Get Satisfaction!
Just happened upon a pretty cool new web service called Get Satisfaction. It is a community site self proclaimed as “People powered customer service for just about everything”.
I found the service doing a search on private video chatting for Seesmic.
It is incredibly easy to use, and addresses a number of customer experience and support needs:
- I can pose a problem to the community and get feedback and answers
- Users can vote on my problem / question and opt-in as having it too - allows the biggest issues to bubble to the top
- Customer self-support is naturally enabled
- Employees of companies represented within Get Satisfaction can identify themselves and participate in the discussion around their products and services
- I can add companies and products/services to my dashboard to monitor - I may be a customer or just interested in buying
Seems like a great site for getting customer support and service, and for referrals and pre-purchasing research.
The UI was very easy and intuitive … the process is easy … see the “how to” below … very interesting!
Disney / Pixar - lessons in cultural integration
After being on the buy and sell side of many merger & acquisition transactions, one thing that is clear is that cultural integration is one of the toughest aspects of bringing two companies together following a transaction. It is the largely unwritten reason for why many (and some will say most) mergers & acquisitions fail. This article about Disney’s acquisition of Pixar in last Sunday’s New York Times highlights a high-profile acquisition success story, in an industry where many M&A deals do not pan out as expected. The intriguing parts of the article had to do with some quotes from Bob Iger, Disney’s CEO, and his philosophies on M&A transactions.
Bob has been on both sides of many deals, and has seen first-hand the time and attention that needs to go into cultural integration, and the consequences of not doing it right. Bob also recognizes that cultural integration is probably the largest predictor of whether an M&A transaction will be successful and meet its original goals.
“There is an assumption in the corporate world that you need to integrate swiftly,” Mr. Iger said. “My philosophy is exactly the opposite. You need to be respectful and patient.”
Key to the successful integration, analysts say, has been Mr. Iger’s decision to give incoming talent added duties. Instead of just buying Pixar and moving on, Mr. Iger understood what made the acquisition valuable, said Mr. Price, the author. “If you are acquiring expertise,” he said, “then dispatch your newly purchased experts into other parts of the company and let them stretch their muscles.”
The more deals I do, the more I am in Bob’s camp per the above quotes. It is in our capitalist nature to want to do things better and faster. However, mergers/acqusitions are largely about bring people of different (corporate) cultures together - and this is true more so in today’s knowledge-driven economy than ever before. We certainly want to do things better all of the time, but the speed at which we do it should not be a sole measure, especially when trying to integrate people. The concept of shared experiences, and creating / fostering ways for these to happen, is one of the best culture melding techniques available, and Bob suggests this in the above quotes regarding ’stretching muscles across the company’. Some good things still do take time.
One last interesting quote from the article is below
“It took about a year before there was a collective letting down the guard,” he said. “Initially people were thinking, ‘Is something going to happen?’ ”
Even in the best of cases, such as the Disney/Pixar deal, the same dynamics of M&A apply - typically a constant and natural fear that something is about the change or be cut at any time, no matter how well things are going. It takes time even when things are going well to build up mutual trust and respect. The best deals happen when the mutual trust and respect exists, builds over time, and both parties work together over the right period of time, making key decisions along the way to implement the desired change.
Social Media Today - Blogger of the Week
Many thanks to Jerry Bowles at Social Media Today (SMT) for featuring me two weeks ago as the Blogger of the Week, and for the cross-mention on SMT’s sister site MyVenturepad. The traffic and suggestions coming from the posts were great and I am still looking for more feedback on my blog layout, and name/brand. I do hate that picture and have yet to find one for my online profiles that I like … wonder what that says!
Social Enterprise Software discussion buzzing last week
Across the blogosphere, the topic of “Enterprise Social Software” was hot this past week.
- Fred Wilson asks if the term itself is an oxymoron.
- Sam Lawrence makes a case here on how social software vendors, including his own Jive Software, and SocialText, Atlassian among others, could upend the incumbent enterprise vendors SAP and Oracle, while referencing this article about a recent Forrester report about these emerging collaboration vendors.
- Dennis Howlett debates Sam and makes a case here for why the incumbents will not be upended, and partially bases his argument on this viewpoint on enterprise inertia from Sig Rinde.
- Jeff Dachis of Razorfish fame raises $50mm from Austin Ventures to pursue the social networking application space within the enterprise
- Last, but not least, Oliver Marks provided a good synthesis of this set of conversations.
The buzz is great news for those of us betting on collaboration and social networking as fundamental disruptors to the traditional enterprise landscape and as fundamental enablers for the next generation of value creation from enterprises of all kinds (corporate, governmental, non-profits, and others). It means something is happening, and it surely is.
However, I feel the debate about this “Enterprise Social Software” market is being viewed through the wrong lens. It is a great set of reading, but it seems that most of the conversation can be summarized with the phrase “Where’s the beef?”. This is consistent with ongoing discussion around Enterprise 2.0 continues to swirl around the topic of the lack of repeatable case examples of ROI for wiki, blog, forum and social network applications.
The perspective that I believe is missing from all of these conversations is that the next generation of enterprise applications - Enterprise Social Applications - are not strictly about wikis, blogs, forums, etc. The emerging Enterprise Social Applications market, as discussed in the conversations listed above, should be about how those Web 2.0 capabilities (blogging, wikis, forums, social networks) are applied to applications to solve the business problems of next generation enterprises.
The problems to be solved by and emerging demand for these new applications arise from three underlying multi-decade mega trends hitting large enterprises today - Globalization, the Talent Crunch and Web 2.0. The push toward being global and acting global will force enterprises to have much more agile, open and collaborative business processes, and the applications to support those processes. The same thing is true with the talent crunch which is upon us - as boomers “retire” and the Net Generation enters the workforce, the demands for more agile, open and collaborative work processes and applications will grow dramatically. This is how the Net Generation gets work done. The fact that Web 2.0 is upon us and that wikis, blogs, forums, social networks exist enables all of this - however, these capabilities are not the specific applications which will be the next generation of enterprise applications, or Enterprise Social Applications as coined in the conversations this past week.
Innovation, Customer-focus, & Long-term Thinking
Here is a fascinating interview with Jeff Bezos of Amazon. Jeff has been on a mission since day-one of Amazon and has done an amazing job of both short-term execution excellence while keeping the company focused on the long-term goal. This post is primarily directed at my colleagues at nGenera (yes, rather than dedicate an entire post to this, I’ll just announce it here - BSG Alliance has transformed into nGenera - check out our awesome new Web Community at nGenera.com).
Amazon is really hitting a stride executing on multiple fronts - it is quite amazing to see a company excel across so many diverse capabilities at once. nGenera colleagues take note - Amazon is not a software company, not a services company, it is many things at once geared toward delivering compelling customer experiences. Think about it - they are an e-tailer, an e-tail platform - both sales and physical distribution, a web-services platform, and a total consumer hardware solution provider (Kindle is more than just a device - think iPod - it is software, commerce, services and hardware wrapped in one). Sound familiar?
Here is a favorite quote
Q: Few CEOs have taken as much flak as you have for spending on innovation, in both good times and bad. What’s your philosophy?
A: My view is there’s no bad time to innovate. You should be doing it when times are good and when times are tough—and you want to be doing it around things that your customers care about. For us, it’s such a deep-seated belief, I’m not sure we have a choice.
Below is a re-post of this post by Tim O’Reilly which highlights some of my own takeaways and another favorite quote. The emphasis is mine.
Business Week has a great interview with Jeff Bezos as part of their innovation issue. The interview is entitled How Frugality Drives Innovation, but Jeff talks about far more than frugality. Here’s my favorite bit:
Q: Every company claims to be customer-focused. Why do you think so few are able to pull it off?
A: Companies get skills-focused, instead of customer-needs focused. When [companies] think about extending their business into some new area, the first question is “why should we do that—we don’t have any skills in that area.” That approach puts a finite lifetime on a company, because the world changes, and what used to be cutting-edge skills have turned into something your customers may not need anymore. A much more stable strategy is to start with “what do my customers need?” Then do an inventory of the gaps in your skills. Kindle is a great example. If we set our strategy by what our skills happen to be rather than by what our customers need, we never would have done it. We had to go out and hire people who know how to build hardware devices and create a whole new competency for the company.
Well worth a read. Another great line: “The key is to pick things that you think are really iimportant, and then focus on them.” It seems obvious, but so few of us do it as consistently as we should!
Further validation of Twitter as a customer experience touchpoint
These blog posts further highlight now Twitter has become a natural outlet for customer feedback as well as a relevant touchpoint.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_get_customer_service_via_twitter.php
http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/2007/12/does-jamba-know.html
Below are companies which have set up Twitter Channels.
Comcast Cares (twitter - @comcastcares)
I noticed recently that Comcast set up a Twitter channel for soliciting customer input directly from the social web. JetBlue is another. I’m not sure if this type of Twitter support will scale as-is, but I’m sure a service could arise to enable it to scale in the same way as services and software exist for supporting customers via email & chat.
What is more interesting than these companies setting up channels on Twitter, is the potential use of Twitter for companies to (a) deliver a superior customer experience and (b) engage with customers to facilitate customer-driven innovation of their products & services.
With the growing volume of Twitter users, companies now have a direct channel to solicit, facilitate, and monitor feedback from a growing number of their customers. The topics can be rich, including:
- feedback on positive or negative aspects of a company’s offerings by monitoring Twitter as users tweet among their Friends and Followers (use the Twitter “Track” feature)
- customer support requests if a company is maintaining a Twitter account
- new offering ideas or offering enhancement ideas from monitoring or direct tweets to the corporate Twitter account (would suggest both for enabling true customer-driven innovation)
- referrals - many happen between Twitter Friends & Followers already, but active company involvement can both facilitate and amplify referrals which lead to sales
These are just some ideas, however, Twitter appears to me to be one of the richest and most opportunity rich areas for companies to truly engage with their customers to drive loyalty, sales, and new innovation. The big outstanding question is how much penetration in society will a service like Twitter get? How many people are eager to tell a group of people, some of which are truly “weak ties“, what they are doing?
I think the use of Twitter will indeed grow beyond its initial intention of ‘what are you doing?’. First, it already is. Second, if people know that they can be one mouse click or SMS message away from telling the company that just ticked them off what they think, I think adoption will grow. When my second Kenmore washer crashed recently within 20 days of getting it, I know I would have loved a better channel than the hours of phone time spent. In fact, I did Twitter the experience to my friends (i.e. became an active detractor). Third, if a customer can truly provide input that is valued and used by companies for new offering ideas, I think the service would also drive adoption. Don’t you have a lot of ideas for products and services that you use daily, but feel that no viable channel for providing your ideas to each company exists? I know I do.
I have always felt that the growth in Social Media services would lead to better overall customer experiences, and force marketers and companies to be more responsive to customer demands and more open to co-innovating with customers. I think Twitter presents one of the best Social Media services to help realize this outcome. I’ll be watching Comcast, JetBlue, and others as they embark in the Twitter universe.
UPDATE: Noticed that Sarah Perez wrote a nice post on ReadWriteWeb on this topic recently.
Social Media Marketing - it’s about consideration
As a supporting follow-up to my previous post on Social Media Marketing in which I attempted to make the case for referrals as the key driver of marketing results on that platform, I want to highlight part of a post I read today from Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research (Josh’s Blog).
Josh’s post is about Social Media being a recession-proof platform for marketing spend. However, in that post I thought he also supported the case I was making about the innate value of the Social Media platform for the purposes of marketing - not awareness, not lead generation in the Pay-Per-Click manner, but what Josh calls consideration. Per his description below, what is called consideration is really about referrals … and the fact that marketers can create Social Media applications which foster valuable referrals (note the emphasis).
But social applications are about consideration, not awareness. Blogs, word of mouth, social networks… they’re about people connecting with other people. You may resist advertising if your finances are tight, but if your bud tells you that new movie is really worth seeing or that the Gap has the cutest new tops, that’s more persuasive than advertising. Basically, in a recession, the consideration phase is more important than awareness — and that’s where advertising flops and social applications succeed.
For fellow Twitter users, you can follow Josh on Twitter here.
^ brian
Technorati Tags: referrals, social graph, social media
Social Media Marketing - what is it good for?
In preparing for the SXSW Social Media Marketing Metrics panel at 5pm on Saturday, March 8th, I’ve been giving further thought to the use of Social Media for marketing purposes. Many companies continue to struggle with how to best leverage Social Media. This struggle goes beyond marketing, but right now my focus is on what value exists in Social Media for marketers, and how to best make use of the social media platform to deliver value.
My thoughts started by looking at other media and how marketers best leveraged the platform for value:
- Snail Mail - direct mail marketing became the marketing tool, and the purpose was solely dedicated to lead generation and the infamous 2% response rate heuristic
- Television - commercials became the marketing tool, and the purpose was to drive awareness and change behavior, starting with P&G and Soap Operas
- Web Search - contextual pay per click ads became the marketing tool, and the purpose was lead generation, or actually more appropriately actions (i.e. click to landing page to action/purchase)
TV is a very rich media environment well suited toward making brand impressions through slogans and jingles, and the medium provids no way to create a direct response. Web Search is a more recent phenomenon worth exploring further in the context of how to best leverage the Social Media platform. I’ll use Google to represent the Web Search platform and overall set of PPC marketing tools.
Google provides a highly valuable service to users - Web Search - which is to easily and quickly get access to relevant content anywhere on the web through search. The Web Search service design drove massive adoption, and the users were highly satisfied with the experience - hence a platform was born. Google needed to monitize this platform and marketers are always in search of new and better ways to access customers. PPC advertising turned out to be the ideal tag-along service for marketers on top of the Web Search platform. Web Searchers are by definition looking for something, for many reasons. By creating a platform where marketers could place contextual ads next to Web Searchers while they’re in the hunt for information was highly likely to grab their attention at a critical, highly contextual and compelling moment. The PPC model - click and then convert to action - makes sense, rather than trying to build a brand or a relationship, which would be entirely out of context for the Web Search platofrm. The model has proven itself out very well.
The point I am hoping to make is that the marketing tool created by Google and other PPC providers, was focused on the core characteristics and advantages of the Web Search platform - namely targeting users highly engaged in finding something specific at a discrete moment in time and providing those users a valuable engagement point. The users click an ad and buy or do not buy, and that is the end of the story.
Now, let’s apply the microscope to Social Media and the unique characteristics of that platform, and see if we can find an ideal marketing tool suited for Social Media. I’m seeking to take this debate past the value of merely creating conversation and two-way dialog with your customers, and toward a scalable marketing tool that is suited to the Social Media platform and delivers successfully on a key outcome sought by marketers that is also highly valuable to users.
If Web Searchers are going to Google to find information quickly, what are Social Media members seeking when they engage in their favorite Social Media site? I do not have a scientific survey to support any conclusions here, so I will highlight what I think based on my own use of Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, Twitter, etc. For me, my Social Media activities are about making and growing connections with groups of like-minded people. Social Media has been a highly efficient platform for doing so, even though it has a ways to go to truly fulfill this mission.
It is important to note that groups is plural. My Social Network, or overall Social Graph, can be categorized into many groups of people, and many of my connections belong to several of my ‘groups’. The collection of these individuals and the various groups to which they belong represent my Social Graph. This is not to say that I have formally assigned people to groups, but in my mind they are allocated or tagged this way. At its core, Social Media to me is about persistent contextual connections with people.
What is a marketer to do with this core capability of Social Media? How can a Social Media platform owner monitize this core capability to continue to drive funding to grow the Social Media platform services for its users?
First, take the Hippocratic Oath. Doing harm to the core of the platform will kill the whole thing. If Google blew the search thing, the PPC model would quickly become irrelevant.
Second, ride the wave. Social Media is delivering value to users by facilitating useful connections across a user’s Social Graph. Whatever the marketer does and the Social Media platform enables, it must be done through the Social Graph and be seen as enhancing to one user’s connection to another.
To me, the most powerful intersection of Social Media and Marketing is around the concept of a Referral. For marketers, the Referral is one of the most valuable forms of lead generation around. It is also highly sensitive and built around trust. How to implement this Referral concept is beyond the scope of this post, and is maybe the subject of a business plan and a valuable business in the Social Media arena. Let’s just say it is way more complicated to implement than to just allow users to become “fans” of products / services / companies, such as what Facebook has recently done. The Referral model in Social Media is also not a platform for merely allowing legions of people to become sales reps for products, such as an Amway model.
I’m highly interested in conversation around this topic. The purpose is to begin to flesh out the true underlying value and capability of Social Media platforms, and how that capability can be leveraged effectively for marketing in a manner consistent with supporting the basic value of the Social Media platform (which is not to make members targets of marketers).
^ brian
Technorati Tags: facebook, google, myspace, opensocial, social graph, social media
SXSW Social Media panel - weigh in with your opinions
I have the great pleasure, thanks to the initiative of Tom Parish, to be a panelist at the upcoming South By Southwest (SXSW) 2008 Interactive conference. The panel will be on Saturday, March 8th, and about Social Marketing Strategies and Metrics.
Here is a brief description of the panel. Tom also has a great write-up here.
Why are CMO’s so scared of social media and social networking? Let’s look at the success of vendors and businesses who have employed these new systems to explore their lessons learned and discover how to leverage social media maketing strategies that will leverage business growth for small, medium and enterprise-scale businesses.
We are looking for your ideas and feedback to make this a great panel. In fact, we would like to include your questions on the panel. Please comment on this post with any suggested questions for us to address.
Some examples include:
- what is social marketing and how is it different from traditional marketing?
- what defines success in social marketing?
- why is management so leery of incorporating social marketing strategies and how can that be changed?
We are hoping for attendees to have the following takeaways:
- what social media marketing strategies are working
- how to define metrics for social media marketing strategies and talk with your CMO
- why you should be thinking about social media and social networking-based marketing strategies for business growth
In particular, I’m hoping my BSG Alliance colleagues will chime in with suggested questions for this panel and case studies addressing the intended takeaways above.
I’m looking forward to your feedback and suggestions.
^ brian
Technorati Tags: enteprise2.0, socialmedia, sxsw
Global Talent
In a recent article in the NY Times, SAP CEO Henning Kagermann, speaks about reaching out for global talent in the software industry. In a short Q&A forum, he illustrates what it means to be a ‘global’ (vs. multi-national) company in terms of sourcing talent. It’s all about comparative advantage - some of the best innovation in the world in software comes from Silicon Valley, so you had better have an innovation strategy that involves being in Silicon Valley as a global software company.
Here are a few of the relevant Q&A points from the article - emphasis mine:
Q. Why did you necessarily have to globalize your work?
A. There really is no alternative, for two reasons. It’s foolish to believe today that the smartest people are in one nation. The second is sourcing, at least if you are a big company. If you are smaller, and have a team of 100 or 200 engineers you can stay in one country and try to attract the best guys. But if you are a big company, you need to tap into the global talent pool. In Germany, we now have this big public debate about there being a shortage of engineers in the country. Well, I don’t care, or at least not as the chief executive of SAP.
Q. How does the global division of labor work? For example, what stays in Germany?
A. If it comes to deep application integration, we go to Germany. It’s where we have many people with deep knowledge of finance, manufacturing, human relations — those kinds of things, and knowledge of those functions in specific industries, the domain specific knowledge. That kind of deep knowledge is essential to platform work, designing the basic architecture of the core product.
Q. How about Silicon Valley?
A. In Palo Alto, we leverage the kind of innovation and creativity that is in Silicon Valley. It’s a place where a lot of new companies and technologies pop up and you can more easily integrate those new things into your thinking and your products. A lot of the Internet work has been done there, the technologies that open our products to others.
Q. And India?
A. India is mixed. But we do a lot of implementation of the design work in India. Our intent was to go there for the large talent pool. But we’ve been in Bangalore for seven years and we’ve grown somewhat gradually there. You cannot go in and hire 2,000 in a year and believe they are going to be ready to develop high-quality integrated software applications.
Technorati Tags: e2.0, NGE, Talent
The Future of Work in NGEs
Manpower is doing some interesting and innovative things in the world of social media. This video from YouTube is a great example of Manpower extending its brand into the social media landscape. It also is a great representation of the future of work in Next Generation Enterprises. The video speaks for itself.
I also favorited some other short 15 second edgy social media ads from Manpower which are also interesting. You can find them here.
Social Media and the value of weak ties
Andrew McAfee recently published two great posts helping guide companies through the choices of applications available in the Enterprise 2.0 landscape.
In his most recent post, How to Hit the Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye, he provides an interesting framework for how to match the e2.0 task with the tool, whether it is a wiki, social network, blog, or other. It appears to be a very good framework, though I’m still digesting some of the component/task matches and may come back with comments.
In that post, and this previous post titled, The Ties that Find, Andy hits on a very interesting point, pulling from the work of Mark Granovetter, titled “The Strength of Weak Ties” to articulate the value of Social Networking Software (SNS) to those executives that don’t quite see how all of these connections matter.
The notion, as McAfee puts it, that those people connected to you by “weak ties” bridge networks (of other potentially valuable folks for certain situations) better than those (fewer) people connected to you by “strong ties”, makes a compelling case for the value of SNS. Andy does a great job articulating this point, so I will not try to repeat it here.
It’s a common source of debate among those of us using SNS services such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. about how many connections to add. Many people are trying to limit the number of connections they have in these ecosystems. McAfee and Granovetter seem to suggest the more the merrier, and more productive.
At our BSG Alliance Senior Executive Summit, where Clay Christensen spoke to our member customers, the topic of thinking about your product in terms of the “job it does for its customer” came up, as you’d naturally expect. We discussed the Blackberry as a product that does the job of making knowledge workers productive during short snippets of down time (such as during a presentation!).
I find that Facebook and Twitter in part do the job of keeping me aware in short snippets of downtime each day as to what my extended network of mostly ‘weak ties’ are doing (both small things and major life/career shifts). The job these SNS services are doing for me in part is to keep me connected and informed of the whereabouts and whatabouts of a substantially larger number people than I have ever been able to remain connected to in the past. These snippets get burned into my brain and my searchable SNS services for recall in an On Demand manner when required. Yes, it’s also entertaining.
This is what is enabled by digitizing the social graph as the Facebook team would put it. I cannot imagine a company that would not want its employees to grow their ability to link their weak ties together. The value of this type of social graphing, while difficult to quantify, seems enormous.
Next Generation Enterprise Transformation - Why it is necessary
Initially I had wanted my previous post to cover the What and the Why of Next Generation Enterprises, but I found that the post was getting too heavy and this topic is too rich, so I decided to break it up into two posts. Plus, I’ve found that like powerpoint slides, when reading blogs it is easier to digest and engage on shorter posts focused on a single topic than to read long, albeit detailed, posts covering multiple topics. I’m curious to get feedback on this general blogging point.
I left off on my last post, The Next Generation Enterprise - What is it?” indicating that we’re on the cusp of a major transformational shift in business which will play-out over the course of the next 20+ years and leave many enterprises stranded or out-of-business in its wake. This shift is why enterprises need to begin NGE transformation today. Let’s explore the reasons behind this shift.
The most recent significant change in business models was dubbed Re-Engineering. It encompassed shifting from a siloed functional organization structure to a process-oriented approach. Alongside that shift, was a technology transformation from centralized computing to client/server computing, putting processing power in the hands of knowledge workers on the desktop through PCs. With that shift, we underwent massive re-engineering of business processes, and automated everything “inside the office”, resulting in large operational efficiency improvements. The back-office was automated by ERP, front-office was automated by CRM, supply chain was automated by SCM, and so on. The focus was inside the four walls of the enterprise, and the underlying enabler was automation.
Our point of view is that the NGE transformation is about “getting out of the office”, with extreme collaboration as pervasive underlying enabler. Here are the parallels:
Re-engineering = Inside the Office - Powered by Automation
NGE = Outside the Office - Powered by Extreme Collaboration
What are the megatrends that are driving us in this direction? Here are a few:
- Talent Crunch: Boomers are aging and starting to head into retirement or second careers at the same time that the Millennials are emerging with new viewpoints and values on work, life, and collaboration, along with massive adoption of social media - how we work is about to change through this shift alone; key skills are also in short supply worldwide.
- Customer Power Shift: Thanks to the openness of the Web, customers and consumers are now empowered with more information than ever before, more choice, lower switching costs, and a platform to disrupt corporate brands directly from their desktop or mobile phone by connecting to the world virally through the Web. Enterprise value is now highly correlated with customer experience more than ever before.
- Globalization: Being a multi-national is no longer sufficient. An enterprise’s operations must be global in nature, taking advantage of comparative advantage of local markets and economies across the globe to bring products and services to markets worldwide. Being truly global will be the only way to compete, placing a higher premium on 24/7 cross cultural collaboration. Regional headquarters will now be replaced with capability centers located across the globe where it makes most overall sense.
- Web 2.0: The nature of applications and application development is changing dramatically with Web 2.0 and Web Services. Now, rich applications can be built in weeks, rather than months or years, and deployed to users without installing software. These new applications can talk with and include other applications or widgets which provide functionality from complimentary applications or marketplaces from across the Web. Within weeks, a new application, comprised of functionality from other applications and marketplaces and services from across the web can be mashed up and deployed, powering a global business process connected with core partners and service providers for an enterprise. Having your current legacy enterprise applications from the past 50 years on a Services Oriented Architecture will be a necessary requirement to best leverage the coming enterprise applications powered by Web 2.0. While wikis and blogs are included, this concept carries far beyond what we’ve seen to-date in Enterprise 2.0.
Any one of the above listed megatrends would constitute a significant disruption in business as we know it today and force a Newtonian response. The combination is powerful and highly disruptive … carrying the Newtonian metaphor forward, the response must be equal or greater in power - thus the need for NGE transformation.
What are your thoughts on the megatrends? Do you see NGE, as defined in the prior post, as the response to these megatrends, and why or why not? Is the response to the megatrends truly contain collaboration and On Demand at its core?
In my next post on the NGE thread, I would like to outline and build upon the fundamental capabilities that need to be part of a truly effective NGE.
^ brian
Corporate Social Networking and the Personal Tag Cloud
Here is a link to an interesting article this week from CIO Insight, about social networking in the enterprise. It highlights Wachovia’s current initiative to deploy an enterprise-wide social network, and the rationale for doing so. Here is an excerpt:
Wachovia plans to introduce its social networking service to its 110,000 workers by early 2008. Like the popular Facebook service, the network will allow users to upload photos of themselves—not just corporate ID mug-shots, either—and personal information. Community-building across the vast company is one of the goals.
This initiative gets at the heart of an internal effort at BSG Alliance as well - that of the “Personal Tag Cloud”. Think of the PTC as a representation of a person’s skills, abilities, interests and past projects for starters. The big tags are where the interest or strength or experience is the greatest. A social network and collaborative focus, in addition to the right On Demand applications, allows this to happen. Some more excerpts related to the PTC concept and the benefits of this type of social networking:
The idea is that it will boost top and bottom lines by providing a clear understanding of who knows what, and who knows whom, within a company and among its business partners. Making it easy for people to get together online and off, and harnessing the energy and information unleashed in recent years by so-called Web 2.0 tools, is supposed to advance core business tasks including sales, marketing and knowledge management.
To my BSG colleagues, it’s interesting to note the industries which have focus on using collaborative social networks for getting work done:
Early adopters range from the U.S. intelligence community, which plans to launch a cross-agency social network in December, to major players in the pharmaceutical industry, where drug discovery is being driven by knowledge-sharing across companies
^ brian
-
Recent Posts
-->
-
Affiliations
-
-
Disqus Comments on this Blog
-
Plaxo Pulse
-
Twitter Feed
-
MyBlogLog Community
-
Enterprise Irregulars
-
Technorati
-
MyVenturePad
