Enterprise 2.0 Thoughts to end the week.

After a busy week, not all of it at the computer, I have many stories to blog, but not enough time for them all.  So let me share a “week in review” post where I highlight some links, thoughts, and touchpoints for you to review.

Maturity:  The data is coming together to form a pretty consistent story.  Enterprise 2.0 is at a very challenging stage of development.  It’s no longer a fad.  It’s not going away.  But it’s not a fundamental part of mainstream businesses, yet.

The research that I worked on along with my colleagues at Forrester indicated this trend.  Research by other firms report similar trends as well.  I came across the results of this survey today on the IntranetBlog.com site.  The numbers look very similar to numbers I see on other surveys, and this is good.  I’d say that the article’s title is forward-looking.  The phrase “becomes mainstream” = “on the road to becoming mainstream”, but not “is mainstream”.  These things take way more time than we want them too. 

And let me add that as more CMS and Portal vendors are adding social computing capabilities, the numbers in these kind of surveys may get inflated.  For me at least, having a wiki, forum, blogs, etc. on the intranet and using a wiki, forum, blog effectively to improve the transparency and productivity of collaboration are very different indicators of progress.

Second Wave Adoption: Along the lines of the indicators that we are entering a new stage of maturity, I found the following brilliant three-part article from the Headshift blog.  I highly recommend you read it.  Christoph is right on target here.  I think we’ll see a more refined level of challenges in this new phase of adoption. 

It’s About Work:  Other indicators of maturity in the Enterprise 2.0 market is the focus on the workplace dynamics, not the tools themselves.  The following post on Bertrand Duperrin’s blog is a must read.  I think our industry needs more data to help take his first draft and refine it a bit.  But this approach is the right way to think about the real problems that enterprises face as it relates to the solutions that “2.0″-ism addresses.

There are many levels to the conversation: I came across this excellent post on Boxes and Arrows.  You should read it. It  got me thinking about the enterprise and individual needs related to Enterprise 2.0 and Knowledge Management issues.  I commented there, and will share here that I think there are (at least) 5 levels of conversation that need to be addressed when thinking about information in the workplace.

1. Enterprise-wide transparency.  By this I mean the general goal and vision of (phase 1) Enterprise 2.0 — where organizations leverage the talent and content in the workplace, rather than get entangled in the information silos that are so often limiting companies to be effective.  I call this phase 1, since I believe there is a phase 2 that addresses the management of information flow between the company and partners/customer outside the company too.  Back in the day that Wikis were the leading force in Enterprise 2.0, I called this the “Work-ipedia model”  The wiki for everyone in the company.
2. Departmental-wide unity. In reality, many successful “E2.0″ initiatives are limited to department-wide implementations.  This is due to the fact that unless everyone in the C-suite agrees to the initiative (very rare), one or two departments will engage, perhaps succeed, with Enterprise 2.0 initiatives alone.  The larger the company, the more likely this will take place.  The political reality of the corporate environment is much stronger than any “vision” especially if it is perceived to be soft, a fad, and devoid of hard ROI.
3. Team-wide coordination.  I have seen dozens of cases where teams find effective ways to deal with collaboration issues.  Teams that span geography or management chains face practical barriers that hinder their ability to collaborate.  This is especially true of the team members don’t have shared technology, and are left to using their laptops and emails to communicate.  The challenge here is that although you can address these issues on a team-by-team basis, you don’t want to have different solutions for different teams. 
4. Project-wide activity (which may or may not be the same as team).  This one can get iffy, since it depends on the way your company organizes in groups.  For some, their project team and their team is the same.  For many, they report into a management team, but then work on separate projects with members of other teams.  When this happens, you hit the very problems that many organizations have — they there are too many solutions to collaborations issues, and that each team does it differently.
5. Individual productivity enhancement tools.  By this I include things like your profile, (micro/life) streams, social bookmarks, or the online tools you as an individual knowledge worker to organize your stuff.  You may be using some great Web 2.0 tools for organizing your work, but if you are doing this on your own, then you are actually part of a larger problem of knowledge disbursement.  Ironic.

I’d love to see the vendors articulate how they address each of these needs.  

Speaking of Vendors:  Here’s a shout out to MindTouch for their release of a desktop component that allow you to integrate your Office applications with the Wiki/Portal environments. MindTouch’s careful attention to engineering excellence sets them apart from many competitors.  They didn’t hack a connector together.  They designed a solution that improves their platform fundamentally.  Their desktop connector and integration with Word and Outlook means they are ready to help mainstream information workers in the tools they are used to using already.  

Giving Back: Final thought of the week, it feels good to give.  This week I ran a workshop for a networking group that helped me out last year.  We spoke about online personal brands, blogging, and leveraging online communities to find a job.  I’ll post slides after I do a bit more editing.  It was rewarding for me and a fun experience for all.

Tagged as: collaboration, community, Enterprise 2.0, tool, wiki, workplace