Dachis + Headshift means…?

Last night the Dachis Group announced that they have acquired Headshift.  Searching Twitter I see lots of congratulations to both groups — as the Enterprise 2.0 community is very excited about this.  I am too.  I wanted to think out-loud and see if we can discover what this mean to the E2.0 industry — specifically three of the major groups of industry participants.

1. The ecosystem of E2.0 consultants and intermediaries
2. The E2.0 vendors
3. The thousands of enterprises who have needs, and where E2.0 may be applicable

Consultants.  There are many people hanging up a shingle and selling their services as Enterprise 2.0 consultants in some form or another (like me).  This merger will have an impact on this space.  Why?  Because this expanded Dachis group now has presence in many of the major marketplaces and has a fantastic sampling of the brightest consultants in the business.  But who do they compete with?

1. Big name consulting shops offer full service IT and Management Strategy consulting.  Dachis is a boutique shop that has a focus on only some (though, important) elements of a larger IT and Management Strategy market.  I mean to be judgment-neutral on the term boutique — that it is neither bad nor good to be a boutique shop, it just is what it is — smaller, focused, and highly specialized.  And this is perfect for some clients, but less so for others.
2. Individual and small-group consulting groups like me and many others who have anywhere between one and ten people on staff and who offer a variety of services ranging from advisory, consulting, and implementation in some niches of the market.
3. Analyst firms — and in particular, those who have demonstrated great thought leadership and has provided the industry with great talent in this space.  These firms provide a level of advisory and consulting that brings data and insight to the table, but most stop short of implementation.

These groups compete on a variety of factors.  Price, geography, reputation, and spectrum of services come to mind as the obvious differentiators.  There’s another category of consultants — those that are part of the E2.0 vendor company who help their clients with advisory, consulting, and implementation — but I’d rather group them in the vendor category.

Vendors. There are many vendors in the E2.0 space, but for the sake of simplicity let me group them into two groups:

1. The New Crew which includes many E2.0 platform vendors who provide products (deployed, appliance, or service) for organizations (not the public)  that allow groups to collaborate and communicate using some variety of wiki, forum, blog – like surface, that allows the articulation of one’s profile and connections to others, and/or that has some notion of activity streaming.
2. The traditional enterprise software vendors that provide Portal / ECM tools — where these tools now also provide social or collaboration features.  These are increasingly relevant to clients who start their journey from the IT department, and less so from those who start from the marketing department (more on that below).

In some cases the vendors also offer implementation and consulting services that are geared to  ensuring client success.  But their focus is obviously on ensuring that their product succeeds too.

Customers.  There are thousands of potential customers for Enterprise 2.0.  I have found that within any particular customer there is usually one of five groups within the company that initiates the conversation about E2.0.  These are:

1. Knowledge Management.  Typically starting from the perspective of document or records management and looking at how informational assets are managed.  Some are also focused on training and on-boarding issues.
2. Idea Harvesting. These initiated by a product development group or an innovation management group.  They typically look for voice of customer or voice of the employee insight to solve problems, gain insight, and help influence new product development.
3. Social media campaigns. These are typically marketing initiatives, and sometimes they involve research groups that want to experiment internally before launching something externally.
4. HR Effectiveness teams. These groups focus on virtual teams collaboration issues, especially in the face of global outsourcing  or other workforce changes (layoffs, mergers, re-orgs).
5. IT. Pent up frustration at Intranet ineffectiveness and the need to remain relevant will drive IT to look at a a serious technology refresh of their portal approach.

There are other stakeholders to the conversation — like the legal/risk/policy setting groups.  But they usually don’t start the conversation.  Many times they are brought in too late.  But that’s a different conversation.

Why this is a big deal. What will the new expanded Dachis group do to this ecosystem?  I cannot predict — and this is partially due to the fact that Dachis has not been very explicit about it’s plans yet.  But I can only speculate based on what I see from their materials so far and from what I know of Headshift.  So I’ll speculate, and invite comment — in particular from the Dachis folks! (We’d love to know!)

I believe Dachis can have a significant and positive impact on the E2.0 consulting market.  This will put added pressure on those analyst firms that still operate in the E2.0 space.  This will also impact the small consultancies by forcing us to refine our target offerings, and perhaps leverage successful partnerships where appropriate.  They don’t have all the top minds in the industry working for them — but they have a healthy chunk of the well-respected voices already on their payroll now.  So I think the echo-chamber will certainly pay attention to what they say — and I anticipate they will provide a unifying voice of clarity.

Headshift brings them more E2.0 focus to their collection of thinkers — many of whom lean more on the Social Media (externally focused) end of the spectrum.  As a unified group they can now handle the internal/external opportunities.  Here’s what I mean:

I’ve characterized Enterprise 2.0 into three stages:

1. Enterprises evolve to allow for non-hierarchical collaboration.  This does not mean we tear down the hierarchies of management.  It does mean that we allow for cross-silo collaboration — enabled by Enterprise 2.0 tools.
2. The boundary between the Enterprise and everyone else becomes a bit more permeable.  This does not mean that enterprise boundaries go away.  It does mean that we see more collaboration with partners, customer, and competitors by virtue of the socially mediated channels that enable trust relationship (a.k.a. Social Media via Social Networks).
3. The term Enterprise 2.0 goes away.  It does not mean that E2.0 dies. It does mean that our use of pervasive, connected, mobile, and social computing platforms changes the way we work.  And we just think of it as “how we work”.  The “2.0″-ness goes away (it’s a poor description anyway).

Dachis is positioned to make Stage 2 a reality for those clients that are ready for it (or those who want to start there) by bringing together the internal focus on intranet based collaboration with the external understanding of marketing, branding, and socially mediated conversations on the public internet.  This is very exciting indeed.

What does this mean for vendors?  Dachis is in the position to help drive the vendor consolidation that this space is expecting.  They may develop important relationships and be in a position to produce facts-on-the-ground case studies.  They will certainly be the ones to watch.  Let’s see how they play this part of the story.  I’m sure they want to be very careful here.

What does this mean for clients?  It’s hard to tell yet.  Because they are still not large enough to be in every market and they are not  yet known outside the echo chamber of the E2.0 community.  I don’t know their go-to-market strategy, nor their views on partnership.  But if they play their cards right, they can provide a very compelling alternative to the existing options — drawing in many clients.  Especially in those industries that operate on the “keeping up with the next-guy” basis.  If so, they just need to continue to develop their high-profile client list, and the rest will be knocking on their door.

Oh — there’s actually a 4th player in the E2.0 marketplace that I did not mention above — the VCs and Angels.  They’ve been rather quite in the E2.0 space as of late.  I’m hoping if Dachis can demonstrate a solid money story, that we can wake up a few more VCs and help them stimulate the more sustainable parts of the E2.0 market.

My initial thoughts: I’m excited to see this acquisition.  I look forward to Dachis providing a clear voice that combines thought-leadership with a decent dose of hands-on experience.  I do not think they are (or even aspire to be) the only game in town.  I think there is a lot of grunt-work in the E2.0 space that they are not staffed to handle.  In my experience as an E2.0 internal practitioner, an analyst, and consultant, I find that many clients need basic help in the “1.0″ fundamentals.  And that part of the work is not going away. I don’t know how Dachis will address the less exciting parts of the work.

But it’s less than 24 hours into this acquisition — so who really knows?  But my sense is that there is great anticipation and respect from many parts of the E2.0 community.  Let’s now see how the paying groups in the marketplace welcomes them.   I applaud their news and I hope they blaze a money trail that brings success to the entire ecosystem.

Tagged as: Enterprise 2.0, social media, vendor