Monday, January 19, 2009

For Your Consideration: Planning for Enterprise 2.0 in 2009

1 comment :
Mike Gotta, an analyst at Burton Group published a good post on the Social Computing Magazine site that i recommend enterprises who want to take advantage of '2.0' check out. Gathered from his own client interactions on the topic, the article titled 'Planning Considerations for Enterprise 2.0 in 2009' outlines a couple key topics and areas that business and IT decision makers should be aware of.

Specific items that caught my interest:

Communities & Social Networks: Think "Adoption", Not "Deployment"
- Since early 2007 i have used the term 'Change Management 2.0' when addressing this subject. Buying/building a 'Web 2.0' tool and installing it within your existing infrastructure does not guarantee success-there are a lot of adoption items like for example social and generational issues in your Enterprise that one needs to be prepared in advance to address in order to be successful.

Social Platforms: Managing The Gap - Gotta's point is that organizations that have selected specific "tools to fill gaps in existing collaboration and content platforms" and are now faced with products that have "grown into mini-suites". This brings up issues of not only multiple technology implementations but of course issues around putting together a successful long term strategy around information management and findability.

Enterprise RSS": It's A Middleware Decision - The recent piece on ReadWriteWeb titled 'R.I.P. Enterprise RSS' specifically including all 70+ comments and all of Marshall Kirkpatrick's updates after the initial post (ah the beauty of the Blog platform!) is certainly a recent must read on the topic of Enterprise RSS. Gotta's points are relevant including his statement that although we use the term "RSS" we should be focusing on Atom because RSS is a dead-end and architecturally deficient. Regardless, one thing that also must be addressed is how to incorporate the features and use cases of using feed syndication into the common non-technical users mindframes in the Enterprise space.

Social Analytics: Redefining Business Intelligence- I think there are two sides (if not more!) of the analytics discussion. One is the value an organization can gain from actually doing it and the second how employees in the future will be 'rated' in some sort or other by their interactions and contributions to the company, their partners and their clients. Mostly everything in the Enterprise needs to be measured, especially if it is eating up operational capital- so Enterprise 2.0 tools are no different, it is just that we do not know what to measure or how. Peter Reiser's work at Sun Microsystems around 'Community Equity' is an interesting early look at how a large company is implementing and adopting analytics as part of their collaboration platforms.

Other highlights that i am always interested in that Gota includes; digital life and digital work convergence specifically around identity, standards for integration and interoperability (he highlights specifically Microformats) and record management specifically as a long term issue that might sound boring compared to all the other things he highlights but as we all know creating data in the enterprise has very different compliance issues then the consumer space.

Gotta also highlights some vendors to keep an eye on as well as open source alternatives that Enterprises should look into.

Image|Flickr|spike55151

1 comment :

Sten said...

Thanks for the article.

In every points you mentioned it seems that we are currently addressing this issue by the end. Companies are tempted to think about the tools first before their needs. And this is what leads to unused platforms or incapacity to leverage the community simply because the solution was implemented without thinking about the core business of the Enterprise.

A structured approach to this type of projects would be necessary to avoid the common issues that you mentioned.