A rant on a growing problem: The social computing community is creating innovative technologies and marketplaces faster than organizations can consume them. And this creates an effect that I call the “long neck”. Whereas the “long tail” provides the market with access to low demand items via the Internet — and is a beneficial result of Inter-net-worked marketplaces, the long neck is a problem. The long neck is my visualization of the famous Geoffrey Moore chasm (which I also mentioned in another post). The chasm is the gap between the early adopters and the early majority (or early mainstream) adopters. The chasm is always there, but I believe that in the E2.0 space, it is growing wider.
I like to think of the thought leaders in the social media space — the vendors, start-ups, pundits, analysts, and other in the social media illuminati as the “intellectual head” that challenges us to new ideas about computing and society. Every day there is a new social network or an updated UI that pushes the level of information access, transparency, connectivity, productivity, and integration. With an endless supply of great presentations on SlideShare, blog posts, and case study wikis – I see that people are thinking about E2.0, and thinking hard.
For those of you who saw the movie “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” — you’ll remember how the King and Queen of the Moon (played by Robin Williams and Valentina Cortese) had heads that separate from their bodies. When separated, their heads could discuss intellectual matters while their bodies went off to engage in more mundane activities. They were challenged by their duality: their intellectual head that they were both proud of — and the baseness of their body. If only they were pure intellect – a clean head with no dirty body. Of course this proves to pose a problem in this scene where the King’s head breaks free from the body…
I’m free! I’m free at last! The body is dead! The body is dead, long live the head, it’s finished, finito, heh-heh! Bye, body! Ha-ha! I shall prove a head does not need a body to survive! I am omnipotent, ha-ha! Yes… OH! Oh no, I got an itch! Oh, no! Oh no, oh no… AH-CHOOOOO!
And his head sneezes into oblivion.
Back to the E2.0 marketplace. The problem is that the “body” — the enterprises that are supposed to benefit from Enterprise 2.0 thinking are lagging far behind. In some cases, they just have other worries, like cutting costs and staying in business. In some cases they feel totally alienated from the E2.0 conversation. They don’t feel they belong to it, or that it belongs to them. They are busy engaging in their “mundane activities” while the head is off pursuing intellectualism.
Companies use 10 year old technologies and 20 year old management styles to address today’s problems. This is the reality for most of the enterprises that E2.0 vendors attempt to help. You who read blogs about this topic, will be shocked, shocked at the degree to which companies today still rely upon old technologies such as fax machines for regular business processes. I was speaking with an IT guy the other day at a large international insurance company with a recognizable name, who supports applications that run on Windows NT. They have no budget or plans to upgrade. Yes, they should have thought about this problem 10 years ago. But they did not. I assure you that although enterprise social networking may be valuable to them — it’s not high on their to-do list. I spoke with someone last week in a very large company who is looking to consolidate more applications on their servers in order to shave a mere three thousand dollars off the maintenance budget. Last year, three thousand dollars was pocket change. Today it’s the priority. I come across this all the time. And those of you who are in a similar line of work will hopefully comment on this post and share your stories about the traditionalism that permeates most companies.
In response, the “head” is moving forward, looking at traditional business as the outdated, backward-thinking, unimaginative dolts who just don’t get it. The messages delivered by the head seems to say everything you are “is dead”. SOA is dead, IT is dead, data-centers are dead, waterfall is dead, email is dead, etc. Instead, we live on perpetual betas, agile, clouds, and micro-this or that, social-this or that. And these are the people you hope will purchase your tools? They ask you for ROI and you respond — “what’s the ROI of your phone?”. This is not going to work for those companies who are asking a serious question about how much they should spend when they have other priorities too.
Now, I happen to love where the “head” is going with all this innovative social technology, but I’m here to tell you that the body does not get it. They don’t yet believe that all they are paid to manage is dead. To them, far from it. In fact, they think the head is flying around and will sneeze away if not careful.
Yes, Twitter, FriendFeed, Mashups, Wikis, Blogs, Facebook, Communities of Practice, and social collaboration in general may indeed be fantastic medicine for most organizations. They may very well need this to survive, or to thrive. But many of them don’t see it that way. And the messaging that some vendors are delivering are simply alienating the head from the body.
E2.0 pundits will say “those who don’t get on the bus will be left behind” or ”we’ll remember them along with the great companies of the last century, Digital, Compaq, Xerox, Smith Corona, etc.”. But if we move too fast and fail to look back, we may miss the bus and be remembered as that cool idea that never took solid footing in mainstream enterprises.
Let’s keep our eyes on the long neck and make sure that we are still connected.
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Gil, as usual, very astute analysis.
I also see a sense of inertia in many cases. The whole argument re “those who don’t get on the bus will be left behind” is nonsense. This fear filled approach to selling just leaves a sour taste in the buyers mind and many remember the Y2K selling tactics very vividly.
As I commented on ReadWriteWeb today, the knee jerk reaction in this economic climate has been to throw more money at traditional efforts that show promise. Surprisingly though, I do see the will to experiment with new approaches. But the knowledge is just not there with regard to where to start, the switching cost, how to measure and most importantly the path to a graceful exit if it doesn’t work out.
The cost of experimenting in a sandbox or skunk works type setting is still fairly low and I’ve found that forward looking customers are in fact ready to try. For instance, lead generation and sales optimization are two places where its been relatively easier to have such brainstorming sessions once you can articulate the before and after state with the use of E2.0.
Its going to take tactical execution planning by vendor provided customer success support or external consulting to bridge this divide.
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Visit the operations for any small to mid-sized investment firms and you will be amazed to find any number of fax servers/machines that are used to provide the communications and indeed, a formal approval transaction conduit for older clients who eschew emails, let alone portals.
These well-heeled and active investors may not be amongst the illuminati of technology, but I assure you that money talks. Even via fax.
To your point, I recall this real-life case study in the not too distant past:
Fortune 50 company in the suburbs of Portland is given the mandate by the CFO to grow the US market by 2x while keeping costs in line. The CMO of this global corporation knew he needed to manage his organization far more efficiently than he was. Everyone in the company agreed, but no one will sign off on a multi-million dollar software and services spend until the linkage is made between the CFO’s growth mandate and the new investment. The ROI justification was illustrated in hard-dollar savings. It turned out to be a wildly successful [enterprise content management] implementation. I was dumb-founded that a company of this caliber and global reach didn’t have such an ECM system in place long before it that. This is just one of a few hundred examples of how long the neck really is…
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Excellent post which should be mandatory reading for anyone who espouses “Enterprise 2.0″ approaches. You need to take the guys who control the spend, and assess your performance, with you.
They need the hard 1.0 numbers to support our 2.0 aspirations
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Gil,
Terrific post. Your chasm analogy for E 2.0 is spot on. One of the ways we at Helpstream try to make it safe for companies to cross the chasm and embrace E 2.0 is to tightly couple communities with business processes. We find companies feel more comfortable if they can point to a specific business process that can be improved with E 2.0 solutions.
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This is some good, hard advice.
The Enterprise 2.0 industry needs to stop using words like “pundits” and “illuminati” and “ninja” in their self-description. Social network theory at this point is largely limited to observed behavior of non-business users. Any enterprise adopter at this point is funding research and the “illuminati” guiding this adoption should be clear with their clients about the fact.
The growth of the industry (not the growth of enterprise adoption) is fueled in part by the perceived value of the tools and in part by a gold-rush mentality. The proliferation of tools and startups that you mention is suspiciously similar to the web bubble of 1999/2000. Companies that employ thousands and invest millions are right to be cautious.
Consultants that are guiding large-scale transformation projects can’t carry around the notion that they are the only ones on the cluetrain and expect success. Key values are empathy, a capacity for sharing passion… and an enormous reserve of patience.
Wow. I just had this conversation with another services vendor this morning, and could not agree more. I was in a meeting with a big company a month ago, and as a warm up to a conversation on E2.0 thinking, I asked “who here has a LinkedIn account?” (set up for Facebook account, twitter, etc. etc.) and nobody held their hands up ! Maybe because they worked for a big company, for many years, and weren’t thinking of getting hired. Traditional Enterprise practices in procurement, legal and related areas still have significant impact on adoption issues.
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Gil, I laughed out loud at the beginning of your blog with your analogy of “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” – brilliant! as well as the long-necked Dino! Great!
And in alot of ways I agree with you, but in some ways I don’t see this “cycle” as that much different than past cycles of the conputer industry for the past 20 years. And people will evolve, some faster, some slower, some with profit, some without, and some with losses. Simplistic, but really it is the same trends.
I think that people who are already intimate with practical application and business experience in the E2.0 space are simply impatient (myself inclusive – a case of “forehead knocking ‘Hello! McFly!!’ “).
Yet, these things take time to evolve, and they will, that I am sure of – and they are. Months seem like years when day to day completely immersed in it, I think.
The recession seems to have fast-tracked everything E2.0 – a nice silver-lining for those who not only believe in the path and space, but also are making a living at a practical business application level as service providers. This only confirms the efforts we are already doing, seeing, and experiencing.
The fact that many in business choose convenient skepticism still has a certain absurdity of perspective. But that is only because we are so close to the fire. I am glad it is a big world.
This cycle has only just begun, just getting momentum (yay!) and it is way too powerful on all levels to die anytime soon. The next 2-3-4-5+ years – staged at every level – are going to be very exciting. Management generations and styles are evolving, and will continue in the coming years.
It’s not that people will be left off the bus, but certainly the bus is morphing (where’s Miss Frizzle from “The Magic Schoolbus!” when we need her… she’d slap some quick sense into all this!).
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Ellen,
thanks! I love to hear about the successes. The economy is accelerating some activities and slowing down others — and I think that my December predictions on http://blogs.zdnet.com/forrester/?p=127 “ZDnet” rel=”nofollow”> are coming true. And yet, there is so much more that I could not predict that is happening too.
My concern is that some very passionate members of the E2.0 community are moving so fast that they are not looking to see if their clients are catching up. I’m hoping to see us close the gap and get more mainstream organizations to see the intrinsic value that E2.0 can provide (when implemented correctly).
The cycle is familiar. Clearly most everyone sees email as a necessity for modern business (something that was not the case 20 years ago). Everyone sees the browser as a necessity (something that was not the case 13 years ago), etc. But will it be the case with other important technologies (internal discussion forums, blogs, profiles microsharing, etc.)? And how long will it take? Understanding how the cycle addresses changes in environment and motivation is essential to the success of this industry.
So I challenge us to keep our eyes on the “body” and make sure that it is along for the ride. I think many do, and some need a friendly reminder.
BTW, I love the magic schoolbus series!
This is not the first tech to go through this cycle. So, all is not hopeless. But, …
Social is a way of living. It’s not a new discipline or an additional activity bolted onto the side of our professional lives like some aftermarket wing on a Honda Civic. So, it’s likely that all the current social-only technologies/products will be the necessary-but-ultimately-inadequate evolutionary stepping stones — sort of design experiments. Clearly, the richest existing communities of practice are ones most closely organized around some existing products/techs, so the barriers to adoption are lowest there. And, before we can have the nation-state of social networks, we probably have to go through the city-state phase. While the theoretical power of the network probably grows nearly exponentially with nodes, the practical complexities of cultivating the network certainly grow exponentially. We are going to have to learn to walk before we run.
I suspect we should set our sights lower in the near term, incorporating practical and small applications of social into existing communities of interest (and their tools) within an enterprise — before we start pitching SNS as some sort of overarching holy grail.
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Gil:
Great article. Would you be agreeable to granting me permission to re-syndicate it on Social Computing Journal? All links and attributions to be maintained, of course.
Thanks!
Alora C. Chistiakoff
Managing Editor
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Gil,
Very nice analysis and directly relates to my world – I spent afternoon yesterday at PRSA West ( http://www.ocprsa.org/events-wdc) in Newport Beach, California speaking to an audience all about web 2.0 for PR — the fact that electronic or social media (blogs, twitter, youtube, forums…) are a major pain point for corporate brands. The audience “got” the fact that their brand no longer “lives” within the corporation. They also “got” the fact that their brand lies in the hands of the millions of bloggers and twitter-folk – I referenced them as citizen soldiers who now have the power to embrace a companies brand or do significant damage to a companies brand reputation.
You’re bang in terms of getting the “head” to understand that the world is changing far quicker than they realize – we do have some great early adopters, but the challenge still remains to get the long tail up to speed in understanding the power of collaborative smart software — software that is flexible, nimble and has the ability to give significant competitive advantage to todays organizations. Here is my post from yesterday: http://blog.dna13.com/enterprise-20-addressing-technology-and-business-goals/151/
Thanks
Chris Johnson
Founder and CMO
dna13 Inc.
http://blog.dna13.com/
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