While attending a session (Enterprise 2.0 – The corporate side of Web 2.0) this morning, I loved what the speaker (David Gootzit) had to say about Enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 technologies. He likened a successful adoption of these technologies to the classic real estate moniker "Location, Location, Location". If there was a theme, it would be that a clear purpose is the universal theme to successful implementations. Here are some key things I took away:
The "Let's put the technology out there and see what happens approach"
In Gartner's research, over 90% of "put it out there" implementations, the ones that start off as, "let's just give users some tools and see how they start to use them, then well adopt a strategy", fail. I've got to say, this is pretty in line with not only what I've found has happened at Habañero every time we put something out and think that everyone will just start using it. That, and our common effort to rescue our customer's unwieldy "tests" of new software further validate this concept. The core message is that social computing technologies are not successful because the tools are cool or are enabling something new, but rather, they are successful because someone has a vision, driven by a clear purpose of how a community is to be impacted BY the technology. So how do you inspire a community to rally behind a purpose? There's a few ways.
You can't make a business case for social software, but you can use social software for a business case
There is no ROI in wikis, blogs, better, quicker, faster, stronger collaborate-and-share technologies. The ROI is in how they are intended to impact the business. How will the changes to the community experience make you more money? Make your products better? Make people care? Reduce risk? This business case, David notes, is driven by a purpose. But realization doesn't happen right away. Most of the time, the types of shifts companies are looking to create happen over long periods of time, with evolving community needs. For this, he suggests creating a Purpose Roadmap.
Never test or prototype with the user community you intend to impact
I found this comment funny. We break this rule all the time and then have to deal with the aftermath. The basic rule here, is you have one try (MAYBE two if you're lucky) to truly get engagement from a user community. If you fail to hit it on the head, offer a compelling user experience, or simply get it wrong, you're toast. TEST with people who know how to be good test subjects….not with your community. A good reminder.
Never break John Gall's law
I don't like Murphy's law ("If anything can go wrong, it will"). It's so pessimistic. That said, I love John Gall's Law (called Gall's Law). It states:
"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system."
Applied to social computing, this basically means, don't boil the ocean with the first attempt. In fact start very, very, very, very small. I'm reminded of our larger consulting engagements that deliver some large, super featured portal or collaboration technology and then struggle with adoption. I love this law, and hope we live it more. God it's tempting to want to add more stuff.
Your tools should stretch a culture, not alter it
To Gall's point, making a "hoarding culture" a "sharing culture"' or a "technophobic culture" an "adoptive culture" is not something that happens over night. Again, it takes years. Find a way to include things in the purpose roadmap that provide incremental and small differences to the community you're impacting. Something we run into all the time: our customers want to make people "retain and share knowledge" because they are not doing it now. Now that I look at it, that's a pretty lofty (and likely impractical) change. I love this roadmap concept.
Purpose, Purpose, Purpose
I think this point is pretty clear now. I'm bet this content is trademarked by Gartner, but I don't think it'll hurt to list what David calls the Magnificent Seven for driving a good purpose for enabling effective Web 2.0 social tools within the enterprise context. They are:
Magnet (what's in it for users)
Aligned (what's in it for the business)
Properly scoped (small, small, small)
Promotes evolution (needs will change, so will the vision, that's the nature of community)
Low risk (choose low risk over high rewards)
Measureable (in business value terms)
Community driven
Now that I've completely stolen everything David said (with editorial), I suppose I say:
"I make no money from this blog."
J
I'm attending the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit this week, and these conferences always give me a blogging boost. I've been to a few sessions so far, and I'm pretty impressed with some of the speakers, so I thought I'd take notes in public form (via the blog). To do this, I'm also testing out Word's integration with Typepad (the company that hosts my blog). It's pretty cool so far, and here is how Word integration with typepad works:
1) First, I created a blank word "blog" document template on my desktop:
1a) I did this by clicking on the Word "Office Button" and Publish Blog
2) Word asked me to set up my link to my public blog. There is easy publishing available for Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, SharePoint (of course), Community Server, TypePad and WordPress. Though if your blog software offers web services for publishing, you'll probably be able to publish to it.
3) Finally, I started to write my blog posting. It's pretty darn intuitive to write, add categories, post and edit existing postings. Here's a picture of this blog posting:
I like this for a few reasons:
a) I can create blog postings while offline (for example when I'm at a conference) by using word as the "note taking" tool, and then publish when I come online.
b) I get to use the familiar interface of word, including spell check.
c) I don't have to remember my blog password. I tell you I forget that thing every time (might have something to do with blogging frequency).
d) Personally, I think the word interface is better than Typepads. It's that cool ribbon that does it for me.
So perhaps a new look and feel will revive my interest in bloggin'.
The Microsoft MOSS 2007 conference is a success for Habanero...we sent 8 folks down to the conference, and as a collective, we've learned a lot. We've also had a great time hanging with our clients, and seeing their eyes light up on cool stuff. Some of the highlights include:
Microsoft blueprint for Silverlight announced. The keynote showed some stuff that General Mills was doing with Silverlight and search. I am convinced this is the future of the enterprise search experience, and I'm going to avidly pursue figuring this out.
Community Kit for SharePoint. It's interesting. Clients don't like 3rd party products (to extend SharePoint). They're concerned about company longevity & pains related to installing, configuring and sustaining a 3rd party product. But boy, are they excited about free code. The community kit presentation highlighted some exciting upcoming features that are extending SharePoint's out of the box experience around blogs, wikis and other social, web 2.0ish kind of features. Export to and import from Word in the "upgraded wiki" features are pretty damn hot lookin'.
Advanced Search. There's a lot of buzz around search here. Not only because the free search was announced, but because of the crazy stuff that people are doing on MOSS search and the recent acquisition of FAST from Microsoft. As soon as that deal is final, expect some amazing stuff. Did you know that for enterprise users (not home users) google, yahoo and msn only own 30% of the Internet enterprise search market [Chris got this out of a analyst presentation]? This means products such as FAST make up the majority of searches that users within companies perform. INTERESTING.
Social Web 2.0 Tools. It's great to see a broader user community get excited about these tools in the workplace. I did a presentation to a bunch of Records Managers a few weeks ago to talk about social networking and collaboration tools and how we are seeing them used in the enterprise (and the RM challenges they cause), and I thought...holy cow...get up to speed on this stuff people! It's good to see some excited big ticket executives talk about the importance of these technologies within their companies.
Records Management on SharePoint 2007. I'm not crazy. There is a HUGE market here. General Mills, DAFRA, and some other big organizations gave presentations on what they are doing within SharePoint specifically around Records Management. One person in the audience asked "so are you locking down fileshares then?". Ahrg...some people just don't GET it. If you're creating a solution that is so bad that it forces people to want to use their old stuff, then perhaps it's your solution that's the problem, not the fact that the old stuff is still available. Anyway, I digress. I'm really happy about the progress we've made in this area and confident there's a good message on how these two play nice together. Certainly a blog topic to kill all blog topics.
Dude, Habanero rocks. Yet more validation we are rocking at Habanero. Besides sending more people than any other consulting company in the world (a guess, but I'm pretty sure this is accurate). We are WAY, WAY ahead of the general user community in SharePoint Information Architecture, designing a brand within the MOSS framework, architecting for large scale inter-continental deployments, user training, governance and having a kick ass framework for developing custom code solutions [see press release on Habaneros.com].
How do we get this information out to customers, future customers, and the general public at large?
Did you know, for example, that while SharePoint can run on a 64 bit server, there is no Adobe PDF ifilter available for a 64 bit machine to allow SharePoint to index pdf's?
or how about:
Did you know that if you're creating an external website on the MOSS platform, you should edit down the JS file that comes with SharePoint so external website users are not needing the nearly 1mb file when they browse your site?
or
Telerik's free MOSS 2007 editing control is all but required for MOSS sites that are going to support non IE browsers? The in browser editing controls for MOSS 2007 do not support Safari or Firefox!
How do we get this news to you?
In the interest of starting a wave of Blogging effort at Habanero around the topic of Collaboration, I'm reviving my blog until we get a shared author "Collaboration Blog" going here.
Soon, my friends. Soon.
Microsoft has released its Office System 2007 Licensing. Some interesting things to note:
a) Current Office Professional users will migrate to Office Professional Plus under SA's and EA's.
b) Forms Server (InfoPath forms via the web) will be released as a separate server offering, but also included in the new Enterprise CAL introduced by Microsoft. This will have a separate licensing structure for external website use.
c) The new Enterprise CAL (which will be an upgrade to the Core CAL many companies already own) will include:
d) A new desktop suite called Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 will include the laptop friendly tools Groove & OneNote.
e) A product acquired from a company called UMT (www.umt.com) is being re-branded and included in the 2007 server lineup as: Microsoft Project Portfolio Server 2007.
References:
Microsoft.com: Client Suite Licensing
Microsoft.com: Pricing Overview (Including Servers)
Microsoft.com (Word Doc): Pricing FAQ Sheet - Includes Great details about each individual server.
I'm anxious to start to share cool details about Microsoft's next version of SharePoint, CMS and other Office products (Called Office 12 or O12). Officially, the O12 client software is no longer under NDA (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, Visio, Access, Outlook). The O12 "servers" are. That said, I've decided I'm going to do two things with this blog until O12 becomes fully public.
a) I'll point you to the best resources on Office 12 and Microsoft's next wave of their collaboration, Enterprise content Management, Business Intelligence, Portal and Desktop Publishing suite.
and
b) I'll try to summarize the publically available details of Office 12 in a manner that makes sense to me :)
O12 is slated for release in the second half of 2006. There are no official details available yet on product pricing or how the server or client products are going to be packaged, which is probably the biggest annoyance, but as soon as we find out, I'll post it.
Get up to date info on the next release of Office (remember "Office" now loosely refers to the package of products that integrate with or complement the desktop suite (Word, Power Point, Excel) : CMS / SharePoint / Excel Server / InfoPath Server / Project Server / Project Professional / InfoPath / Visio.
What's coming?
Built in PDF support, a new User Interface, Records Management, new XML based file formats, revived Content Management, a customizable User Interface for SharePoint, integration with Windows Workflow foundation, an enhanced Information Bridge Framework (Business Data Catalog), Item Level Security, enhanced Rights Management, Recycle Bins. And that's only the stuff that's been publicly announced...
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx
Alrighty, I recognize I have a clear Microsoft bias right now.