Impressions of Enterprise 2.0 in Boston

Boston at five in the morning before I had to take off on Friday.

This past week, I was on a panel at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston with Bob Bickel of Ringside Networks and Jeff Whatcott of Acquia, the commercializer of Drupal. The topic was open source options for delivering an Enterprise 2.0 Experience. Both Bob and Jeff are excellent speakers and bring a wealth of experience behind new companies. I think that Kathleen Reidy at the 451 Group did a very good job of covering the panel, so I will move on to my impressions of the conference.

On the panel, we spent much more time talking about open source and less about Enterprise 2.0. However, this doesn't mean that there was a lot of clarity on the meaning of the term Enterprise 2.0 at the conference. Although Web 2.0 had no less than Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle to define what that term means (barely), Enterprise 2.0 has no such authority. Consensus says that it is just Web 2.0 for the enterprise. However, researching the concept a couple of years ago, E2.0 is about taking the social aspects of Web 2.0, collaboration, social networks, user contribution, wisdom of crowds and social tagging and voting and applying it to information, documents and content in the enterprise. There are no fixed patterns for how to do this, although popular Web 2.0 sites, such as Facebook, Google Maps, Digg, YouTube and Wikipedia, provide at least paradigms for how these can be accomplished in the enterprise. It is very difficult to describe Enterprise 2.0 without drawing analogies to these web properties.

On Wikipedia, the topic "Enterprise 2.0" redirects to Enterprise Social Software. In August 2007, a "Ruud Koot" permanently redirected it from Enterprise 2.0.  The last direct version of an Enterprise 2.0 article in Wikipedia extolls an Alan Wurms as the person who apparently coined the term in 2001. That is the power of Wikipedia, it can get rid of the rubbish. Most people's problem with the term is that it does not describe what it does and it sounds like it is just riding on the tailcoat of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Is this really a new version of the Enterprise? I sat in a session with Carl Frappaolo where he equated Enterprise 2.0 with the evolution of Knowledge Management, but made the point that enterprises have not fundamentally changed as a result.

Some people believe that Enterprise 2.0, like Web 2.0, must be delivered as a whole hosted platform on the internet in order to be Enterprise 2.0. For some people this is absolutely true, but a majority still look to keep this information under enterprise control for bandwidth and security reasons. The majority of vendors in the exhibit area provided Software as a Service solutions. Most likely they used open source in creating those solutions.

I apparently missed the highlight of the show, which actually occurred on Monday before the opening. This was a shoot out between Microsoft SharePoint and IBM's counter to SharePoint, Connections. As an IBM product manager at the IBM booth said, "We don't fuck up demos." Everyone seemed to agree with him. Poor Lawrence Liu of Microsoft was not so lucky. The Microsoft demo did not have the business process coherence in which IBM is very well versed. There was a lot of hand-waving about how various Enterprise 2.0 features were supplied by partners. The performance issues that Lawrence faced may very well be related to the terrible internet connectivity provided by the Westin Hotel. Imagine an Enterprise 2.0 conference where no one is connected. Both companies are talking more about Social Software, Social Computing and Social Networking more than Enterprise 2.0, so my feeling is that this emerging market will be named more along those lines rather than E2.0.

Peter Fields of Wachovia

There were three customer presentations on their usage of Enterprise 2.0 and these present probably the best understanding of what these collections of technologies are, what they are trying to accomplish and what market is forming as a result. Despite the fact that he was using Microsoft SharePoint, I really liked the presentation from Peter Fields of Wachovia. Peter seems to think about the business problems and technology solutions the way I do. (Or probably the other way around.) He described the need to empower employees as a way of tapping into the intuitive sense of employees and he is the only other person I have ever seen that has uses Myers-Briggs to describe this paradigm shift. In a session just before, I got shot down in flames for daring to suggest that the change in enterprise software is the result of shifting demographics and a new, incoming generation of worker - the Millennials. Here Peter was backing it up with data that suggests that in less that five years, this generation will move from 25% of the working population of the US to 41% of the working population. He discussed an imperative that I had not really considered as well, which is that the baby boomers are retiring and this will represent the single largest loss of implicit knowledge in industrial society. Enterprises MUST facilitate capturing what the baby boomers know now and lower the barriers dramatically toward capturing that information.

Simon Revell from Pfizer

Peter is roughly my age, but Simon Revell from Pfizer, who looks a lot younger, presented a view of what the new generation wants - seemingly both Generation X and Generation Y. Pfizer has created a couple of sets of slides describing life in a networked world. Pfizer does use the 2.0 word and even describes a "Doctor 2.0" as a female researcher who also seems to spend a lot of time on Facebook. But rather than trivializing what that means, Simon presented a set of tools that Pfizer is using (open source by the way) that allow researchers to collaborate. Pfizerpedia is a mediawiki implementation modeled on Wikipedia and used as a single instance. Its primary purpose is to capture best practice in an informal way, which Pfizer codifies and controls after the process is discovered or developed. The result is actually a knowledge base of information that can be used for many other purposes. My sense has been that wikis that are single, highly interconnected instances rather than many team or project wikis. Bob talks about one wiki, Peter is hoping for 10,000 wikis. My take is that we need two words for what is now described as a wiki.

I wish I could have seen more the conference, although many of the break out sessions didn't add a lot. The subject of wikis and blogs have been covered better at Web 2.0 conferences. Some of the sessions on community didn't really say anything at all. Neither did a session by Mark Woollen from Oracle CRM. Mark is a good speaker and there was some good content at the end. Too bad that the beginning didn't say much except that social networking will probably be important in the future.

The direction that Oracle's Mark Woollen's presentation took

Enterprise 2.0 is not just about wikis, blogs and forums. These do not make communities. A whole bunch of the vendors in exhibit area are likely to be gone in a couple of years if not sooner. Open source, although played down in this conference, will likely be one, if not the, major driver of this new market. Companies are actually using this and it is those that hope to attract and retain not just a younger generation of employee, but also customer. The smart ones are also recognizing that they need this stuff to make sure that critical knowledge is not retired when their baby boomer employees have.

Comments

[Walter Adamson]

John, thanks for the heads-up and the pointer to Pfizer. I commented over at Conry-Murray's blog post on InformationWeek where he wrote in response to your post. I thought that I'd include it here as you may have some thoughts.

"I think that Corinthia is spot-on, with some great insights. I wrote, 20 years ago, about that paradox of users not thinking seriously about what they want until you present them with what you've understood that they asked for - and that's not going to change unless we have instant tools.

But moving to Web2 and information-sharing and capturing knowledge - it has to be generative, that is pulled from the shop floor. That requires a focus on collaboration (not collection) a focus on sociability and then the all important encouragement of use. Without that pull from the floor it won't work.

I've just finished an assignment from the CEO of a 5,000 person engineering enterprise who has previously encouraged and rewarded his staff on being operationally and functionally lean, mean, and independent. Now he realises that (a) to go to the next level of his business strategy he needs information sharing as a part of that plan, and (b) 40% of his workforce will retire in the next 10 years.

It's not about wikis (in general) as they are more information collection and sharing is not as social and generative as it needs to be. You also have to bear in mind that unlike us, a large percentage of the workforce in industry don't have logins nor accounts to access this information - so how do you get them to share when they don't even have company emails?

The nub of the issue is leadership, culture and people. I'm not a fan of "knowledge management" its another head office consulting dream and remote from the shop floor. I'm also no longer a fan of the "structured approach" of first defining business processes etc because the time, effort, complications, management etc of such is just a big effort for now reward on the shop floor, and just too hard. The costs are not even remotely rewarded by anything sustainable and useful.

The answer is in the hygiene factors of the right infrastructure and tools, and then all the right human and social factors.

Past efforts have failed the value test, but new technologies and leadership attitudes can be successful, I believe."

Walter Adamson
http://www.digitalinvestor.com.au
Melbourne, Australia

[fornetti]

I do not believe this

[Blovius Maximus]

John. You must be a real dick to work for.

If the Oracle guy gives a presentation you don't like, then maybe you should just shutup. Luckily the web is a big place --- certainly big enough to fit in small individuals like you. I doubt if the Oracle presentation was as bad as you snobbishly infer. Anyway, I'll be at some conference eventually with great anticipation to see how one of your presentations go.

[John Newton]

Dan -

I know what you mean about "social", but Microsoft and IBM are heading in this direction and appear to be pulling this out of the soft category and into real, hard business benefits. The shoot out definitely had the Social slant to it. In addition, marketing material seems oriented toward Social.

[John Newton]

Thanks for the clarification Carl.

[Dan Keldsen]

John - great catching up with you in Boston. Sounds like you had fun, eh?

Great summary - I like the color commentary. We should have you in a live streaming commenting booth for events like these - contrast with Stowe Boyd for a bit of controversy AND synchronicity.

Interesting that you believe the term for this market is likely to go in the Social (whatever) direction. Seems to soft/fuzzy to me for "serious organizations" to market with, let alone buy, but as long as they begin to understand and adopt it, they can call it whatever they like.

Sidenote (and plug): It may not be perfect (and we plan to continually refine it), but we did take a stab at (re-)defining Enterprise 2.0 in Q1 2008 in our Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0. 441 respondents weighing in what THEY felt E2.0 represented, who was doing it, who wasn't, whether age makes a difference, etc.. Free download at www.aiim.org/enterprise20 - for those who haven't yet read it.

[Carl Frappaolo]

John:

Thanks for the mention of my session at the Enterprise 2.0 event. With your indulgence, I wanted to qualify the point I made - I believe that Km and Enterprise 2.0 can bring change to organizations, but that neither fundamentally changes the basics of business. I am often aggravated when I read industry analysts and pundits in an attempt to draw attention make statements like "Enterprise 2.0 will fundamentally change the way you do business." Hogwash. Bring change - sure. Fundamental change - not likely. These are tools that facilitate collaboration - not groundbreaking business practices that will redefine the premise of the business model as we know it.

Don't get me wrong - that is still some powerful stuff.