that "IT isn't the problem at the car companies!" I totally agree. But technology can be a large part of the cure for what ails them. And I'm confident that the biggest and fastest bang for the IT buck at a US automaker today comes from ESSPs and Enterprise 2.0.

Do you agree? Or do you think there would be better uses for investment dollars and managerial bandwidth after the hypothetical leadership change of my thought experiment? I don't, but I'd love to hear your thoughts and reasoning if you disagree. Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

by Andrew McAfee Associate Professor, Harvard Business School

The emerging case for open business methods

The Internet has been the genesis of countless useful business innovations over the last several decades. These include a globally unified e-mail network, the advent of search engines, the rise of rich user experiences and SaaS, and most recently cloud computing to name but a few. But perhaps one of the most far-reaching innovations was the Internet’s ability to enable the creation and organization of the open source movement, arguably the most important progenitor to most things 2.0 and perhaps eventually to business in general.

The business world of the next decade will look quite different from today and require different values and management styles to match.While open source itself is mostly closely associated with the creation of free software in the Internet age, the associated concepts of open collaboration and open information sharing has roots in the early scientific community, where the (mostly) transparent sharing of ideas and data was the most effective way to enable progress. Related trends such as open data and the Web 2.0 model of open content reflect the now widespread activity of open information sharing and exchange using primarily a commons-based approach, enabled greatly by pervasive world-wide networks such as the Internet.

Given the current size of the Internet, about 1.2 billion people, tapping into and unleashing the enormous productive capacity and latent knowledge at the edge of the network has become one of the most powerful and underutilized economic resources available to businesses today. Accessing this effectively ahead of the competition has been the explicit (though too often unstated) premise of countless Internet startups. It’s turned out that companies with a native “Web DNA” have the best perspective to see the fundamental potential here better than their traditional business counterparts. Most businesses still look at the network mostly as a secondary channel for activities such as value inputs, customer relationships, and worker communication and collaboration and not the most valuable one. This is primarily because they’ve traditionally had more dominant and important channels.

But this is starting to change. Through continuous and very widespread experimentation and endeavor, open models of communication, information, and even the creation of products and services, have emerged as a proven and highly effective way to directly drive business activity in entirely new and powerful ways. It’s largely thanks to things like open standards, open source, and open content (aka user generated content and peer production) which have tremendously challenged and even up-ended the old world models of proprietary formats, commercial software, and traditional media respectively.

All this might seem a familiar story but these methods, still too pent-up in a world of high technology and Internet businesses, have begun to spread beyond their origins in software and content and become an significant avenue of opportunity across all aspects of business, albeit involving both great rewards and significant challenges. Particularly in these trying economic times, open models have begun providing the crucial, raw ingredients for a fresh, new perspective in the way we look at how we operate our businesses.

Enterprise 2.0 is just one good example of the emerging intersection of many of these open trends combining open collaboration where anyone can collaborate with globally visible information sharing. It’s also one of the most immediately appealing models to most businesses since it doesn’t necessarily entail many of the risks and challenges that more external modes of open engagement would require. In other words, businesses today are generally comfortable with achieving objectives with the assistance of 3rd parties in an outsourcing or partnership model, but they are generally not as comfortable with using open sourcing or crowdsourcing to achieve the same objectives.

The reasons organizations are wary of more open and 2.0 models for sourcing work and information are many and varied but it generally boils down to four reasons:

1. Lack of familiarity. Despite the extensive body of knowledge that has accumulated, particularly in the software and media industries, there is a broad lack of understanding of how open models work for those whose line of business lies outside the technology industry. These include how to start and successfully manage open business methods as well as the various governance, legal, and brand issues that open models involve, to name just a few. While many businesses are in fact evolving and expanding their Internet channel, most executives are not yet tracking how these open methods can potentially generate much greater value for less cost across their organization, something that most businesses would find very attractive right now.
2. Poor evidence in their industry. Most organizations are medium-to-slow adopters or fast followers, not innovators. Open business methods, despite the evidence in other industries, are still unproven in a number of fields of endeavor. As is the case with open APIs, despite their enormous potential, there requires either an enormous individual success story or general industry consensus before there is broad recognition and uptake. Unfortunately, in the online world, where the world is flat, being a medium-to-slow adopter can prevent you from getting in the game at all. Fast followers do have a good chance however, by learning from the mistakes of early adopters and leveraging their momentum before their network effect is firmly established. Along with the stories below, there is an increasing body of evidence that open business methods work in product development, customer service, marketing, operations, human resources, and fields of all kind from politics, manufacturing, education, law, and many others.
3. Perceived challenges to ownership, control, and monetization. Earlier this week BusinessWeek published a widely covered article about the ongoing business issues around open source companies. From open source software companies such as to social media firms such as YouTube there is a general perception that the intrinsic nature of the openness of a business model can collapse its economic value while upending them into a morass of legal entanglements and intellectual property issues. Never mind that businesses are historically not inclined to share ownership of their products with the market. It is true that open business strategies are quite different than traditional business models and require a different mindset and set of skills to avoid their most commonplace issues.
4. Uncertainty on how to leverage successfully. Translating entirely new network-driven business models into a business is certainly a tall order for most of us. Without a pioneering success story to guide us, we are left to having to make all the mistakes and do all the hard work. Open business methods have the potential to have millions of our customers help us create the richest and most dynamic products and services, drive down the costs of production, and increase innovation and diversity, but they currently require investment and experimentation. Regulated industries that have their means of operation locked down are going to have some of the largest challenges. And let’s not forget that innovation isn’t automatically a good thing; one could argue that the financial industry was innovating with complicated new investment products in the 21st century and that it spectacularly backfired.

However, intriguing success stories have begun to emerge recently and organizations large and small are beginning to have success with open business methods. Open platforms are probably one of the oldest and most proven of open business strategies (leading to the success of operating systems, personal computers components, and even the iPod accessory market, to name just a few), most open business strategies are still heavily technology and information centric. Some of the more interested recent stories include the following:

Emerging examples of open business strategies

• Google Android. One of the biggest open business initiatives in existence is Google’s Android platform, which has brought the first open source mobile phone platform to market. Google has made most of the code available already and will soon make the entire source for the whole platform available to the world. Dave Bort’s post about the open sourcing of the platform in October is telling, saying “Have a great idea for a new feature? Add it! As an open source project, the best part is that anyone can contribute to Android and influence its direction. And if the platform becomes as ubiquitous as I hope it will, you may end up influencing the future of mobile devices as a whole.” Google is making what most businesses would consider as a tremendous gamble in letting anyone contribute to their mobile phone platform (which is currently in production shipping on devices such as T-Mobile’s G1.) However, Google is an Internet firm first and foremost and understands that giving up a certain amount of control also gives them tremendous benefits including getting participation and ideas from around the world. This open business strategy supports an encirclement and constriction strategy around other smart phones such as the more closed iPhone by allowing dozens and perhaps hundreds of different handsets based on Android to proliferate and flourish.
• Open location. The world’s best map data is still the provenance of commercial map making companies, but this has begun to be eroded by open location initiatives such as the excellent OpenStreetMap which is a “free editable map of the whole world” using a wiki-based approach and uses high production value including sophisticated interactive Web interface to let anyone add to and improve the data set, which is entirely licensed with Creative Commons. Initiatives like this will eventually affect the commercial viability of more traditional business models around location. Most location products — such as GPS receivers and online map services such as Google Maps — use data sourced from companies like NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas. These organizations are ripe for disruption unless they too adoption open business strategies that offer more participation, transparency, and richness. Fortunately, they have already begun to realize this and NAVTEQ’s user-powered Map Reporter is an example of the kind of response traditional businesses will have to enable open participation in the development of their products over the network. And open location is a good microcosm of the issues that will start to surface as open methods become more common. Will users ultimately be willing to pay mapping companies to access the data they themselves contributed? Will mapping companies be able to maintain the high rates of monetization they have when more and more of their map data is generated by their customers in free products? These are vitally important questions and can be directly translated to industries of all kinds.
• Open innovation. Open innovation strategies such as Dell’s Ideastorm and Innocentive are well-known successful examples of open business methods that allow companies to leverage the knowledge and intelligence on the network in a controlled fashion. When open innovation is applied to product development, I’ve referred to it as Product Development 2.0
• Peer production. Beyond specific verticals, the concept of peer production is to use the open network to harness collective intelligence and actively build useful outcomes. Also known as crowdsourcing, peer production has resulted in impressive outcomes such as the well known story around the creation of Linux to lesser known but more commercial compelling stories such as Goldcorp, which made a extensive sets of geological survey data of its properties available to the public over the Internet. They offered rewards to anyone who could analyze the data and then suggest places where gold could be found. The company currently claims that the effort produced 110 targets, 80% of which proved productive, yielding 8 million ounces of gold worth more than $3 billion. Netflix has also offered the popular Netflix Prize to encourage innovators anywhere to submit algorithms for film recommendations. The Netflix Prize leaderboard already shows many participants and some winners, though no Grand Prize winner yet. There are many other examples similar to these. The key point here is that companies are beginning to understand how to use open business methods on the network to directly generate business outcomes. One early lesson learned are that incentives are proving to be key to getting high levels of network engagement. There are many ways to use peer production to generate business outcomes and understanding the tenets of open business methods are essential to leverage them successfully.

More efficiency, richer results, but very different businesses

That open business methods are going to become more commonplace as the methods and successes improve there is increasingly little doubt. The real challenge is in the need for change and transformation; successful businesses are less inclined to go out of the comfort zone and risk their reputation and investment on what seem unproven ideas in their industry. But today’s times are extraordinary and there is a very real need for not only change but accountability.

And one of the very best aspects of open business methods is openness; having transparency and visibility into all parts of a truly open business model and the ability to make sure there are few surprises and true accountability. When everyone can see what everyone else is doing and there are not just double-checks and triple-checks but everyone that wants to can observe, understand, and validate what’s taking place. Radical decentralization and radical transparency go hand in hand with open business methods.

Whether your open business strategy is some internal Enterprise 2.0, crowdsourcing your next product design, or using customer communities to provide customer self-service, the business world of the next decade will look quite different from today and require different values and management styles to match. The future of open business is very likely the future of business in the 21st century itself as the network turns out to be the single most valuable asset to which every business has access.

By Dion Hinchcliffe

Solving Organizational Challenges with Enterprise 2.0

Interesting post from Enterprise 2.0 thought leader and academic Andrew McAfee on his prescription for restoring the operational and financial health of the big 3 US automakers. Mcafee imagines himself a newly appointed auto industry IT Director and discusses what he would do to heal his ailing company.His solution is to implement a corporate wide talent networking type program which he calls an "emergent social software platform" or ESSP.

He call for a comprehensive suite to include:

blogs

wikis

discussion boards

social networking service

microblogging

prediction markets

praise and recognition

Why does he recommend this approach? Mcafee suggests that the answers to the company's challenges reside in the minds of the employees dispersed across the organization.

Individuals themselves may not have the best answers but technology can be used to pull together the bits and pieces of employees' knowledge to find the right solutions.

Complicated buzzwords aside, I think it's a great approach. We are already beginning to see this kind of organizational social collaboration at non-troubled companies using talent networking.

There is no reason to believe that it wouldn't work equally well with companies that have greater challenges to solve.There are a few caveats though that Professor Mcafee turned imaginary IT Director should heed:

1) The initiative will not succeed if it's driven by the IT department. Although on the surface it seems like a technology solution, in reality it's a people solution that uses IT. As such, a good strong HR and/or Talent Development department needs to be the one spearheading and nurturing the implementation of the program. I have nothing against IT people but they do not have the appropriate skills and knowledge for this.

2) Because it's a people program, it needs to be nurtured - a lot. Really cool technology with all the requisite components is still just a platform - the "P" in McAfee's ESSP. The more challenging aspect is directing and focusing and shaping the use of the platform to create the end result that the company is seeking, that is actionable solutions. In this case, success is not in the journey, it's in the destination.

3) Beware of information overload. Companies that utilize suggestion and feedback systems often become overwhelmed with the amount of information that they capture. Be prepared to deal with an abundance of both good and bad information.

4) Remember that the Wisdom of Crowds only works when each individual in the group is more likely to be right than wrong. As Cass Sunstein pointed out in When Crowds Aren't Wise, crowd think fails if each individual is more likely to be wrong than right. Therefore, it's important to address the right questions to the right people who have the information to be correct, individually, more often than not. Making decisions based on faulty group think will not help the company succeed.

5) A company like any of the big automakers comes with a lot of baggage. There is a history, a corporate culture, there are long standing policies, long service employees and union contracts. The roll-out of the program will need to be integrated in such a way that does not conflict. The employees need to be enthusiastic about participating. If it's not handled well, they will end up with lots of employee eye-rolling and complaints.Therefore, I suggest the following:The organization should prepare in advance the objectives and specific challenges they wish to solve with the system.

They should identify a team from HR that will work with divisional managers on tailoring the program to meet the objectives. A senior executive should be found to help champion the program.

A methodology should be in place for reviewing the information and separating the wheat from the chaff. An ongoing plan should be made for keeping the program energized. Tools should be available for reporting and analyzing on usage and results.

by Beth N. Carvin

Implementing Enterprise 2.0 In The Real World

Now that the hype of Enterprise 2.0 is starting to settle, it's clear that there are many valuable approaches that can (and should) be put into practice.

Intranet and information managers are busy, however, pulled in many directions by different stakeholders. Resources are limited, and senior management visibility is often low. Most teams do not have the luxury of playing with technology, without some level of accountability.

So what should teams be doing in the real world?

These are my suggestions:

Don't be afraid to experiment. At its foundation, innovation is driven by a spirit of experimentation.

I've long argued that the 'traditional' approaches to intranets (and other enterprise platforms) hasn't been working, so we have everything to gain by trying some different ideas.

Take a 'safe-fail' approach. Enterprise projects are very conservative, moving much more slowly than the wider world.

To increase the pace of change, we need to take a 'safe-fail' approach, allowing a range of ideas to be tried with the expectation that some (perhaps most) will fail. The key is to have these failures to strengthen the strategy, not weaken it.

Have a clear purpose. Enterprise 2.0 is just a means to an end. We need to have clear business goals and end-user benefits driving our projects, beyond fuzzy ideas of 'knowledge sharing' or 'creating a collaborative culture'.

Take it seriously. Don't just 'roll out' a solution and hope for the best. We need to make every effort to have these new approaches succeed, including creating usable tools, and establishing good communications, marketing, training and support.

Make it work now. There is a remarkable consensus on what future directions should be, and how things might look in the longer term. Our projects, however, cannot just plan for the future. If staff don't use our solutions in the short-term, there won't be a long term (for us or our projects).

Match the culture. Technology can, to some degree, change the culture of an organisation. More realistically however, our projects should match the current culture to give the best chances of success. We shouldn't be trying to deploy solutions that staff or the organisation as a whole aren't ready for.

Build on the experiences of others. The early adopters have blazed at least some of the trails ahead, and we should build on their experiences. This allows us to avoid 'reinventing the wheel', or deploying solutions that are founded solely on idealism.

The last point is the perhaps most important. I have no patience for breathless enthusiasm about Enterprise 2.0, divorced from the real-world realities of the organizations that we work in.

Instead, I think it's time to take a more measured and mature approach to Enterprise 2.0, building on past experience and best practices.

For example, we want to establish an 'internal Facebook' within our organizations, but our earlier efforts with 'expertise directories' failed at an appalling rate. What personal motivations amongst our staff are we going to target to obtain success this time around?

We know that in most organizations, personalisation often doesn't work, and 'my sites' will not be used. So why are so many organizations betting their entire strategies on one (or both) of these two approaches?

On the other hand, projects by organizations such as British Airways and Scottrade show us some of the many Enterprise 2.0 approaches that do work in practice.

I think there are many important changes to make, and much success to be found. So let's take a middle road, experimenting with new ideas but focusing on delivering success right now.

by James Robertson