Posts Tagged ‘social software’

The Enterprise 2.0 coffee machine

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

I’m quite certain every manager can vouch for how important the coffee machine is to their business. And for those that think they are just time wasters, well..

Because, not only does it provide the workforce with the much needed caffeinated brew, but first and foremost, it provides the necessary space for:

  • Exchange of ideas
  • Exchange of information
  • Social interaction (who does what ?)

But, there are some shortcomings:

  • The information is volatile
  • Ideas cannot be formally credited
  • The information is confined to those present at this particular time
  • The advent of anti-smoking laws has split the workforce into essentially 2 separate groups

And that’s where social media tools can help. Of course, no-one expects that it can entirely replace the coffee machine – at least because social media tools do not provide one with caffeine (yet), but some of the information exchanged during social interaction – basically “gossips” – is probably best kept “volatile”.

But most of the information exchanged and social networking should be seen as business assets, and therefore should be exploitable as such. Appropriate tools should allow anyone to feed the system using free flowing input such as informal textual information, pictures, sounds, videos and hints – and leave it to the system to organize, formalize, categorize, link, etc..

For the workforce, there are multiple incentives

  • They get credit for new ideas
  • They can track their own progress
  • They can track other people’s progress

For the business and management, it gets even better

  • They can track their workforce progress
  • Individuals have easy and intuitive access to information
  • Individuals have easy and intuitive access to the people who possess the relevant information
  • From a HR standpoint, it becomes possible to get candid information about morale and such
  • Information fed into the system becomes persistent asset
  • Information can be fed quickly without the hassle of looking for specific forms and whatnot
  • Information can be fed even by those who do not drink coffee, smoke or either/both

–Ivan

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Selling 2.0 internally

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

On the same day we had our seminar, I went directly to my company’s boss – who happened to also attend the seminar I was talking about in my last post.

My intents here were simple : Get a candid view and eventually to start getting ready the field for our OWN implementation!

Unfortunately, he hadn’t seen the whole pitch (can’t blame him – a CO line of work hardly allows sitting down for hours listening to someone explaining concepts) – so some work had to be done – and that’s within the allotted amount of time he could spare for me.

So when I came in his office, with all my high hopes and renewed interest in the matter, I was slightly put down when he merely brushed away the whole concept – and pretty much gave me the “unbeliever” look. “Nah.. I don’t believe in this whole 2.0 thing”

But Enterprise 2.0 is not a matter of faith ! It’s a matter of business and hard facts.

And his first rebuttal was actually my anchor : Basically, he was stating that he couldn’t get his employees (yours truly included) to file reports or transmit simple facts to the rest of the team. He gave me an example of what happened when one of our partner’s salesperson changed – and no-one was aware of this because the information wasn’t spread around. So his objection was : How can we expect our people to sign onto blogs, wikis and whatnot when we can’t even get them to fill in simple forms ?

So it hit me. This is *exactly* what 2.0 is about ! How can you expect a busy person to browse through a hierarchical file structure, find the right form, fill it with intricate and (mostly) useless details when all you are asked to convey is something it would take you 20 seconds to just “say”. The answer is simple : Just allow the people to enter their information the way they would “say” it! And leave it to the 2.0 tools to sort it out for you.

Not only is it more simple for the employee to fill some non-formal report – without having to search the whole internal document hierarchy to find the appropriate form (something that will never get done unless under duress), but instead just feed it to the information bin. The tool is there to classify this for you (and if you can give hints, so much the better !). And not only this, but when the critical piece of information has been fed into the system, it now becomes part of the whole. The next time someone needs to know about “Salespeople at partner XXXX”, not only do you get the latest news, but you also get *who* brought it up (and you may then be able to ask for more details if necessary)

So it goes from 10 minutes searching the forms, and 3 minutes filling in the form – for some information no-one will read to a 30 seconds quick type in a text box, adding a couple of tags – for some information that is easy to find and that can be relayed to you so you can give details if people are interested.

At this point, my boss started looking fairly intrigued. He hadn’t thought of it that way. He didn’t give me the go to start implementing a whole 2.0 infrastructure in the company. Although I might have convinced him – or at least – given him food for thoughts, there are other considerations to take into account (some way more political than I care to even think about !).

But it was a step forward !

–Ivan

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Novell end-user conference debrief

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

Yesterday, I was invited to the Novell end-user Conference.

It was a nice little conference, with 50 or so people attending.

After the general opening session, we had a demo presentation of Groupwise 8, Novell’s messaging solution. Some nice features in there !

We were also granted with a customer experience report from one of Novell’s Groupwise customer.

Then came Bruno Teyton of IDC which gave us a summary of IDC’s view on the economic perspectives for the next 4 or 5 years as well as how this would impact implementation of messaging and collaboration solutions. Of course, that was a bit grim, but overall, it wasn’t all that dark. There was some focus on messaging solutions as a cost reducing mean by achieving quick ROI. Long term prospects also put emphasis on reducing storage costs by deduplicating data.

After a quick snack, we were back for the afternoon session

IDC was back and gave us more prospects about the 2.0 world. That was probably the part I was the most waiting for. Again, the focus was more on the economic aspects of going 2.0 – with some strong emphasis on the actual management changes required. Overall, going to a 2.0 model seemed like the 2nd executives topmost priority (although I couldn’t get if this was from a global perspective or only for the large businesses). Some of the reasons given for that push was cost reduction (no surprise here) through use of telecommuting and remote communications – via instant messaging, webinars and videoconferencing. Other drives evoked were leveraging knowledge workers assets, being appealing to generation Y workers and increasing reactivity and turaround times – by somewhat shortening the chain of command.

Quite an interresting view on the state of affairs in that field, but – not to lessen IDC’s work on those analysis – it’s what they do anyway – I am personally always a bit cautious about the validity of long term prospects, especially in times like now when everything seems so volatile. Giving 5 years outlooks with 0.1 point accuracy seems a bit ambitious to me !

Novell then presented their own collaborative package – called Teaming and Conferencing. The “teaming” part is based on kablink and seems to offer quite a few nice features. It sports the basic handfull of traditional 2.0 tool facets : groups (or teams), blogs, wikis, tagging and profiles. It also contains some document workflow handling capabilities with a neat graphical workflow editor. They also presented the next version (still not released yet) which has a few additional featurettes and a slightly different look and feel.

The conferencing part was only briefly evoked – but it offers the usual web conferencing facilities.. Whiteboarding, application sharing, slide presenter, group chats, etc.. We didn’t get a demo of this one though !

We then had a presentation by a Novell partner who seemed pretty pleased at how easy it was to put the teaming part in production for one of their customer – managing to roll out within 2 weeks after the deal was made.

The day finished with some tapas and some wine tasting games to flush it all down !

I am not going to make any sort of comparison between the various 2.0 software packages at this point – not without having tested the whole bunch – and – this could take some time ! But Novell’s package did seem to me like a decent player in that market.

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Social Software, Enterprise 2.0 and the VAD perspective

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

I attended Lotusphere 2008 this january, and it’s obvious that there is an overall trend towards promoting (and ultimately selling) social software solutions.

I’m not going to review the ins and outs and advantages of the 2.0 model (or whatever they’ll call it next year) – this has been covered by people way more capable than me on the subject.

But I am faced with 3 different problems. First, I am a VAD (read : Value Added Distributor – I sell stuff that I get from the vendor to resellers that themselves sell to the end users).. Meaning I have very little interaction with the final solution users.

Second, it seems more and more obvious that the problem with selling Social Software solutions is that.. well.. you can’t ! Not directly. There are preliminary steps involved which include promoting a shift in the enterprise’s paradigms, and that’s not easy.. We’re talking about going from an all formal process to a partly non formal methodology – and rely on the social software infrastructure to provide that formalization.

Third, most of my partners customers are SMBs (SMall Businesses) – and not in the IBM sense of the term – But really small <100 employees businesses which makes it even harder. After all, those Fortune 500 companies may have an “Enterprise 2.0″ commission or task force, but that’s not going to happen for those very small businesses.

So here I am, having to convince a 2nd tier entity of the opportunity of laying the ground for Social Software *WITHOUT* even trying to sell the tools (at first) to small legacy companies.

The solutions I believe is to take a multi step approach. My first baby step involves convincing my own management of the advantages of going 2.0. The advantage here is that it’s a whole lot easier to promote something that you are doing internally.

I asked about that to one of the 2.0 evangelists at Lotusphere and he advised me to start by taking even more small steps. He told me the best possible approach was to start by implementing a small subset of the Social Software spectrum of tools. Maybe start with some profiles and activities tools. If everything is done right, before long, they’ll ask for more.

Now, assuming this works as planned (and that’s a big if), the next step is obviously to start pulling my partners into the loop and get THEM to take the same approach – I’m always going for the assumption that it’s easier to sell something you use everyday – and teach them from what I’ve learned. Mind it, at that point, I still haven’t made a penny yet !

There is also some nice incentives for the partners. Besides the obvious licensing sales, huge up sell opportunities exist – consulting, service, possibly recurring SAAS revenues – and if everything is done right, some good word of mouth to help enroll more customers.

I am at a starting point here, and I am the middle man – or rather – my company is – but there are some opportunities, I just want to make sure I can make something out of it.

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