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Secret Santa Surprise: Land of (not-so) Misfit e20 Toys

To close out 2009, I thought I’d write a wrap-up of some of my favorite Enterprise 2.0 platforms that for some unknown reason don’t have the visibility they may perhaps deserve in the broader landscape. If you’re shopping for Enterprise 2.0 platforms in 2010, please be sure to give a few of these a looksee.

1. Traction Software. Traction Teampage has been around since 1999 and was originally developed by the good folks who created hypertext journaling (like, orignally). As you can imagine, over ten years this product has grown to become one of the most versatile tools in the socio-collaborative arsenal. Traction has an A-list of great customers including many security-conscious Federal agencies (such as the Department of Justice). One of our members, Brian Tullis @briantullis (Alcoa), did an amazing job with his case study at Traction’s annual user group conference. You can watch that here.

2. PBWorks. Similarly, born “PBWiki,” PBWorks has outgrown its wiki origins and has a full-featured platform that now includes voice, micro-blogging, live-editing and notifications, IM, and project management. (I probably left out a few.) This tool also has a very pleasing user interface and could win awards for ease of use. PBWorks seems to have hit a home run in the legal sector, but it’s truly a great platform for anyone interested in collaborating online. ITSinsider e20 trivia contest: First person who comments on the blog who knows what “PB” originally stood for wins a 2.0 Adoption Council coffee mug. (PBWorks employees– you can’t play. )

3. ThoughtFarmer. Ah. Jevon McDonald @jevon (my brilliant, handsome fellow EI) introduced me to ThoughtFarmer. It was probably love at first site (pun, yes) with me and ThoughtFarmer. The first time I interviewed Chris McGrath, @thoughtfarmer I may have asked him to marry me as I was so swept away with the beauty of the software and its elegant design. The ThoughtFarmer story started like this: “A client hired us to design their SharePoint site. We hated it so much we decided to tear it apart and start from scratch building a product from the ground up.” Of course, I’m paraphrasing from my memory of the interview. What ThoughtFarmer did, however, was design a socio-collaborative platform starting with PEOPLE as the centerpiece. I think when I heard that, I popped the question to poor Chris. As I commented on the ThoughtFarmer blog last week, some of our best contributions in the Council come from ThoughtFarmer members. I look forward to many years of ThoughtFarmer success.

4. Lotus Connections. Luis Benitez @lbenitez approached me at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco and asked me why Connections is not getting more love from the e20 echo chamber. I told him I hadn’t heard a lot from the Connections team and would like to change that. Considering word on the street is that the SharePoint team calls the SharePoint v. Connections bake-off Mike Gotta held in 2008, “The Boston Massacre,” Connections has lost a little momentum over the past year, especially, as MSFT is now evangelizing SharePoint 2010. Connections is still a best-in-class enterprise alternative. Headshift’s Jon Mell @jonmell has some great experience and posts on Connections. Head there for more details.

5. Socialcast. Socialcast continues to impress me. The latest redesign of the product is as elegant as it is functional. The platform’s ability to integrate legacy application data, its security provisions (behind the firewall as well as hosted), and the multitude of opportunities to feed external social content make it one of the most simple on-ramping e20 introductory tools available for businesses of every size. Socialcast is also free up to 50 for an unlimited number of users. Check ’em out.

Of course, these are just a few of my favorite tools in the e20 space. I wish every vendor continued success in the category. The pace of innovation in this sector is part of the fun of being an engaged observer.

What are your favorite tools/platforms?

Cisco Will Prove the Model

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

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.

Like Marc Benioff, Chambers is betting the business. Perfect time, incidentally, for Andrew McAfee whose ideas are now seeding The Harvard Business Review, management book shelves, and The McKinsey Quarterly.

As a Matter of Fact…

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:

adoption research

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.

Stay tuned.

Checkmate

Enterprise 2.0 is a Crock!!! says Dennis (the 2.0 Menace).

Here’s who says it isn’t:

Accenture+

Adidas Group+

Alcatel-Lucent+

Alcoa+

Allstate+

Alstom Power+

AMD+

AT&T+

Bell Canada+

Booz Allen Hamilton+

British Petroleum+

CapitalOne+

Cardiff University (UK)+

Chubb+

Cisco+

Compagnie de Saint Gobain+

Compuware+

Corning+

Covidien+

CSC+

Deloitte+

Deutsche Bank+

The Disney Corporation+

DuPont+

Electronic Arts+

Eli Lilly+

EMC Corp+

European Central Bank+

FDA+

Ford Motor Company+

GDF Suez+

General Mills+

General Motors+

GlaxoSmithKline +

Goldman Sachs+

Hatch Associates+

Hewlett-Packard+

Honeywell International+

HSBC+

Humana+

IBM+

Intel Corporation+

International Paper+

Johnson and Johnson+

Juniper Networks+

Lockheed Martin+

Lowe’s Companies+

Lyonnaise des Eux/Suez Environment+

Massachusetts Institute of Technology+

McDonald’s+

McKinsey & Company+

Medtronic, Inc.+

Mercer+

Merck+

MetLife+

Microsoft+

NASA+

Nike+

Nokia+

Océ+

Penn State University+

Pitney Bowes+

Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne+

PricewaterhouseCoopers+

Procter & Gamble+

Progressive Insurance+

Raytheon+

Research in Motion+

SAP+

SAP BusinessObjects+

Schlumberger+

Seagate+

SK Telecom+

State of Maryland+

Sun Microsystems (Oracle)+

Swedish Armed Forces+

Texas Instruments+

The Washington Post+

United Business Media+

Wells Fargo+

Wipro Technologies.

And we’re just getting started…

E20/SF: Bigger and Better than ever

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.

Are you an E20 expert? Prove it!

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.