Enterprise 2.0 – Page 29

Office 2.0: War Room, Revolution Central

A woman I admire, Olga Grkavac, at the Information Association of America (ITAA) recently got back to me on an email inquiry. I had asked Olga what, if anything, the ITAA member companies were thinking about Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 for their businesses. In an email response, she basically said, “Not much, but I’m still checking.” (I’m paraphrasing). I remember being at an ITAA conference with Olga in 1998 or ’99. We were standing on a beautiful outside deck at a cocktail party at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. The Colorado Rockies loomed hazily in the distance. I gestured toward them and said to her, “Olga, the Internet is like those mountains. It’s a giant phenomenon that’s going to hit the IT industry by surprise. Some people can’t see it, but it’s coming.” She looked at me quizzically, but I was going for a Hollywood impression, and I think I got it. I reminded her of that discussion this week in my return email. I told her, “I’m writing you from a conference on Office 2.0. The conference is sold out with standing room only in the popular sessions. There are over 45 companies exhibiting here. A lot of these firms (most actually) are startups. My point is the federal and commercial groups not only should but must start looking at this phenomenon. The Internet has finally grown up and is going to work!”

Office 2.0 was one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended in my 20+ years experience in the high tech industry. Why? Because there was a special magic in the air that we were all on the ground floor of something BIG. Even the skeptics who made for some interesting panel discord, couldn’t deny there was something going on here that was worth sticking around for. For the record, I am an unabashed believer. I asked Rafe Needleman who sat next to me, “Rafe, are we in another bubble?” Thoughts of losing my income, my house, my car, and my stock portfolio like in the last bubble were haunting me like the ghost of Christmas past. Rafe said, “Yes,” but reassured me that the market was more mature. Rafe Needleman is an insightful guy who reviews new technology. I felt good he wasn’t fearful of the road ahead. We agreed we’d live another day to write about it, if we were headed for another implosion.

At the same time we were in San Francisco, I got an email from a friend who said there were over 6,000 people at the Gartner IT Expo that was on this week in Orlando. I was surprised to hear that even Gartner analysts were talking about Enterprise 2.0. and that it was a hot topic at the show. This encouraged me. Most of the dissension and disagreement was related to whether or not IT is the enemy or not. More on that for another post. In short, I’m starting to weigh in on the side of the neo-Enterprise 2.0ers who believe we can find some common ground. IT will embrace Enterprise 2.0 the same way they have accepted Salesforce.com; it’s just a matter of time.

With 56 vendors exhibiting, and my obligation to my client, Itensil, I didn’t have enough time to see every product. This was probably my biggest disappointment, but I’m the one to blame. The most impressive, hands-down, company I spoke to was Atlassian. The reason was not for the imaginative nature of the product, but because of the company’s fast-track success. I will post separately on Atlassian, as I spent a lot of time getting a demo and brief from co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes. Other products that impressed me included Approver, FreshBooks, Koral, SiteKreator, Vyew, Wufoo, and ZoHo.

Major Props to Ismael Ghalimi for conceiving and delivering a first-class conference!

Office 2.0: Don’t miss the podcast

I’m here at Office 2.0. It’s a terrific conference. I’d say the enthusiasm is outweighing the skepticism so far, but the day is not over.

In the meantime, Anne Zelenka has taken up the initiative to create a podcast for the conference. Be sure to tune in:

“The Office 2.0 Podcast Jam launched Monday with podcasts on the Office 2.0 revolution, technology usage in Afghanistan, and 2.0-style enterprise content management. This experimental project provides a virtual alternative to the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Check in today for a discussion of Office and Web 2.0 in higher education, a proposal for an IT 2.0 toolkit, and coverage of the unified communications landscape underlying next-generation web technology.”

Visit the website at www.office20podcasts.com

Web 2.0 and the Youth Culture

Thanks to the creative talents of Rod Boothby, the Enterprise Irregulars have a new logo image. The Irregulars are an incredibly smart and experienced collaborative team who group together on the web to try and solve the mysteries of the future of Enterprise Software in the Next Net world.

I’m going to post here a point I made to the Irregulars a few weeks ago. I received excellent comments on it, and would like to solicit more feedback, if possible.

Talking ’bout Y-Generation
Web 2.0 is not all about us, sorry. I have no hard statistics on this,
but I’m thinking that many of the developers that are building it are a
generation behind us. Adoption is coming in the enterprise because the
next-generation office-worker is psychographically predisposed to it.
It’s what Jerry Bowles refers to as the “MeMedia” generation, not sure
if that’s original from him. We need to keep this in mind when we’re
thinking about defining the sector.

In other words, it’s the ‘tude, man. My kids would be rolling their
eyes if they saw me trying to type cool. Yet I feel compelled to put
this on the table. We can argue the enterprise software
deletion/inclusion debate like the EU trying to establish its European
Constitution for months, maybe years… but there is an entire
generation of nextgen hotshots building applications that will find
their way into the enterprise. Will we be ready?

Take a look at this presentation from Molecular*, a consulting firm part
of the Isobar network of Interactive Agencies. Isobar with its massive
reach, has G2000 customers. They are raising awareness and generating
excitement on a global scale.

*Sorry, the presentation is not widely available. You can contact Molecular directly to get a copy of this 100-slide deck.

Revolutionary holdout… Maybe Bowie not Lennon. Definitely not Lenin.

What time is it when a consultant blogs? Time to turn and face the strain.

I heard Andrew McAfee say recently that he doesn’t think we’re involved in a revolution; that it’s more of a transformation. Sigh. I need to go on the record saying I respectfully disagree. He said revolutions are generally short and violent. (I’m paraphrasing.) To try and make my argument, I did what I normally do in these situations, I researched “revolution” on Wikipedia. I won’t argue the violent observation, but the short I will. Take the American Revolution, for instance. It lasted 9 years from 1774-1783. More importantly, it was a war for independence and overthrowing existing societal and governmental order. Am I the only one seeing the similarities here? Am I wrong, perhaps?

From Wikipedia:
1774–1783: the American Revolution establishes independence of the thirteen North American colonies from Great Britain, creating the republic of the United States of America. A war of independence in that it created one nation from another, it was also a revolution in that it overthrew an existing societal and governmental order: the Colonial government in the Colonies.

In fairness, I caught the revolutionary bug from Joe Kraus whom I interviewed for an article on the disintermediation of high-priced consultants due to SaaS applications in the enterprise.

JotSpot CEO, Joe Kraus admits, “JotSpot is trying to enable a Do-It-Yourself revolution. When you give people the ability to do something that previously only experts could do, I think very interesting things happen.” Kraus doesn’t think the impact will be overnight, however. He believes the adoption of the new technologies will take about five years. “I think we generally tend to over-estimate the impact of technologies in the short term and radically under-estimate them in the long-term. There’s a lot of racket and fear that this is going to displace traditional consulting, and my answer would be, in the short term, I don’t think so, but in the long term, I think there’s more risk.”

Yes, we’re transforming the enterprise with new alternatives, but there is an undercurrent of shall-I-say… Raging against the Machine… that is driving the move to self-help applications. I’ve been harping on the socio-cultural underpinnings on the “movement” and the freedom of choice that web 2.0 applications provide to users for months now. For whatever their reason (I hate Outlook, Excel, SAP, Oracle, fillintheblank for xxx reason), users are turned off by the establishment’s choices and are psychologically primed to look at alternatives. That smacks of revolution– not transformation.

Along these lines, before the rumors broke about Google and YouTube, I had wanted to publish some commentary from my old friend, Richard Holway. I’ve never known an analyst to be as prescient as Richard. Here’s what Richard (who publishes for the UK market) had to say about the ch-ch-changes taking place in today’s enterprise and for today’s enterprise suppliers.

McAfee is an incredibly bright guy. I’m ashamed to admit I disagree with him, but for ITSinsiders who’ve known me over the years, I have a hard time not stating my opinion. And, also for the record: Lord knows, I’ve been wrong before. But if I’m right, I feel we’re missing something more deeply philosophical in our discussions of Enterprise 2.0. It frames how truly remarkable this wave of “next net” is. I heard a lot of this talk during web 1.0 from digital evangelists who were inspired to subvert the prevailing paradigm. Today, we have the tools and the passion. The sad truth is, we won’t see the results until widespread user adoption takes root. This is something I’m sure McAfee and I can agree on.

Are We Eating Our Dead? Again?

During web 1.0, I was a skeptic and pretty vocal about it. Before my research was finished, I presented in Atlanta (12/99) when market caps were high for the digital apostles I was tracking. Most of the presentation was tongue and cheek, but is somewhat prescient looking at it today. I wrote this column for Phil Wainewright’s aspnews.com site which was also published as an op-ed in Computerworld for the user community. When the back-breaking, risky 300-page market research report on what I called the “e-services” market was published in April 2000, I joined one of these start-ups myself. You see, through the course of doing the research, I became a believer too. I fell in love with the first Internet revolution and its massive societal-changing promise. Of course, like most companies in that first run up, the start-up crashed. I felt like I, in particular, should have known better than to have fallen for such an idealistic infatuation.

I read with interest Michelle Manafy’s editorial in eContent. This is the second time I’ve heard the Soylent Green, “It’s made of people!” reference in the web 2.0 crowd. This time it gets attributed to Ross Mayfield. I know when I have said, “It’s the people, stupid.” I’m not talking about cannibalism and annihilation; I’m talking about liberation. I’m not talking about overpopulation; I’m talking about a billion Internet users– sharing and doing. Interestingly enough, the tagline for our 2000 start-up was a question– “what happens when everyone’s connected to everything?” Less death. More rebirth.

So, maybe we should start considering a different indie flick? or maybe something more mainstream, if the mission is to turn perception positive on Enterprise 2.0, eh? Manafy’s a great writer and her community is extremely important to the new office generation. For instance, I just received the best presentation (a 100-slide deck) I’ve ever seen on web 2.0 yesterday. It didn’t come from Dion Hinchcliffe; it wasn’t something I found on techcrunch or wasn’t even something I could have gotten my hands on privately as an Enterprise Irregular. It came to me from Molecular, a consulting firm part of the Isobar network of Interactive Agencies. And oh, the reason I was reading Manafy is because Shiv Singh (Avenue A|Razorfish) referred to it in his blog.

Manafy writes:

Web 2.0 inside the firewall isn’t all work and no play, though. Singh has suggested to clients that there are fun ways to use the interactive processes for “prediction markets,” which harness group intelligence. For example, if a company has six ad campaigns under consideration, they can create a space where employees can “trade shares” on the ideas. “Then execs can see the activity that happens around an idea,” he says.

While Web 2.0 may or may not live up to its press, nobody can scoff at the ability of its underlying technologies to enable some of the Internet’s founding principles. As Singh says, “Collectivism is very big.”

Referencing the slide above… Now, one film we might consider could be Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The “throw out your dead” scene, in particular, is working for me. I was chatting with Cognizant’s Malcolm Frank Friday who is not dead (“Yes you are! No I’m not!”), and he was telling me that, in fact, Bob Gett, Gordon Brooks, and few others from web 1.0 are back in the Internet or IT services game. Of course, Jerry Greenberg has found Internet religion again. So maybe the Holy Grail is attainable in web 2.0. I’m not skeptical this time ’round. And it’s really early.

Incidentally, for all ITSinsiders who haven’t heard yet. the weirdest development for those with long memories, is last week’s announcement that Jim Sims was named to EDS’ board of directors. Can someone send that cart to Dallas? 🙂

Ancient Geek

I’m an ancient geek and not ashamed. I was the only girl (I’m pretty sure, anyway) in my high school to take the first computer programming class there in the 70s. We learned FORTRAN IV on card decks the instructor had to run over to a mainframe somewhere in batch mode. When our green printouts came back, we had to make changes, and he would run over again… I loved it. When I went to college, I had to learned COBOL. Ugh. I hated COBOL. My Advanced COBOL textbook was written by Ed Yourdon. I will never forget it: Learning to Program in Structured COBOL. As a matter of fact, my 4.0 in Computer Science got me a job offer at Bell Labs. If I had accepted the offer, I might have been a rocket scientist by now.

Recently, when I saw Ed Yourdon’s name in the blogswarm on Enterprise 2.0, I was curious. So, I checked it out. Yourdon has taken the trouble to build a mind-map that explains web 2.0: its societal and technological implications. He’s interviewing web 2.0 companies.

Ed Yourdon is my new hero. I forgive him for Structured COBOL. His blog says he’ll be at the New New Internet conference. I’m hoping to shake his hand. I hope blogger Mike Stevens (and his readers) will come who is of the opinion that Enterprise 2.0 is a vaporware category. I don’t blame Mike for thinking this, as I have a bit of advertising background myself. Enterprise 2.0 is an emerging market, not really a category yet. Companies and knowlege workers are getting interested in it, investors are putting money into it, and products are being developed for it every day.

Yes, it’s true. I spend my time helping companies with marketing strategy now, and I can’t even figure out how to make my blog work properly. Nonetheless, at heart and by DNA, I’m a geek. Not a hype merchant. Not a card-carrying marketeer. You’ll know it’s true when I meet Ed Yourdon and blush.