Web 2.0 – Page 7 – ITSinsider

Big Animal Pictures

Back in the stone ages, I had the good fortune to work on Madison Avenue before the digital age had arrived. One campaign I was working on was IBM’s launch of its long-awaited mid-range series, the AS400. We grappled with the positioning of the product and did focus group testing across the country. When it was time to launch the product, the creative team pitched using the team from M*A*S*H, including Alan Alda to promote basic positioning of the product which was simple: the AS400 will help your small business grow. Why am I risking humiliation revealing my age by telling you this? The account team was headed by a guy that often used the turn of phrase, “big animal pictures” to describe how we had to have a very simple visual impression to tell our story. I can’t reveal to you what IBM spent on their launch of the AS400 with our Madison Avenue agency, but even after 20 years– it’s a lot. Similarly, during web 1.0, we saw hundreds of millions dollars spent on advertising to create awareness, induce trial for Internet companies. Add to that the giddy Wall Street headlines and until it all went south, there was a baseline understanding of what it was all about and what the benefits of doing business on the Internet were.

We are lacking Big Animal Pictures to bring the message home for Enterprise 2.0 today. In web 2.0– we have the blogosphere and maybe YouTube. The problem with the blogosphere is, well, we get it. The budgets and the markets aren’t the same as they were in 1.0 and in the enterprise space, until the large enterprise vendors get serious about enterprise 2.0, we’re not going to see widespread education and awareness building for the masses. In the meantime, we will get to appreciate the terrific work done by what I’m starting to dub “Pirates of the Collaborian” like this guy, Scott Gavin, with his truly awesome “Big Animal Picture” slide show: Meet Charlie. (Please send Charlie to everyone you know in the hopes it will be picked up on a major media outlet.)

It is interesting, however, because just as enterprise 2.0 must grow virally throughout the enterprise as an emergent, collaborative alternative, it is following the same pattern of adoption in the broader context. Exposure and education is still the gateway.

Enterprise 2.0: what’s in and what’s out?

I found myself surprised that Euan Semple is a Facebook user. I asked him about it, and he says it’s not just for kids, “There are loads of my friends in Facebook and it is good at helping us be social.” he replied. And like a select few of the bloggers I follow, I have not succumbed to the Twitter addiction, but find myself a little jealous that Stowe Boyd is now a friend of John Edwards and Barack Obama if only for a few random minutes at a time.

Social media knocked me over again last week reading the reports from my fellow Enterprise Irregulars who were blogging at Sapphire– SAP’s flagship conference for its friends and fans. This screen shot of SAP’s Harmony, an internal MySpace/Linked-in of sorts, got forwarded immediately to our head of HR. We’ve been using Ning for our internal communications– which we are really having a lot of fun with, but seeing this, I realized how much more fun we could have if we customized Ning for our company– and then for our customers.

Harmony screen courtesy Craig Cmehil

What really caught my eye last week was Stephen Danelutti’s initial attempt at drawing up a framework for enterprise 2.0. I comb the web daily for enterprise 2.0 posts and news, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone take a stab at defining what is including specifically in the definition. For instance, we probably all agree that McAfee’s SLATES is included (Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extentions, and Signals). This would include all blog, wiki, and search technology. McAfee talks a lot about predictive markets too, though. I would add mash-ups, most SaaS apps, and anything AJAX-built, no? I don’t have Dion Hinchcliffe’s gift for drawing diagrams, but I’d love to hear some input on this.

Mashup Fantasies con’t.

Relocation is a bear. My lastest mashup desire comes in the way of a simple consumer interest to buy a nice house in a good school district. So, the mashup becomes “Available real estate” + “Good schools.”

What do these two images below have in common?

Austin Schools

Austin listings

Yep, Google Maps. Now, I’m no programmer and API means “Associated Press International” to me, so the likelihood of me figuring out how to get at the data and display it easily approaches zero. Nonetheless, it can be done, yes?

My simple mashup fantasy is similar to what Dion Hinchcliffe is writing about lately. Clearly, I am living proof of his call for ease of use as a “key issue for successful mashup creation tools.”

Ease of use: Being usable by virtually anyone with any skill level using any browser in any language without any training will be essential for mashup tools to succeed with the general public.

So what’s a simple-minded home-buyer to do? Call a local realtor?

Maybe, but not yet. I emailed contacts at IBM (QEDwiki) and Teqlo over the weekend and asked if they could figure it out. The good news is they both said yes, but not just yet. It occurred to me what a tremendous market opportunity these mashups would be for the data sources of this information. Take GreatSchools.net, for instance, a site I refer to often. There is an enormous amount of public and user-generated information on that site for anyone interested in researching schools and school districts. This simple mashup would drive a tremendous amount of traffic to their site. You can see how the network effects from this simple application would create value for the site’s users; thereby increasing its value in the market.

In addition to the market expansion benefits for the content sources, the benefits to users are limitless. It’s a simple matter of knowing what you want.

It’s like Dion is saying here:

But what is clear is the vision, ingenuity, and widespread interest and potential benefit that really good DIY Web tools could bring to literally hundreds of millions of users around the world.

User Adoption Chronicles

Thank you Dennis Howlett for alerting the Irregulars to this story coming out of the U.K. The sentiment jibes with what I’ve been seeing lately about hurdles in user adoption. I know Jevon McDonald does not like the term “adoption,” and I’m happy to use a replacement, but mass adoption of web 2.0 in the enterprise is what separates us from widespread revolutionary change and where we are today.

First a few thoughts on this UK piece. When I first read the headline, “Fears of brand damage scaring banks away from Web 2.0” I read it as, “Fears of brain damage scaring banks away from Web 2.0” which might make more sense. 🙂 I found myself wondering who they polled– marketing execs? IT execs? officers? If they polled marketing execs, I’d be really interested in their reasoning, which unfortunately this piece does not provide. If they polled IT execs or officers, my suspicion is this answer is camouflaging a larger issue which has to do more with a loss of control.

Along these lines, here are some lone wolves crying out in the wilderness of user adoption:

I found this post a last week from a European blog. Three guys from France, Germany, and Italy trying to push the e2.0 agenda. The sentiments are similar to a note I received last week from a blogging bud who has been valiantly trying to kickstart his investment bank’s foray into enterprise 2.0 adoption.

First the euro-istas:

I said in my previous post about strategy 2.0 beta, that one of the main problem in technology adoption is user habits and managers education – it is still true of course, but today I would like to add a key problem that was implicit in my post : IT development.

Here we are.

I am currently investigating the needs of the users within my company in order to suggest a brand new Intranet. I will propose of course a web 2.0 strategy with a long term approach.
But what’s going to happen even if I the users and my managers give me their goes?
IT department will say “Impossible with software we have, too dangerous to plug different applications in our environment” and so on.

Why?

Because large companies are not famous for rapid adoption of new tools.
Most of companies are using SAP, Microsoft or IBM. IT managers don’t take the risk to connect applications that could be incompatible. These software firms are only starting to propose some kind of web 2.0 related features. By experience, it is often tricky to integrate the 1.0 versions of software.

In brief, if big software firms launch some web 2.0 features this year, IT dprt will think about it the year after, and integration will be finished after one year more. In the best scenario (that implies that everyone already agreed that we should have collaborative and web2.0 features), it means that my company could have an Intranet 2.0 in…2009.

Now, the Investment Bank:

1) E2.0 in practice in a diversified financial services firm is a completely different beast than E2.0 in theory…the information sharing barriers inherent in the business mean that security and permissioning needs to be built into EVERYTHING…which immediately complicates what is supposed to be simple. Legal departments want ‘nothing’ shared, because then they don’t have to be worried about inappropriate things being shared…even if you have proper user-based security sharing rules in place, they still are uncomfortable with the fact that IT might be implementing a system that encourages security breaches.

2) E2.0 in large organizations with large IT departments and large bureaucracy MUST have management buy-in at some level…it is impossible for workers to install and start using IT that is not sanctioned by the IT department (the restrictions on what users can and cannot do are enormous).

3) I am trying to combine the best of ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ by developing Enterprise-wide E2.0 solutions that can be adopted (or not) by various business units. Generic E2.0 toolkits (like tagging, RSS, social bookmarking, blogging, wiki, etc.) need to be on a common system so that they can all connect and talk to each other…this is essential to a successful E2.0 ‘system’

4) Even though some parts of E2.0 will be emergent and freeform… I think that some of it might be structured as well. For instance, when talking about document management and tagging… in order to maintain critical metadata on a document, we NEED users to tag the document with a specific code… if tagging was completely freeform, then users would not be prompted for this code… and therefore they would never enter it… so you can see how some structure might be necessary for E2.0 to be successful.

I think that the combination of a tipping point with Web 2.0 in the outside world (coming soon, if it hasn’t already)…plus the fact that Enterprise software vendors seemed to have grasped E2.0 pretty heavily (Microsoft, ibm, Cisco, sap, Intel, start-ups, etc.) and will be pushing E2.0 solutions to their clients will combine to change the intranet as we know it today in 5 years. I’m not saying that everything will be emergent and freeform though…but I do think that E2.0 tools such as social networking, blogging, social bookmarking, RSS, wikis, search, and collaboration sites (SharePoint) will be prevalent on the Intranet of 2012!!