Interactive Agencies – Page 2

Sapient Erupts

Taking a short break from Enterprise 2.0 coverage, I had to acknowledge the news on Sapient today. I received a flash alert from Sapient’s investor team that, “SAPIENT NAMES ALAN HERRICK PRESIDENT AND CEO.” The bulletin went on to explain that co-founder Jerry Greenberg had resigned. Stuart Moore, the other co-founder is still a board member, but gave up his position as co-chairman in order to allow for an independent chairman (now, Jeffrey M. Cunningham). The company also named Joseph S. Tibbetts Jr. as the new CFO, replacing Susan Cooke who was interim CFO and who also resigned today.

Reading the press release, it appears Sapient is in hot water over options-dating, I suppose. Is this the 2.0 crime du jour? Why, everybody’s doing it! Not just Silicon Valley hotshots, but now a company like Sapient, that heretofore, I believed was basically infallible.

Sheesh. I’m not sure I’m more disappointed this happened or if I didn’t know anything about it because I’ve taken my eye off the IT Services ball. Some ITSinsider! Well, the good news is Dan Farber agreed to give me a ZDNet blog on IT Services, so I hope I will be catching up fast.

I put out a number of calls on this Sapient news, and haven’t heard back from anyone yet. I talked to Sapient, but the PR woman really couldn’t tell me anything more than was in the release. The news troubles me. I once wrote a column about what makes an IT Services firm successful, and Sapient gets high marks for all my criteria. I’m sure the company will weather the storm, but when founder CEOs leave, it generally doesn’t go well. My guess is we’ll see a merger/acquisition on the horizon.

Incidentally, Jerry Greenberg is a Jersey boy. He grew up in a small town here in South Jersey not too far (or too dissimilar) from the town I live in today. He made it to Harvard out of there majoring in Economics, he then worked at Cambridge Technology Partners, and started Sapient with Stuart Moore in 1991. Moore was a Computer Science grad out of UC Berkeley. In the day, Moore led one of the first client/server implementations on Wall Street and managed one of the largest installations of Sybase.

I admired Sapient for many things… including the choice of naming Susan Cooke as interim CFO. Imagine that? A woman who can talk numbers and face the investment community.

So, we’ll see what happens. For me, it’s the end of an era.

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.

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? 🙂

Sweet Virginia

Thank you for your wine, California
Thank you for your sweet and bitter fruits

Mick and Keith might not be there, but you will be among friends. The kickoff conference for Web 2.0 for Business is definitely Dion Hinchcliffe’s New New Internet conference here on the East Coast in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. He has assembled an A-list set of speakers in web 2.0 including Michael Arrington (TechCrunch). If you (customer or vendor) are on the East Coast. DO NOT miss this conference. A first-mover event; will make it into the history books.

Office 2.0 in SF: It’s the “IT” (the hip word, not Information Technology) conference for the Fall

Office 2.0 conference,
originally uploaded by srm_nj.

I’m experimenting with flickr. Here is the button for the Office 2.0 conference. What’s neat about this conference is the grassroots effort that is behind its organizing, collaborating, and showcasing.

Let’s see what happens when I hit “post entry…”

You say you want a revolution? We-e-ll, ya kno-ow…we all want to change the world…

I knew these worlds would collide (the Interactive Agency market and Enterprise 2.0). Shiv Singh at the Enterprise Solutions practice at Avenue A | Razorfish published this primer yesterday explaining Web 2.0 for the Enterprise. It’s a cultural tectonic plate shift taking place.

His summary spells out my argument:

Web 2.0 (its technology and values) is here to stay. The web is not about publishing content and making it available to employees, partners, and customers. That was Web 1.0. This time it’s about letting those customers, partners, and employees take control of the online experience.

I love the fact he paired technology and values. I would lead with values. Values are what drive revolutions; the techology is an enabler.