Andrew McAfee, who coined the term “enterprise 2.0,” wrote yesterday that he found himself “preaching to the converted” for the first time in a group of CIOs from “old economy” companies. The CIOs at his session weren’t coming to him expressing their reservations about enterprise 2.0, but instead were complaining that their companies were not moving fast enough to implement these technologies. In other words – enterprise 2.0 is mainstream now. What challenges does enterprise 2.0 face now?
Last summer, Michael Idinopulos wrote on the Socialtext blog:
Last week, the Enterprise 2.0 world turned a corner. Nobody pounded the table for cultural change. Nobody talked about incentives or change management. Nobody talked about transparency or modeling collaborative behavior.
Instead, people talked about process. […]
Process, rather than culture, is increasingly seen as the key enabler of social software in the enterprise. Rather than wringing our hands and gnashing our teeth about how to change organizational culture, we’re looking at how to insert social tools into the existing business process. Conversely, we’re also starting to look at how business processes can be redesigned and optimized now that these social tools are available.
That remains one of the leading issues for next-generation enterprise software. We previously covered the way Nielsen put a process around innovation using BrightIdea. Like I said at the time, it seems like ultimate corporate oxymoron. But the need for process is real. BrightIdea now hopes to have defined the process for innovation with its new suite.
I’ll be covering both BrightIdea and business process management next week.
Reducing Rather Than Contributing to Information Overload
Earlier this week we looked at the increasing problem of information overload. Our informal, unscientific poll found that enterprise 2.0 tools have been a mixed bag so far.
Yesterday, R “Ray” Wang tweeted a reminder about his post on activity stream filtering from last summer that hits on many of the important points for this subject.
Integrating Applications
One other stumbling block for adoption is the “too many buckets” issue. Workers tend to work in a few different apps, but usually have one main place: e-mail, ERP, BI dashboard, CRM, help desk, etc. Adding additional applications for users to track can be problematic. Adding social layers into existing applications is better.
Most enterprise 2.0 solutions, especially the new breed of social CRM suites, want to be all things to all people. This make work for some organizations, but I’m more interested in the integration efforts of companies like Simplybox, Socialcast and Socialtext to bring activity streams to existing applications. Our coverage of Simplybox and Socialcast is here and our coverage of Socialtext Connect is here.
And just for fun…
What if Peter Drucker Taught Enterprise 2.0 Strategy?
View more presentations from
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Slide deck by Mark Fidelman, hat tip to Gil Yehuda.