Early market test data coming in…

Over on the Itensil blog, I posted a note about early user adoption. To summarize, we’ve begun our Early Access Program for interested users. We’ve employed a useful web lead generation tool called Salesbuilder to categorize and qualify the interested parties in the product. For me, as a researcher, the early data coming in is interesting.

I was particularly alarmed by the answers to this question: User Adoption

Over 50% of the qualified leads were not able to get a product evaluated by the team that would benefit by using it. A mere 19% were. And there’s no guarantee, the product was adopted post-evaluation.

Although the data is not yet statistically significant, it’s an early warning sign to all Enterprise 2.0 vendors that user adoption is going to be a challenge for many enterprises. For this reason, I’m starting to think it’s in the best interests of the community to start educating and enlightening its target communities on the benefits of ALL enterprise 2.0 solutions.

I think Jeff Nolan was onto an idea like this… I will contact him and report what I find. In the meantime, I’m recommending all e2.0 vendors start accumulating data about their customer’s trials and tribulations while adopting or trying to adopt e2.0 products. If web 2.0 is truly about content, collaboration, and community– we will all benefit from eachother’s experiences, yes?

Fun with Outsourcing…

Saw this on an outsourcing discussion group and had to share…  They’re talking about outsourcing architectural drawings to India.

Re: Paris??
so which projects you do can you send me a detail list in email so that we can mutually understand and exchange some projects..		  
 
Reply From: CB
Date: Nov/17/06 – 20:05 (GMT)		 Reply
Re: Paris??
Here is our project list.
1.)Paris
2.)Paris surrounding areas

We would love to mutually understand and exchange but we have outsourced the
projects that were outsourced to us to an outsourcer who outsourced them to
another outsourcer who uses an exporter. It may take weeks to figure out
where Paris is.

We also may have difficulties in exchanging checks as we have sent our
checks to a Nigerian bank. We are trying to unlock the funds of the dearly
departed Mr. Smith. We have been assured that we will be rewarded kindly
for our help in the process by freeing 10 million dollars in funds from the
Smith estate.

Sorry we can not be of help now.
—

It’s Friday!!!!!

More user adoption… and so it begins!

Three items of note, coming in from the mainstream tech media. CNet, CIO Magazine and eWeek have recent enterprise 2.0 stories showcasing web 2.0 technologies at use or in trials at major corporations. I’m particularly interested in the American Express experiment:

From CNet:

American Express is experimenting with internal use of wikis. On its customer-facing web site, it uses RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, to deliver information, and the company’s web site invites its customers to provide feedback to influence product design, said Bob Morgan, vice president of technology strategy at American Express. We’re interested (in Web technollogies)– there’s clearly some applicability. And we want to give customers the sense of community feedback,” Morgan said.

I had an excellent chat with Indus Khaitan who’s part of a marketing group at Symantec.* Three and half years ago he launched a stealth internal blog on an old server they had in the department. He’s become somewhat of a renegade, internal web 2.0 “go to guy” for blogging and wikis today. He inspired not only his team to belly up to the web 2.0 bar, but an Executive VP who now has 700-800 readers on his blog. Khaitan has done all this under the radar of the IT department. “IT was busy on other projects,” he said. The truth is, he didn’t need IT. His department has virally caught on to the web 2.0 tools and now collaborate on campaigns and other projects. Sometimes he gets roped into helping colleagues hone their blogging or wiki skills, but he doesn’t mind. “It only takes about 15-20 minutes,” he said. He thinks the wiki is a great platform and he’s already coined a new term for its newfound popularity: the writable intranet.

These stories, in addition to forward-thinking IT groups, are how enterprise 2.0 will begin to spread virally throughout the enterprise.

*Although clearly Khaitan just got busy with web 2.0 on his own, I found it ironic that Symantec is self-described as “the global leader in information security and availability” considering some recent flak e2.0 has gotten on security issues. See Alex Barnett‘s blog post yesterday.

McAfee’s “Empty Quarter,” mind meld, and backlash.

I was encouraged when McAfee wrote about how his new Harvard graduates would be coming into the workforce with an “I want my MTV Internet” attitude. This sentiment is what I’ve actually been trying to get across here and here. His latest post on the “Empty Quarter” is even closer to my personal experience researching the Computerworld story on Enterprise 2.0. (Incidentally, there is excellent commentary from Microsoft’s Alex Barnett on McAfee’s Empty Quarter post.)

But like I told Dion Hinchcliffe a while back… be prepared for the backlash. As talk of real Enterprise 2.0 starts trickling outside the echo chamber, we’re going to start seeing some real negativity. Rod Boothby and Tom Davenport were debating its merits here. And McAfee got slashdotted here for his efforts in evangelizing.

The flipside to this negativity is the positive experience I had recently while visiting an Interactive Agency, Avenue A| Razorfish (AARF). Clearly, this firm “gets it.” The company is delivering Enterprise 2.0 solutions (despite the backlash) to their Global brands. The firm also eats its dogfood. The company uses a wiki (MediaWiki) to collaborate. Interesting enough, the way to the corporate user-adoption nerve center may be through the Chief Marketing Officer, not the CIO. Better- a collaborative effort between these two executives. Even though, today, AARF is focused on building consumer brands, the firm survived the dotcom bust by building and implementing enterprise portals behind the firewall. That experience goes far to explain how AARF can converse easily with advisors, employees/clients, and knowledge workers who are expecting the same experience in the Enterprise world as they have in the consumer world. “Technology is an enabler,” said Amy Vickers, who is heading up AARF’s enterprise solutions. “There is a robust set of flexible combinations… users are more empowered to have a voice and IT manages the collaborative effort between business and technology,” she said.

This is where web 2.0 meets enterprise 2.0. What’s changed is the consumer taking control of the brand conversation, according to Vickers. But in the enterprise all users are “consumers.” Bob Lord, the East Coast President for AARF said, “IT is put on notice. No longer is it a blackbox mentality. The corporate knowledge worker is saying, ‘I can do this on Amazon, why can’t I get someone’s address?'”

As the evangelizing starts to move its way into the empty quarter, it may be coming in the front door (CMO) as well as the back (IT). It’s more about demand than supply, in other words.

Along these lines, industry leading B2Bonline has a cover story on web 2.0 today. I found this quote interesting:

Weber [Larry Weber, chairman-CEO of W2 Group] said this latest iteration of the Web makes the Internet “very emotive.”

“It’s not a channel anymore,” he said. “B-to-b marketers need to understand the profound impact this platform will have in their buying and selling, and in their relationships with customers. The job of marketers in b-to-b today is to be that of an aggregator of products, trends, issues, events and communities.”

He said marketers will need to venture beyond their own sites to other Web destinations where customers congregate. “A lot of the b-to-b companies don’t understand that they have to go out to other people’s `parties,’ ” he said. “It’s just like networking in the physical world. You have to start going out so that the community comes back to you as well.”

 

¡Ay, caramba! Blogging is work.

I’ve been posting on the new ZDNet blog. They tell me it’s live, but there’s a glitch in the technology that is preventing it from showing up in the blog roll. You can view it here. I’m very interested in off-beat IT Services stories, so please email me (susanATitservicesadvisoryDOTcom) with any interesting ideas.