LUCRUM RADIO: Episode 1, Doug Ross
June 12, 2008
Lucrum Radio is our new podcasting series. It will feature interviews and discussions with thought leaders in business and technology, providing a forum for sharing knowledge with the world.
Episode 1 of LUCRUM Radio got us off to a great start. It features an interview with Doug Ross, CTO of Western Southern Insurance. In the podcast, moderated by fellow LUCRUM employee Andy Erickson, Doug and I discuss topics such as collaboration technology, crowd-sourcing, organizational dynamics, the integration of IT and Marketing, and the role technology can play in differentiating an organization from the competition.
Give the podcast a listen, and let us know what you think…
Special Thanks to Doug Ross for his willingness to participate in the project, and for doing such an amazing job of delivering insightful, innovative thinking.
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13 Statements about Collaboration – each less than 143 characters!
June 11, 2008
I was thinking about two things today…Collaboration and Microblogging. So, I mashed them up a bit here. I outlined in 13 parts, my thoughts about collaboration. I pasted them here in a microblogish format and they form an outline. Over the next couple of weeks, I will post a blog dedicated to each “Part” – for those of you interested in one person’s experiences. Feel free to comment me up! Here goes…
Statement 1, “Collaboration Definition!”, “People working together on creative, non-trivial issues that requires deep thinking and an exchange of ideas in an iterative and cumulative manner by domain experts. Click here for part 2 of “Collaboration Definition!”
Statement 2, “It’s not about technology!”, Technology is simply a dimension around an implementation method-they come and go. A great idea is to slice your bread – who cares about the toaster, until you want toast! Click here for part 2 of “It’s not about technology!”
Statement 3, “Collaboration Success!”, Real Success – The art of understanding your corporate culture and how to transition them to a focused sprint of collaboration to solve the problem extracting real value.
Statement 4, “Collaboration Transition!”, Transition your company’s conduct, habits, culture and management. Encourage the deeper level of communication. First expose the real business goals and objectives!
Statement 5, “Collaboration Accountability!”, Establish a clear level of accountability – one person who is tasked to demonstrate the value that collaboration brings. So, IT and Business alignment is mandatory!
Statement 6, “Collaboration Value Alignment!”, Make sure that you revisit with the sponsor(s) often to ensure that the value they expect is in fact the value you are working towards. Business changes, adapt your plan! Click here for part 2 of “Collaboration Value Alignment!”
Statement 7, “Collaboration Attributes!”, Choose attributes; re or pro action, rich features or limited set, centralized control versus distributed, technology controlled behavior or community managed.
Statement 8, “Collaboration Scope!”, Apply collaboration to the enterprise, LOB, business unit, workgroup, or even a business process. Suggestion: Horizontal Strategy + Tactical Verticals.
Statement 9, “Collaboration Horizontal Strategy!”, Determine an enterprise level of depth that addresses higher level issues across the organization. General company dialogs at this level promote a culture change.
Statement 10, “Collaboration Tactical Verticals!”, Analyze your company and look for deep level collaboration needs. They usually center around master data items, governance groups, departments, teams or initiatives. Click here for part 2 of “Collaboration Tactical Verticals!”
Statement 11, “Collaboration Business Processes!”, Setting up collaboration at the business process level provides maximum value because its focused on a real need while cutting across the enterprise to involve others.
Statement 12, “Collaboration Business Processes – warning!”, Make sure to determine the right-level collaboration strategy before actually embedding it into the business process, least they become dependent upon one another.
Statement 13, “Collaboration Business Processes – Challenges!”, Different locations and time zones, clear exception handling, management coordination of shared processes and working across political boundaries.
Cheers!
~Scott Felten
Recipes for Success
June 11, 2008
Using unique experiences to reach out to customers…. is the theme of a recent WSJ article that featured John Bostick, executive chairman of LUCRUM, and also President and CEO of dbaDirect. The article talks about how different small companies create unique opportunities to meet with their customers. The article was published on Friday, May 30, the very day after I attended one of John’s classes up at Jungle Jim’s in Fairfield, Ohio (another exercise in unique customer experiences – they have every imported food you never knew you needed ‘ 6 acres of food under one roof’ http://www.junglejims.com )_
The class I attended was called ‘Hot Thai Summer Sizzlers”. John prepared some wonderful Thai dishes, and Jim Hennessy showcased several unusual beers that enhanced the flavors of the food (except for the Paulaner Heffe – beer and clove are not good flavors in beer, in my opinion!). In the class, John prepared and discussed the origins of many of the exotic dishes he was preparing, but in an easy to understand and appreciate manner – demystifying many otherwise exotic dishes and convincing me that just maybe I should try this at home sometime. Everything was delicious, and while, a few offerings were too spicy for some of the attendees – don’t say he didn’t warn you about the peppers! – the different beer offerings were a great way to ‘cool the palate’. Several LÛCRUM customers and their family members attended, and as the WSJ article discussed, it was a great way to get to know people outside the normal business environment. John and I both share the common experience of having worked for IBM, and are rooted in the belief that ‘people buy from people they like’. So, having the opportunity to get to know our customers in a more relaxed environment is something ingrained in us, starting with our days at ‘Big Blue’. The best testimony to the value they received from the class is the number of folks that were signing up for the next class! – Obviously, it was an enjoyable, informative session.
Just like trying new foods and beers can provide an enjoyable experience, trying new business offerings and concepts can also lead to a positive experience. For example, one of the offerings that is unique to Lucrum is our ‘Strategic Alignment Session’. Using a guided methodology, our consultants facilitate sessions for customers – taking them on a journey – starting at the beginning, and discussing their history (which quite frequently, everyone has a slightly different recollection of!), and using that shared history to guide the participants on the journey, resulting in a shared experience, mutual goals and ways to achieve those goals. These sessions are one of those things that you just don’t fully appreciate until you’ve actually observed, participated in, or spoken to someone about. I sat in on one session during my first weeks with Lucrum, and was impressed by the way our consultant (Eric Duell, in this case) led a diverse customer group at a local chemical firm through this process as they attempted to design a new customer pricing system. In the past few months, Eric has conducted sessions for 2 of my customers – both in very different businesses – one, a large financial institution, where we helped an off-shore firm develop a new sale and marketing plan. And then most recently, we drove a few hours north and used this same process with another custom in the non-profit sector, bringing together a very diverse group including marketing, IT, creative, and education departments, resulting in a new vision for a major website re-design for their institution.
In both instances, there were participants who walked into the session, thinking “this better be good, they convinced me to give up 2 days (or 2 – ½ days) of my time”. By the end of the first session, or even sooner, you could see that their impressions had changed, and they were eager participants in the process – and walked away from the sessions with a new vision and ideas on how to lead their organization through the next phase of their business plan. And, some were even ready to ‘sign up again’ for more sessions – to utilize this process in other aspects of their business.
How I Reduced My Gasoline Expenses by 40%
June 10, 2008
My daily commute averages just under an hour assuming I leave home by 5:45 in the morning and make my return trip before 4:00pm. Now, when I accepted my current position at LUCRUM as Marketing Manager gas was about $3.00 per gallon. Roughly 100 days later, it is hovering at just above $4.00 per gallon, and showing no signs of plateauing. That represents a substantial increase, and one which costs me quite a bit of real money. I am fortunate to own a very fuel efficient vehicle, but still need to fill up multiple times in a traditional 5 day work week. After much thought and careful consideration I have found a way to reduce my gasoline expenses by 40% a month. Let me explain how.
When I am not listening to books on cd from the library during my daily commute, I tend to listen a fair amount of talk and news on the radio. I am constantly barraged with “what to do about soaring gas prices?” Generally the answer given is something like, fewer SUV’s and more fuel efficient cars, use bio-fuels, tax the oil companies, switch to alternative fuels, move to the city and walk to work, drill for more oil, etc… I hear Senators, Congressmen, Presidential Candidates, The President, American Consumers, Business Owners, and Foreign Dignitaries all expound on how to solve this pressing issue. From liquid coal to switchgrass, ANWAR to Ethanol, hydrogen to methane to propane, there are a multitude of solutions, but none that is viable today. At least that is what you think….
Now all of these ideas have merit. While I agree with some more than others, you can make rational arguments that any of these solutions could yield marginal decreases in the price of fuel. But marginal decreases are not what we need. You see, while these ideas are all sound, they treat the symptoms of the problem. We need something to strike at the root. The game itself must be changed. We spend an inordinate amount of time placing the blame on “big oil” when we are reluctant to change our behavior in the face of price increases. Simple economic theory will tell you that these companies are going to charge as much as they can until the behavior of the marketplace forces them to change. Consumers have given these companies no form of retribution for raising prices. We continue to fill up, drive to the office, and complain about high prices, but we do nothing.
I am here to tell you that there is a simple way to reduce your personal dependence on foreign oil at the micro level. At the same time, this way could improve the environment, enrich our personal lives, reduce company expenditures and increase workforce productivity exponentially. The real alternative fuel is utilizing collaboration technology and the internet to get more work done, more efficiently, and at a much lower cost.
Collaboration Technology has allowed me to work from home on average 2 days per week. Thus, by this simple change in behavior I have reduced my consumption of gasoline by roughly 40%. I would like to increase that to 4 days a week, but baby steps are required for both me and my employer. Thus, I am sticking with 2 as the goal for now. Now, I ask you, what the net effect would be if consumers across the country were to embrace this trend? Well there are a few simple conclusions that come to mind.
First, by reducing the demand for gasoline, the overall supply would naturally increase. Now, the math does not work out exactly the same on a large scale as some people just can’t work remotely. Nurses, Doctors, Truck Drivers, UPS, etc… So the aggregate reduction in demand would admittedly be less than 40%. Still, if those who could work remotely chose to do so 2 days per week, the effect would be very noticeable. Include in this number those who are in sales, logging countless miles of windshield time to meet with clients in person and the impact increase more. Collaboration technology, delivered via the internet, empowers people to effectively “be in the same workspace” without ever leaving home. Let’s see switchgrass do that. Now this has a direct effect on gas prices in that Less Demand = More Supply = More Pressure to Lower Prices!
Now assuming that the distribution of remote office days was spread evenly across the work week, there would be a noticeable improvement in traffic patterns. Highways would be less congested – leading to safer driving, less gridlock, and as a result increased fuel efficiency. (Cleaner Air would be an added benefit, but that is another post.) Greater fuel efficiency would translate into reduced demand for gasoline. Again, Less Demand = More Supply = More Pressure to Lower Prices.
I don’t know about you, but I believe that if this trend were noticed, oil companies would act to stop it before it became a cultural norm by… lowering prices. Again the consumer benefits. Should this trend catch on and expand to 3 or 4 days a week, a virtuous cycle would develop, with oil companies again needing to reduce prices to entice you back into your car. Now the consumer would have a choice again, and oil would develop more of an elastic demand pattern. In short there would be real and measurable consequences to increasing prices – consequences which today don’t exist.
Finally in the benefits column is the fact that by working remotely 2 days a week, I recapture at least 4 hours of time that can be spent more productively. Exercise, family time, reading, working, and other activities easily fill the void created by eliminating my commute. Time is truly our most precious commodity, not oil. Giving me back 4 hours of productive time outweighs any economic benefits offered up in the first two reasons. More time = happier worker = lower turnover = more profits for company
So, in summary we would have fewer cars on the road, filling up less frequently, more empowered consumers, a better environment, and a more efficient workforce. Personally, by adopting this work model, I have more time, more money, and I am a better employee. It is just that simple.
I truly believe that the technology world needs to speak out about the concept of Collaboration as the Alternative Fuel of the Future. We are operating modern businesses on a factory model created to optimize the businesses of the industrial revolution. This system required people to work as machines, and the machines to be present to add value. This paradigm is no longer relevant for many of us, yet we continue on with business as usual. It is time to begin to use the collaborative tools of Enterprise 2.0 to solve problems in new and innovative ways. IT should be leading the charge in reducing the dependence on foreign oil, and allow us to get beyond simply blogging about how we hate high gas prices.
More to come on this concept in future posts. I would love to hear your thoughts on how collaboration can change the world. Please share your comments.
Enterprise 2.0 and Governance
June 8, 2008
Prof. Andrew McAfee (see my previous post) in a blog post in Nov 2006 asked his readers to consider this: Imagine two competitors, one of which has the guiding principle “keep security risks and discoverability to a minimum,” the other of which is guided by the rule “make it as easy as possible for people to collaborate and access each others’ expertise.” Both put in technology infrastructures appropriate for their guiding principles. Take all IT, legal, and leak-related costs into account. Which of these two comes out ahead over time?
My guess would be the latter.
So, what is Governance?
In simple terms I’d say that Governance is the set of policies, procedures and structures you define and establish in an organization to guide and direct the use of technology to achieve organizational goals. So it is about both IT and the business.
Many people think governance is about control and limiting the power of the user. On the contrary I think that good governance actually enables better collaboration – the more clearly the terms of use and the collaboration structures and mechanisms are defined, the easier it becomes to navigate the world of unstructured content. To me, governance is like the banks of a river – without the banks the river waters could cause enormous destruction and would spread out and be wasted. The banks provide direction and enable the river waters to be channeled and to achieve useful purposes.
In the Enterprise 2.0 context, one finds that companies are concerned when it comes to allowing the use of such technologies across the firewall. The typical concerns are around monitoring the content posted in blogs and wikis, fears over potential lawsuits emanating from the publication of information that is slanderous in nature or hate-oriented or which can be interpreted as being harassing or discriminatory in any shape or form. There is also concern around the potential for trade secrets, new product information, R&D information and other such inside information getting out. At the client I am at currently, there is tremendous concern over the possibility of allowing for collaboration between internal employees and any external entities.
I wonder if the very same concerns existed when email was first introduced or way back when the telephone was first made available in a business setting.
Most companies tend to have an information security policy and that seems to have generally sufficed to handle these concerns around email and phone calls. In a similar fashion, I think it’d be useful to extend that information security policy to cover Enterprise 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasts, social networking, etc. It’d also be useful to highlight and publicize these policies so that employees are aware that instant messages or blog or wiki posts or comments on a discussion thread are to be treated as public communication. Also, one needs to consider that typically online, social communities tend to be self-policing and self-correcting.
So I would like to suggest that for a company to successfully embrace Enterprise 2.0, it should first decide how it wants to handle the content that will be generated through the use of such technologies. Would it not be reasonable to assume that all such information should be treated as the company’s digital assets?
So when it comes to providing governance around your Enterprise 2.0 solution, it might be useful to look at the following areas:
* Findability – how can you make it easy to find relevant content so users do not have to remember URLs or content locations? What can you do to provide true enterprise search capabilities? Can the search experience be customized?
* Retention – how long should content be retained both from a legal perspective and because of the business necessity to find older content? How about a mechanism to archive content that isn’t being actively used?
* Versioning – how many versions of content would you like to support? Make it easy to go back to a previous version but manage this effectively to minimize storage costs. Can you enforce storage quotas?
* Information Architecture – what guidelines do you want to provide around navigation and search? What kind of metadata do you want captured with different kinds of content to make it easy to find pertinent information? Do you have specific thoughts around taxonomy? Also, would you want to use workflows to manage document state? How about content approval policies? How do you integrate the content in the collaboration system with your enterprise portals?
* Customization – is the system customizable and does it provide the ability to turn functionality on/off as needed? What kinds of user customization of the system would be acceptable? How do you plan to verify that those customizations are safe to be deployed to your Production environment? Will there be a rollback mechanism?
* Security – provide adequate security so that content that needs special security can be effectively protected. Also verify that there are adequate mechanisms to audit and report system usage, and enforce information management policies such as retention, auditing, expiration, etc.
* The terms of use – define what terms govern the use of your system.
* Acceptable content – state upfront what kinds of content are acceptable i.e. regarding text, images, videos, audio, etc. Also specify your policy around sharing this content externally.
* Integration of such systems into the organization’s Enterprise Content Management system – How do you envision the information flowing from the location that provides free collaboration to your enterprise content management system? How do you plan to handle e-discovery? Where should the final, legal record of content reside?
* Tools – finally, evaluate the available Enterprise 2.0 tools to see which one best meets your needs in light of the requirements outlined above.
* Documentation – document your policies and procedures and the custom framework you are going to implement with respect to the software tool(s) selected above and publicize its availability.
To exercise the system, a pilot rollout could be considered and the guidelines and policies then be tweaked appropriately based on relevant feedback. But after that, IT should get out of the way and strive to effectively enable and empower the business to use these Enterprise 2.0 technologies.
One other thing I think companies should focus on is identifying and establishing the process for maintaining a single version of the truth when it comes to content management. Having multiple redundant versions of the same content for example in email, the user’s pc, a shared network folder, a collaboration space and a content management system is not a good idea not only in terms of governance and compliance but also very expensive when you think of backup and storage costs and not to mention the amount of time lost in finding out which is the latest version or the single version of truth. I had a colleague use the term “single point of truth” or SPOT and thinking in terms of SPOT should be a key focus area for governance. In this regard, you could for instance institute a policy that states that internally, email should not be used to forward documents but instead that a link to the document on the intranet or collaboration area be emailed. The same policy could be adopted for external communication as long as an extranet site is available to share content with external collaborators.
Today it is becoming common that the business is beginning to make use of Web 2.0 tools without overt IT involvement. With regard to Web 2.0, this is not as significant an issue since it is mainly about the consumer aspects and geared towards the individual user. However, when it comes to Enterprise 2.0, I do not think that is necessarily the best thing to do long term. For Enterprise 2.0, my recommendation would be that the business work hand-in-hand with IT and make use of a corporate vendor that builds and integrates its Enterprise 2.0 offering with existing infrastructure and has the vision, and proven financial and technical abilities to engineer a solution that can scale well and provide the necessary controls and mechanisms outlined above.
I would like to propose that IT be forward-looking and embrace Enterprise 2.0 technologies and strive to empower and enable the business to effectively use such technologies. And I would also propose that the business work in association with IT to achieve its ends instead of pursuing solutions that are good for a single department but may not scale well to the enterprise or are unable to provide the functionality needed long term.
How is Enterprise 2.0 different from Web 2.0?
June 3, 2008
The term “Enterprise 2.0″ was coined by Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee, during 2006, in an MIT Sloan Management Review article entitled “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration”, as opposed to Web 2.0 (which was popularized by Tim O’Reilly in 2004).
When asked “What is Enterprise 2.0?”, the typical response might be “The application of Web 2.0 in the enterprise”. AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management association, states that there is more to Enterprise 2.0 than that. “Web 2.0 is focused on consumer and public-facing Web sites although that distinction was not explicitly made in the original definition.Enterprise 2.0 is much more about businesses’ adoption of “2.0 mindsets” than with the consumer facing side of the coin.” Plus, there is the lack of preciseness around the term Web 2.0.
AIIM defines Enterprise 2.0 as: “A system of Web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence, and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise.” (see AIIM Market IQ, Q1 2008, “Enterprise 2.0: Agile, Emergent & Integrated”, by Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen).
A couple of frameworks for Enterprise 2.0 include one from Prof. McAfee, which goes by the mnemonic SLATES (Search, Links, Authorship, Tags, Extensions and Signals), and another from Dion Hinchcliffe which goes by the mnemonic FLATNESSES (Freeform, Links, Authorship,Tagging, Network-oriented, Extensions, Search,Social, Emergence and Signals).
In similar fashion to AIIM, Forrester Research believes that “the term Web 2.0 has come to embody both consumer and business use of next-generation Web technology but that this lumping together of services is too imprecise to be practical” (see Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 To 2013 by G. Oliver Young dated April 21, 2008). Young states that as a result, “most pundits and technology strategists segment the market between consumer Web 2.0 services and business Web 2.0 services.” Forrester thus refers to “the business Web 2.0 market as enterprise Web 2.0, which encompasses Web 2.0 technology and service investments for both externally facing marketing functions and internally facing productivity and collaboration functions.” So for example, Forrester doesn’t include Blogger, Facebook or Twitter as Enterprise 2.0 services even though they are Web 2.0 services.
Forrester believes that “enterprise Web 2.0 technologies represent a fundamentally new way to connect with customers and prospects and to harness the collaborative power of employees.” They specifically refer to Enterprise 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasting, social networking, mashups, and widgets.
The list of Enterprise 2.0 technologies provided by AIIM is quite similar and consists of mashups, blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasting, social voting/ranking and social bookmarking.
One has to remember though that even if Enterprise 2.0 technologies such as the ones listed above provide for rapid and agile collaboration and empowerment, there has to be a cultural openness to this within an enterprise for it to truly be successful. So it’s not only about aligning the technology with the business, but aligning the culture with the technology that now becomes the challenge.
In future posts, we will take a look at some of these Enterprise 2.0 technologies and the cultural issues around the adoption of Enterprise 2.0.
Social Networking and SharePoint 2007
May 27, 2008
On May 14, 2008, CIO.com published an article about Understanding Microsoft SharePoint in a Web 2.0 World.
Obviously, Social networking is a significant goal of Web 2.0 and has received a lot of attention over the recent past with the hope of improving worker productivity by making available enhanced online access to people, skills, knowledge and other resources. As Wikipedia says, “Social Networking has revolutionized the way we communicate and share information with one another in today’s society”. Social networking software typically allow users to build an online profile through which they can share information about themselves and thus leads to the building of online communities with shared interests and/or activities.
SharePoint 2007 uses the concept of individual, customizable user profiles to provide users with a means of publishing information about themselves. These user profiles can combine information from the organizational directory service such as LDAP or a Human Resource application.
SharePoint provides individual sites (My Sites) for each user that provides personnel information as well as private and public views of content. Visitors to an individual’s My Site can see contact information, presence information, and organizational hierarchy information. My Sites also enables users to display information about their skills, colleagues and other social information.
SharePoint uses the notion of Colleagues, where colleagues can be friends or co-workers or members of the same team, who are related to an individual by means of their profile. The list of colleagues is built by mining multiple sources of information and is directly influenced by the organizational hierarchy. A user can also manually add or remove colleagues from their colleagues web part.
The colleague tracker web part can track changes to the profiles of a users colleagues, for example tracking such things as changes to a blog, new or modified documents, and changes to user profile properties, etc.
The Memberships web part let users see the lists and sites that they are members of.
The In Common With web part shows a visitor summary information relating to memberships, colleagues and managers that the visitor has in common with the owner of that My Site.
The Organization Hierarchy web part on My Profile page shows the user’s manager, peers (others who report to the user’s manager) and any direct reports of that user.
In association with Office Communications Server and Exchange Server, presence information is made available that indicates online instant messaging status, Out of Office messages and contact information.
The People Search function allows users to find people or skills by means of a search interface that returns search results based on social distance (an ordering of results based on colleague relationships i.e. first your colleagues will appear, then their colleagues and then everyone else).
Microsoft has also provided several Role Based Templates for My Sites to cater to the unique needs and requirements of different roles in an organization.
For more information, see the following white paper from Microsoft: Managing Social Networking with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
What is Web 2.0?
May 22, 2008
Wikipedia defines Web 2.0 as “a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users.” It also quotes Tim O’Reilly (who is widely credited with coining the term Web 2.0), as saying that “ Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”
Forrester Research defines Web 2.0 as “a set of technologies and applications that enable efficient interaction among people, content, and data in support of collectively fostering new businesses, technology offerings, and social structures.” (from “Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 To 2013″ by G. Oliver Young, dated April 21, 2008.)
The phrase Web 2.0 (which really is more of an idea than a software version) has now come to mean the new Web. In an informal sense, Web 2.0 refers to an enhanced form of the world wide web which provides a richer user experience, is more interactive, collaborative, dynamic, participative, and up-to-date. It’s not just about retrieving data anymore but also about creating data and shared knowledge often times in association with others. So users not only download or read but are able to actively upload and create/edit content.
When we speak of Web 2.0, we are speaking about particular technologies and features such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS), Weblogs (Blogs), wikis, forums, mashups, rich Internet Applications, collaborative or social tagging, podcasting, shared bookmarks, virtual team workspaces, widgets or gadgets, etc. XML, web services, AJAX, etc. are typical building blocks to enable these features of Web 2.0.
And Web 2.0 is big business! In the article quoted above from Forrester, we also read that “Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013, with social networking, mashups, and RSS capturing the greatest share… In 2008, firms will spend $258 million on social networking tools. After blogs and wikis, mashup technology takes off next, growing from a small base of $39 million in 2007 to $682 million in 2013 — second only to social networking.”
Web 2.0 has already affected social behavior significantly and is beginning to now affect the workplace culture and the ways of doing business. There is enhanced communication because of these technologies and more collaboration between a business, its employees, partners and customers. There is increased knowledge sharing and growth in online communities of shared interests. New and exciting ways of presenting the same information are becoming available.
So even as we witness the evolution of the Web into its Web 2.0 form, we can already feel its revolutionary impact!
Some SharePoint competitors in the Enterprise 2.0 space…
May 19, 2008
There’s been a lot of buzz over the past couple of months around companies who are pitching their products against SharePoint. Just the fact that companies are targeting SharePoint tells you that it is the product to beat. For instance, have you read about the offerings from Google and IBM?
Here’a a link to a ZDNet article saying Google takes on Microsoft SharePoint with Google Sites. And here’s another one asking: Is Google Sites going to be a SharePoint killer?
Both articles conclude that for all the hype surrounding Google Sites and Google Apps, apparently they still have a long way to go to catch up to SharePoint. Also, given that Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is available for free with Windows Server 2003, users do not need to pay any licensing fees to use the basic collaboration platform available with SharePoint. And by the way, did you know that Office Live Small Business (which provides everything you need to take your small business online, including a free website, free email, free online business applications, etc.) and Office Live Workspaces (an online place to save, access, and share documents and files), are built on SharePoint products?
IBM recently announced how they’d like to “liberate” your apps from SharePoint. Also look at another article around the same topic. IBM acknowledges the “viral adoption of SharePoint” in the enterprise, almost like Lotus Notes back in the 90s. And it’s interesting to note that the man behind the success of Lotus Notes, Ray Ozzie, isn’t with IBM or Lotus, but is the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft! Hmmm… And I know of at least 2 major corporations with a huge presence in Cincinnati, OH, that have decided to move away from Lotus Notes to SharePoint! I guess we have to wait and see if Quickr is able to stem this flow…
Evans Data Corporation’s recently surveyed over 400 developers for its May 2008 report on “Web 2.0 Developer Programs – 2008 Rankings”. Some folks might be surprised to hear that Google came in at second place. So who came in first? Apparently, “the strength of Microsoft’s Windows Live offerings for Tools and SDKs and Web Services allow them to finish first overall”.
So it seems that SharePoint is not something an organization would want to ignore or take lightly – plus, serious web 2.0 developers need to more closely look at Microsoft’s offering in this area.
So why are people flocking to SharePoint 2007?
May 12, 2008
By flocking, I mean that “the vast majority of enterprises — 96% — are considering, planning on, in the process of, or have already completed deploying at least some part of Microsoft Office System server software. And most of those — 87% — plan to implement or upgrade to Microsoft Office System server software within the next 12 months” and that’s from Forrester (see the free Forrester research document titled “Topic Overview: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007”, by Kyle McNabb and Rob Koplowitz, dated April 24, 2008)!
It’s easy to see why SharePoint 2007 is such a strong contender in the enterprise collaboration space, when you realize that it combines messaging, social computing, real time collaboration and virtual team workspaces.
I am currently working on developing a plan and strategy for collaboration for a client and it’s all about leveraging the power of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (SharePoint 2007) to increase employee productivity and connect seamlessly to people, knowledge and data to help employees make better informed decisions so that they can serve their customers more effectively.
SharePoint 2007 provides blogs and wikis as site templates so that you can easily create those as needed. The People Finder can help you locate people based on different directory level attributes and the neat thing is you can find people based on skills or expertise that they have specified in their user profiles. People and group lists are readily accessible depending on user privileges and presence information is available as well. Real Time Presence and Communication is enabled wherever the real-time presence smart tag icon displays. In conjunction with Live Meeting 2007, Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007, this makes for a very powerful collaboration tool.
In the messaging space, the tight integration between Outlook 2007, Exchange 2007 and SharePoint 2007 allows you to take offline an entire library so you can work disconnected from the network. Also your SharePoint tasks can display right alongside your Outlook tasks. Alerts that you set up on your SharePoint site automatically send you email notifications. Discussion boards are email enabled so users can save their email as part of a threaded discussion. Also, lists and libraries can be email enabled so as to allow users to email a document directly into a library. There is an RSS viewer web part with which you can subscribe to an RSS feed. Furthermore, every list and library in SharePoint 2007 is RSS enabled, so you can subscribe to the contents of a list or library via RSS.
When it comes to virtual team workspaces, SharePoint 2007 provides several different site templates out of the box. Apart from this, Microsoft has released 40 site templates that cater to commonly used functionality such as vacation scheduling, contacts list management, etc. Furthermore, it is very easy to create a custom site template – once you configure your site to work just the way you want, you can easily save that as a site template so you can now reuse that as needed. These virtual team workspaces provide a repository for lists of items, libraries of documents, announcements, online calendars, surveys, task and issue lists, project tasks list with Gantt chart functionality, and task coordination using simple workflows. Lists and libraries can enforce security at the item level and they also provide versioning, explicit check in/check out, content approval before publishing, etc. These team workspaces can be also be secured at an individual or group level. SharePoint 2007 makes it possible to easily create no-code, declarative, sequential workflows based on business rules using the SharePoint Designer 2007 tool. Combine SharePoint 2007 with Groove 2007 for collaborating across organizational boundaries, whether connected or offline and now you have an even more compelling scenario of use.
So all in all, it makes sense that the adoption of SharePoint 2007 is so pervasive!
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