It’s about that time again when bloggers and pundits start thinking about predictions for the New Year. I took a look at mine for 2009 and was pleased I was correct at least some of the time. One that is coming true, albeit a little later than I had hoped, is this one:
John Chambers is talking and walking the talk. BusinessWeek has a feature this week on “Cisco’s Extreme Ambitions.” The story details how Cisco is leveraging non-traditional methods to turbo-charge its growth and deliver strong margins to Wall Street. One of those innovative tactics is democratizing decision-making and using a variety of web-based tools to identify talent.
‘…John Chambers and Cisco’s entire leadership are focused on driving Cisco’s growth and business results.’ Chambers admits the council structure is unusual but argues it’s the only way a company Cisco’s size can move as fast as it needs to. He says the councils work and help identify talent throughout the company.
Cisco is taking on a lot of risk and reinventing the company from the ground up driven by the principles of 2.0 transformation. Chambers said in his address at Cisco Live, “Organizational structures enabled by the network as a platform can change the speed and dynamics of a company.”
This is what we talk about when we’re talking about transformational change and the reinvention of work. The end game is market competitiveness. BusinessWeek sums it up:
In a sense, Chambers is bidding for a place in the history books. He’s trying to use the ambitious expansion and unconventional management strategy to demonstrate how a company the size of Cisco can remain fast-growing and nimble. If he succeeds, he may end up regarded as a business icon, along the lines of General Electric’s Jack Welch.
Well, well, well. Didn’t I relish that gushing endorsement of social computing last week by Marc Benioff? Yes. I did. As the conversation took off on Twitter, what was game-changing-significant was that a tech celeb– known very well in Enterprise circles, as well as the financial community– threw his Enterprise SaaS hat in the ring and announced the company’s, “Biggest breakthrough ever: Salesforce Chatter.” Of course, Salesforce Chatter is the company’s answer to social computing.
Sometimes it takes a celebrity to help a new technology cross the chasm. But more often than not, however, the most influential catalyst is market acceptance. So, whilst I welcome the newfound attention and consciousness-raising for 2.0 adoption in business, I’m eager to start publishing some of the factual data that supports the hype is not without merit.
The 2.0 Adoption Council is now unveiling some of the research we’ve been collecting on our members. The first synopsis report should be ready this week, available for download. The survey reflects responses from over 70 of our members spanning over 17 industries, managing over $50M in budgets expressly dedicated to Enterprise 2.0 initiatives.
Here are some quick data points that are proving interesting:
In addition to our survey research, The Council has also released its first “how-to” report, “A Framework for 2.0 Adoption in the Enterprise.” This report was written by Gil Yehuda after interviewing members who described a narrative on how rolling out an initiative worked at their large enterprise. The paper tracks neatly through a logical iterative sequence and “Director’s Commentary” on how to successfully introduce 2.0 technology and practices to a diverse employee base.
The market survey results should be ready this week for download free (courtesy of OpenText who sponsored the study), but the “Framework” report is available now for $425 in our store.
More good news coming from the Council includes the announcements of some strategic relationships, as well as a new web site currently in production.
Bigger, busier and more “social” than ever, the Enterprise 2.0 Conference San Francisco is abuzz with conversation on how to participate in the market’s riches.
Lots of new products/services have been announced here, and the sessions have been packed– some standing room only or attendees taking seats on the floor.
Andrew McAfee, the father of e20, launched his book here. You can see him in this photo (bottom left) signing books issued by the publisher.
We have approximately a dozen members here from The 2.0 Adoption Council. As always, it’s great to participate virtually, but the face to face meetings and memory-making events are irreplaceable.
We were extremely proud to announce our “Internal Evangelist of the Year 2009” yesterday. The winner of this year’s award is Claire Flanagan, Senior Manager KM and Enterprise Social Software Strategy, CSC. Claire received accolades from her executive leadership, as well as Jive software whose platform CSC is building out to its nearly 100K employees. The final nominees for this award also included Megan Murray, Booz Allen Hamilton and Greg Lowe, Alcatel-Lucent.
Today, Council members will participate in a morning keynote session addressing the highly charged question, “Is Enterprise 2.0 a Crock?” And once again, Ross Mayfield and I will be facilitating a few unconference sessions this afternoon starting at 3:15pm. If you have a burning issue you want to address with peers, this is your opportunity to share informally with conference attendees and get some personalized answers.
The 2.0 Adoption Council has begun work on a new initiative – an Adoption Index that will measure the adoption of 2.0 technologies within large enterprises. We’ll be announcing the results of our member survey at the Enterprise 2.0 conference next week, and we want to get all the friends and fans (and Twitter lists) involved. The bigger the crowd– the smarter we all are. We’d like to engage the entire community in predicting E2.0 adoption trends We’re partnering with Crowdcast to launch a prediction market that will tie in to our next survey, which will be conducted in June 2010.
As an Enterprise 2.0 fan, you’ll have the opportunity to make bets about what you think will happen with hot topics such as “What percent of budgets will be allocated to ongoing community management?” and “What percent of organizations will report using mash-ups inside the firewall?” You’ll also be able to see what others think. We’ll be giving out prizes for the most accurate bets, so if you’re ready to put your (virtual) money where your mouth is, you can request an exclusive invitation to participate here.
Why get involved? This prediction market, the first of its kind, will allow us to harness the wisdom of a broad group of experts – (that’s you!) – to develop forecasts of Enterprise 2.0 trends. This will be an excellent complement to our 2.0 Adoption Council state-of-the-market survey, which will provide regular snapshots of the current state of adoption. Not only will you know the current state of adoption, but you’ll also have insight into where things are heading.
The market will officially launch next Wednesday, November 4 at 3:00 pm, right after the 2.0 Adoption Council research presentation, “Straight from the Horses’ Mouth” by Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen at 2:40, when the results of the first Adoption Council survey will be announced. Request an invitation today here.
You know that feeling when you have to take a random trip to the mall and when you get there, the entire mall and every retail establishment has been magically transformed for the holiday shopping season? Wow. It’s not even close to Thanksgiving, you think… But sure enough, you find yourself a little excited, a little sentimental, a little anxious about the fact that the holidays are upon us. It’s an emotional, a psychological reaction that launches a number of triggers that will ultimately lead to the consumer behavior the retailers are banking on.
That’s how I felt the first day at SAP Tech Ed, SAP’s annual education extravaganza. I had never been to an SAP Tech Ed before, and wasn’t sure what to expect. In the first twenty minutes after I arrived at the newly renovated, cavernous Phoenix Convention Center, I started hearing the words collaboration, transparency, and social. And it wasn’t from the blogger’s corner, I was hearing these words from SAP executives and customers. The event was suddenly, surprisingly relevant to me in a way that I did not anticipate, nor that I was prepared for. It was magical.
And similar to my experience visiting the mall and being greeted by a re-themed holiday shopping bonanza, the event launched a numbers of triggers for me. The first trigger was excitement. SAP gets it! I beamed to myself. For so long, it appeared SAP corporate was just not interested in the Enterprise 2.0 agenda. As recently as last SAPPHIRE (April), SAP’s massive annual customer and partner event, I was grousing about the fact that 2.0 was all but completely absent on the agenda or the trade show floor.
The second trigger was anxiety. At the same time as SAP TechEd, Oracle was holding its famed Oracle OpenWorld. Keeping a CPA eye on the tweet stream, it occurred to me that Oracle was “getting it” too. As I write this, Microsoft is amassing its fan-adulating entourage in Las Vegas where it will announce the long-awaited SharePoint 2010 which has been predicted to be the e20 startup killer. And, lastly IBM got this a long time ago which completes the MISO (Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Oracle) four horsemen of the 2.0 apocalypse. The combined market strength of the enterprise vendors to persuade and advance their particular offering signals an unmistakable step change in the heretofore teensy Enterprise 2.0 sector evolution. The big boys are moving in with their big marketing budgets and massive sales organizations. Not to be discounted either is Google whom unless you’ve been trapped floating above the earth in a homemade helium balloon, or hiding in an attic closet, you know has recently launched Google Wave: its impressive collaborative, real-time sharing platform. The other one I suppose I shouldn’t leave out is Cisco who’ve been re-tooling their go-to-market messaging around a fluid collaboration theme for months now.
Why does this tacit endorsement of e20 by the large enterprise vendors prompt my anxiety? Because I’m concerned they’ll dominate the discussion; maybe suppress innovation, dilute the passion that has historically fueled interest in e20. It’s hard to predict what the effects of mainstream promotion will be for e20, but one thing is for sure, e20 is about to bust out of the echo-chamber.
I started this post on the plane ride home from SAP’s TechEd (USA) two weeks ago now. Yesterday I was pre-briefed on Jive’s new announcements coming with its SBS 4.0 platform. Whatever real anxiety I felt about the big boys moving into the space has now been dissipated.
It takes a startup like Jive to inject innovation, creativity, passion, and excitement to this sector. Jive is releasing a ground-breaking set of features that will set a new high bar for excellence in the category. I’m certain the tech bloggers will cover the announcements in depth, but in brief, Jive is announcing an iPhone app (plus an email-driven enriched BlackBerry experience), very slick MS Office integration, and a bridging capability that will unite internal and external communities. All this in addition to the series of announcements Jive made previously that include social media monitoring and a SharePoint connector.
What’s significant about the Jive announcements is the company’s commitment to releasing timely, innovative new capabilities in response to customer feedback and requests. I’m here at JiveWorld, the company’s first customer event. From the energy circulating in the crowd here, it’s obvious to me Jive is customer-driven and loyalty from Jive’s customers handily delivers repeat revenue as well as product improvements.
Jive’s ability to manage the books, pay careful attention to its user base, invest in educating its partners and employees, rationally identify its target market, as well as manage its growth effectively squarely positions the company uniquely from other startup competitors in the space. Further, it accentuates the advantage startups have over the large enterprise vendors where releases are timed in years, not months.
So, as the e20 market twists and turns to accommodate innovation, advancement, and welcome step changes in attitude and strategic direction, one thing is guaranteed—all of this progress benefits customers. Customers have a hard enough time getting this job done, so thank goodness, vendors like Jive are making it easy to accelerate adoption and experimentation with 2.0 tools and philosophies.
