ITSinsider – Page 14 – What's Next in Tech

Jive: Keepin’ it Real

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.

Join me for a conversation on 2.0 adoption

Bjoern Negelmann has been conducting a series of TinyChats with leading voices on Enterprise 2.0 in preparation for the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt, Nov. 10 – 12. I hope you’ll join me this Friday: 9:30am ET for a conversation on trends in 2.0 adoption.

I think the process is fairly simple. At 9:30am ET, just go here.

Fact-gathering on 2.0 Adoption

The recent acquisition of Headshift by the Dachis Group was largely celebrated in the e2.0 community. As I commented for RWW, it’s a testament to a growing, maturing market. Enterprise interest in incorporating 2.0 tools and practices has never been higher. With this stage of evolution comes the good stuff, the fact-based data that helps guide our understanding of where we are, what it takes to get this right, who’s behind Enterprise 2.0 initiatives, what expectations are for business results, how much money will move through the market, etc.

I was really excited to see McKinsey’s 2009 “How Companies are Benefiting from Web 2.0” report that came out this week. Having come from a large consulting background tracking the IT services sector, it’s a raw indicator that the 2.0 phenomenon is about to break out of the echo chamber when the large consulting firms start paying attention. Some of our best contributors in the Council are large consulting firms who are rolling out their own initiatives, and I expect these firms will leverage this intelligence to build their own practices at some point. During the first evolution of the web, a whole host of IT services firms cropped up to take advantage of the promise of enterprise transformation via the web. Most of those firms fell flat in the dotcom meltdown bringing down investors, customers, employees, and the echo chamber. I did a huge research report that profiled who those companies were and what dynamics were driving that sector. What did succeed, royally, from that era is the undeniable impact electronic commerce brought to the consumer and enterprise sectors. Seeing “what could be” drove the vision of many of those early firms, and even if their dreams crumbled under the weight of their own ambition (and hubris), they were correct about identifying the potential of the Internet to radically change business.

So, we’ve moved from e-business to social business in a decade. While the hype factor is still a little deafening, I’m thrilled to announce we will be kicking off the first in-depth exploration into the 2.0 adoption phenomenon to bring some clarity to the maturing market sector. To conduct this research, I’m pleased to announce the Council has signed a strategic partnership with Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen of Information Architected to conduct a qualitative research study on the dynamics surrounding 2.0 adoption, as well as quantitative data on our members relative to industry, professional profiles (titles, organization), budgets, and other data points that present a portrait of who the early adopters really are. I’ve done some preliminary inquiries on our Council members and have already discovered a number of surprising findings that I would not have predicted. For instance, budgets for 2.0 are a lot higher than I would have guessed (if at all even established).

budget
Other interesting findings reveal that IT is not driving many of the decisions to implement a wide-scale enterprise 2.0 initiative. Lines of business comprise the lion’s share of our members.

One of the greatest goals for this research is to finally highlight salient case studies that explain the motivation behind the 2.0 effort as well as the expected business results.

For example, I conducted an interview this week with a very well known Wall Street investment bank. It was the audit and compliance global organization that drove an e20 solution to answer an age-old problem: high inefficiencies and underutilization. It’s an impressive global rollout that incorporates 5 financial center locations with approximately 200 of the firm’s subject matter experts in product, trading desk, regulatory, and banking. The initiative has yielded a “huge leap forward” according to the bank due to the transparency and visibility the firm has now as a result of breaking down the fiefdom walls that impeded the firm’s progress in years past. Greatest challenge? The people issues. It forces employees to communicate more. Additionally, the new processes expose the weak links in the firm and threaten job security/relevance. Greatest benefit? The initiative answers to the Board of Directors and provides predictable, reliable reporting that mitigates risk and ensures regulatory compliance. I asked my contact if the effort played any role in the financial recovery of this particular firm, he said not really because this was purely a cost-containment effort, yet he added, “The platform should, however, allow [the firm] to be more nimble in the face of increased regulatory scrutiny. Management can now see the effects of re-allocating resources to review areas of the firm with a higher perceived risk.”

All good stuff. There are so many exciting initiatives going on within the Council membership, I am thrilled to be able to bring them to light via our research. We will be presenting top-line findings of this research at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco (Nov. 2 – 5). The Council has a number of initiatives going on at the conference, and I’ll be blogging about them in the upcoming weeks.

If you are a customer in the throes of adoption and would like to participate in the research, please simply request to join The 2.0 Adoption Council. Membership is free and you will receive a tremendous return on your (non) investment.

They’re Real, and They’re Spectacular

The 2.0 Adoption Council is off to a rockin’ start. We’re about 7 weeks into our new venture. I launched the Council on 6/26/09 on LinkedIn. We’ve sinced move our conversations to Socialcast (7/13/09) and the Jive SBS platform (7/15/09). We currently have about 50 members. During our weekly Council conference call last week, we discussed the size and scope of the Council. I mentioned that I’d like to get the Council to 100 members. I am in the process of considering various membership models, but my intention for this first 100 inaugural members is membership will always be free or very low-cost. I’m currently reading Chris Anderson’s “Free” and have taken away a number of great ideas from it already.

Anderson talks about the “is it worth it?” flag when making a decision. With free, “that flag never goes up and the decision is much easier.” In my opinion, having tracked Enterprise 2.0 for nearly three years now, the “market” is not about transactions, but about relationships. If you have a solid understanding of what drives the SocialWeb, you should appreciate why “Free” is the best pricing model for the Council startup.

Creating value in the Council is opt-in. The more members participate and share, network effects will amplify the value each member receives individually. We have the potential in this group to do much better than Jakob Nielson’s 90-9-1, considering each member only has to commit a fraction of their work week/personal time to participating in the Council. But considering all members are socialweb savvy, I expect contributions to grow steadily as more members draw greater utility from the conversations and connections.

Take a look at the market leaders who comprise our Council. All of the members here have been personally vetted by me. Each is engaged in some facet of Enterprise 2.0, social media, or social computing. As far as I’m aware, nothing else like this exists on the planet. We got a nice endorsement from Andy McAfee this week too.

I took a quick snapshot of who the group is and what they’re currently budgeting for spend on Enterprise 2.0. About half of the members answered the survey already (in bold). The members come from all areas of the business: CIO/IT, Knowledge Management, CTO/Innovation, HR, and Marketing. In fact, it turns out that 64% of our surveyed members come from LOBs, not IT. Regarding spend, I found it extremely interesting that 36% of members are budgeted to spend $1 – $5M on their social computing strategy/execution. Another 40% are still in the planning stages, which I find to be very promising and a real boon to future spend coming from these market leaders.

I put up a simple web site this week at www.20AdoptionCouncil.com. I’ll be adding more content there over time. We are also working on an external community similar to what Jerry and Robin have done with Social Media Today. Please let me know if you’d like to be an inaugural blogger there. The invitation is extended to all regular readers of ITSinsider and, effectively, the entire Enterprise 2.0 Community. Our Council members will be blogging there as well, so you will have the opportunity to comment on their content and interact with them directly.

Very exciting times we are living in… Enterprise 2.0 is, indeed, real and spectacular.

Who Will be the “Internal Evangelist” of the Year?

Interest in the 2.0 Adoption Council has been fantastic. Over forty members have filled our ranks. Each of our members has an extremely demanding day job. Educating, motivating, cajoling, rationalizing, bargaining, organizing, tracking, recruiting, and learning are all part of the job skill requirements. The “Internal Evangelist” (IE) has to carefully balance the needs of the business with an incredible responsibility to drive change in the organization with tools and practices that are outside of the comfort zone of most large enterprise employees, not to mention the pockets of organizational resistance predisposed to preserving Enterprise 1.0.

For this reason, I have decided to award an “Internal Evangelist of the Year.” One member of the 2.0 Adoption Council will be selected to exemplify the tenacity, courage, and sheer energy it takes to inspire a large enterprise to embrace the principles and practices of Enterprise 2.0. The award will be announced at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

“…the job of the internal evangelist is far, far more difficult. These folks toggle between fighting the good fight every day and then slipping uneasily into a sort of DMZ where they can peek out into the broader community for support and the rejuvenation they need to go on fighting another day. It’s often a thankless job with no clear roadmap for advancement, yet the majority of them do it because they believe in the principles of the 2.0 movement. I celebrate them!”

Please feel free to nominate someone who you believe is deserving of this award. If they’re not a member of the Council already, I will be happy to extend an invite. Refer the individual to me on my LinkedIn profile. We’re still screening candidates via LinkedIn.

UPDATE: 8/10/09. We now have a form for nominations.