Enterprise 2.0 and social business : what to expect in 2012 ?

January 10, 2012 By 1 Comment

Résumé : what will be the enterprise 2.0 / social business in 2012 ? It will highly depends on choices organizations will make to deal with the paradox of finding ways to go out of the crisis while not having much money to invest. 2012 will certainly be the year where window window-dressing projects and deeper corporate ones will diverge as well as those aiming at adding a community layer to the existing organization vs those aiming at reinventing the organizational structure and operation models. Should the world be perfect, we’ll see budgets shift from technology to organizational transformation, from adding new layers to integrating existing ones, community approaches becoming more operations-driven, social becoming more a transformation than transplanting an external body. In a non perfect world we’d see window-dressing projects surviving a little bit before the final collapse, because of approaches too disconnected from the enterprise world to deliver results and sustain long term engagement.

A new year is starting…with the usual prediction challenge. It does not matter if these predictions become true or not, that anticipation is confused with taking one’s dreams for granted : predictions are a part of the landscape and even those who don’t take them seriously expect them. So I’m trying to play the game one more time.

First, let’s be clear on what prediction means. Even if I’m happy with what I “predicted” these last years (understand “I was right”), don’t expect to find anything revolutionary in the next lines. What we usually call predictions is nothing more than common sense (or lack of). Predicting the iPhone en 1990 would have been a prediction. Prediction the need from bringing social into the flow of work in 2009 was only common sense. Rather stating the obvious.

What leads us to a very important point. As long as one is lucid and clearly understands that, even social or 2.0, the real point is enterprise and business, with all the constraints and context that comes with, it’s not that hard to identify where things will block and what concerns will arise. Finding how organizations will decide to respond is much harder. Anyway each one will respond in its own way depending on its culture, its culture, the courage of its executives when it will come to make strategic decisions. Because of all that, we’ll surely see much more diversity than before in social business approaches…

So, here are the trends I seen for 2012.

1°) Budget : from technology to organizational transformation

Before being about people or technology, that’s a matter of money. Technology, accompaniment, internal efforts… And we all know that in 2012 money will fall from the sky and anyone will be able to spend it on any shiny initiative. Or not. So it all depends of a strategic choice for enterprises facing crises : getting ready for the crash or finding the winning way out.

Finding the winning way out may mean many different things. One of them could be keeping the investments and even making more efforts because it’s “now or never”. Another could be of not changing the amount but the allocation. I recently mentioned a survey saying that HR seem to refocus on organizational transformation to the detriment of some other points. I read another one, about services budgets, saying something like “less software and integration, more on building new business and organizational models”.

The most meaningful choice will on whether to favor technology or its usages. It seems that the second may win or at least not being the least considered part of the job anymore. Such arbitrations will be key facts to understand 2012.

 

2°) A more operations-driven approach to social dynamics

Some of us have been discussing this point for years but it seems that things are becoming more mature now. In 2009, anyone talking about a social approach to business processes was considered as an heretic. Today things seem to be converging and enterprises are more ready to listen and understand to such discourses that make more sense for them. Or maybe the disciples of the “Care Bears Social Church” have given up and admit that the word process was not a blasphemy anymore.

So, the job is not about keeping the old organizational structure and adding a community layer on its top, out of the flow of work, but :

1°) Bringing  social into the flow of work even it means fixing the flow to make it agile and adaptable

2°) Jointing flows of work and out-of-the-flow community approaches to ensure all the efforts will contribute to value creation. If not, the final conclusion will come quickly : communities = unproductive silos…and once again we’ll have missed a great opportunity to improve things.

But being aware does not mean acting accordingly. Even if a consensus forms on such an approach, it will take time to implement it because it needs organizations to put their hands in the organizational mess and out of age processes. That’s what the “E20 = E1.0+communities” was designed to avoid. Unsuccessfully.

Depending on the choices made in each organizations, we’ll see forks forming in the the social business world. And, in my opinion, one of them is a dead end.

Behind this point lies something deeper…that’s my third point.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR, Software & Tools, strategy, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Google + : an enterprise tool ?

September 23, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary : Can Google Plus become a major player in the enterprise software field ? It will depend on its positioning and the efforts Google will make to understand a field where things have always been difficult for them. Google Plus is not a social networking platform but brings relevant answers to exchange and communication issues that are more related to email than social networks. Anyway, Google Plus, will not only have to fill some gaps to become a credible enterprise tool but will also need to learn how to integrate in the complex ecosystem of existing enterprise applications, most of all for usages they’ve never been good at. Google has the means of his ambition provided he proves he has de right culture

After a first post on my first steps with Google +, it’s time to deal with the question that’s already in many people’s minds : can Google + become an enterprise tool. Let’s be clear : I’m not talking about using this tool for brands but as an internal work tool for employees. In other words : will Google Plus be a game changer the day it will be a part of Google’s enterprise apps pack ?

As a matter of fact, many see Google + as the missing link of Google’s enterprise off which still lacks a collaboration/social/conversation part. Until now, Google has always been very good at search, online office tools (which is a first level of collaboration but limited to documents) but has never been successful when trying to go further. Google sites despite being useful and powerful only meet a small part of people’s need and the “Wave” experiment…was only an experiment. Too early, too improvable, too powerful but too ununderstood…Wave was “too” too many things and Google decided to kill it instead of improving it. But it’s sure that they learnt a lot from Wave when they started working on Google +

Hence the reflex of positioning Google plus as Google’s Trojan on the enterprise social software market, on the enterprise social network part. But Google plus has nothing of an enterprise social network platform. It’s not a social network in the strict meaning of the word because it does not allow to validate the link between two people in an explicit way. You’re in my circle(s), I’m in yours but it doesn’t mean anything more. This is way even Twitter founder’s once said that Twitter was not a social network…even if it’s easier to consider it as such. It’s not either an enterprise social network because it’s functionalities are too light. Of course, integration with Google apps can solve a part of the problem but not the whole problem. Groups and communities also lack for an enterprise use.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

An internal social network replaces nothing but improves the existing

August 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : A social network ? Yes but to replace what ? How many times did we hear this question at the time this kind of tools was entering the corporate workspace. Considering social networks as something that will replace existing tools often lead some misuses, for things it was not designed for. As a matter of fact, enterprise social networks were more designed to make up for lacks than for improvement. Marketing approaches did not help either since saying “xxxx is dead, let’s throw everything away” was so easy. An interesting approach is to separate the social aspect from the network tool in our thoughts. The network is a tool that completes the existing, social is a conceptual and functional approach that improves the existing and creates synergies between all the tools, the resources that use them and the resources they handle.

This is a periodical question that comes like season. What ? The obsession, of wondering what part of the information system will be made obsolete and replaced by an internal social network.

Let’s sum up. We had “will ESNs replace the intranet ?”, “Will ESNs kill the email ?”. “Will ESNs replace the corporate directory ?”. “Will ECM be replaced by conversation ?”. “Will ESNs replace collaboration tools ?”. And what was the final conclusion ? “Yes…but no. ESNs are a part of a wider system that needs us to rethink the way we interact with others, with information, the notion of collaboration”. Since it appeared that adding a tool did not solve anything without having a more global approach, the the discussion moved to….replacing another tool. And so on…

As a matter of fact :

• ESNs to replace the intranet ? Except for those who have a simplistic vision of intranets or a SMB without very specific needs, ESNs only conver a part of the needs.

• ESNs to replace email ? Without a deep thinking on the way information is consumed, acted on, on the way exchanges are organized on a global scale, on the way we analyze, process and prioritize it, thinking that a social network will replace email and solve the information overload is nothing but illusory. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Information should go from tool to tool. End users shouldn’t.

June 4, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : Even if there are lots of discussions on new ways of working and the tools that will make it possible, very little attention is paid to the matter that’s being worked and the reason why it’s worked. Employees, who need to gather knowledge, information and people from many tools, still don’t have any melting pot to do their work. As a matter of fact and contrary to the usual way of looking at it, tools and people need to articulate and follow each other around the matter employees are working on rather than scattering the matter between tools. The problematic people are working on is unchanging while the rest varies. What matters is to organize the mobility of objects in the context of work rather than the mobility of employees around tools.

When discussing the way people work (or should work), we use to focus on the organization of work (usages and management), tools (collaborative, participative etc…) but seldom pay any attention to the objects people work on. Thinking that work is all and only about adopting new tools and practices may be too simplistic if no one cares about what needs to be handled, gathers, put together, transformed in the context of work. These things may be of so many different kind that I’ll use the very generic word of “object” to call them. This word also seems very relevant in the context of a concept that is more and more talked about and is really key to understand what employees need to get their work done : “social objects”.

To get their work done, people need to find, enrich, improve, modify, put together, alone or in a collaborative may, “objects” as various as a “case”, a person, a file, a feedback, a procedure etc…in fact nearly any form of information available in the organization, This is one more evidence of the changing nature of work that is more and more about putting knowledge and people together and in context.

The biggest issue in change programs is not always to make people work this way. In fact they’re already doing so,  juggling with many tools and the information they contain, trying to be the middleware between all these things. The problem is that they’re given new tools that are supposed to fill some shortcomings but no attention is paid to how to pu all these new tools and info together. So the amount of useful and usable information can endlessly increase while users are still unable to make the most of it. And the reason is quite simple to get : users are equipped to handle objects in the context of the tool that “owns” them and not in the context of their work. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Knowledge & Information management, Recommended Bookmarks, Software & Tools Tagged With: , , , , , ,

What is a social intranet or an intranet 2.0 ?

January 28, 2011 By 2 Comments

Summary : Everybody’s talking about social intranets or intranet 2.0 but none have a clear idea of what it can look like. Between the myth of intranets being replaced by social networks and traditional owners of the intranet fearing the end of the top-down model, ideological and functional debates may last for long. A social intranet does not mean that social networks will assume the whole power but that the elements of a traditional intranet, information, people and business applications, will be socialized. It’s not about adding new tools but generalizing new services and functionalities across all the components of the intranet. And, at last and even before all, it’s a work tool that’s here to serve a corporate vision. Changing the intranet is useless unless work, internal and external relationships as well as the related behaviors and positions are revisited.

Many organizations are rethinking (or thinking or rethinking) their good old intranet that is obviously affected by the weight of years and wonder how to integrate the famous “2.0 layer” in what is supposed to be a social intranet (or intranet 2.0). But, even if the word are in every mouth it does not mean that the idea of what it exactly mean is clear. There are many options depending on the maturity of the owner of the project, the realistic nature of the roadmap he’s assigned, and the change tolerance of the organization. Depending on the context, some of these options will be more or less relevant.

In the previous paragraph I mentioned the “social layer”, what states that the 2.0 side is a new dimension of the intranet and not an isolated bubble. So, it’s not about building an intranet on the one side and a social network on the other side. Why ? For 90% of employees, using a social network at work is not a reflex and it the network is not close to the center of gravity of their work environment, there are lots of chances no one will use it. Moreover, social activities need stimulation and stimulation often comes from a corporate information, a business related data…in fact from sources that are usually on the traditional intranet.

I suggest that such an intranet relies on some pillars that are. :

Socializing information

What I mean by socializing information can  take one many forms :

- allowing users to choose the sections of the intranet he wants to read in particular and display them on his home page or a dedicated page.

- allowing users to share any content of the intranet with colleagues (via their internal “twitter”, in a community etc…) with respect of rights and authorizations. (But let’s be honnest = today, even without such tools, secret information circulates by email).

- allowing users to share external content and bring them in the internal flow, and let rating and curation mechanisms make it climb to the head of the organization or spread horizontally.

- allwing users to react to any content either where it’s published or by pushing it to a blog or a community to start a conversation.

- allowing users to promote any content by rating it, approving it (“like”) to make it more visible on the homepage or share it through one’s activity stream.

- allowing any corporate department to deploy on-demand microsites (with predefined templates) what makes corporate communication more granular and close to employees.

It’s the least any enterprise can do, most of all because it’s in the scope of the traditional top-down communication that will not disappear but needs serious improvements to become more user-centric and interactive.

Socializing people

Sharing, reacting, discussing and collaborating are good things…but knowing with whom is even more important. Of course, there are people we know and who’ll quickly join our “network”, but there are also all those we don’t know today but we will need one day. So, before telling users to connect and do things together we should make it easier for them to find and identify one another.

Everything starts with a rich profile like those we can find on any social network. It will made of official information from the traditional IT systems (position, hierarchical belonging, competencies…), employees being free not to display all of it, but also of information provided by its owner (past experiences, topics of interest) and even bu his colleagues (endorsements, tags…). Of course, the owner validates anything others want to put on his profile. Last, the profile also includes employee’s social activities : communities, blogs, wikis updates, shared bookmarks…

This information constitute a stream other users can subscribe to to follow the activities of one person in the same way they can follow a specific section of the intranet or the corporate communication. Anyone can choose what appears in his one’s own stream.

This rich profile should not compete with the official directory : it’s the directory. To be more precise, it’s were the directory is accessible to users. (Note to IT people : don’t forget to choose solutions that can sync with several directories at the same time : it’s very useful when there’s not a single directory and it shows a unified view of all your directories even if your standardization project is late…)

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Intranets and digital workplace, Knowledge & Information management, Management & HR, Software & Tools Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Rich profiles : an overlooked market ?

November 12, 2010 By 2 Comments

When we talk about social media in the workplace, it means, it’s about lots of tools. Blogs, wikis, social networks, social boomarking, microblogging etc… As years go all these tools are improving, each adding the core functionalities of the others to such an extent than more and more products are now looking alike.

One of these tools has not been packaged as a product by itslef : the rich profile, enriched by people activies, by more official datas, professional or personal information that makes it easier to identify, find and know each person.

Profile is key to many approaches because its usefulness is obvious to anyone : easily find people one’s now but also identifying relevant people one don’t know but are relevant to solve a given problem. For many organizations it’s, and for good reasons, the entry point to social media, because it’s seems to ensure a quick adoption of a first light social layer that meet an actual need.

On the other hand, rich profiles makes no sense if not fed by relevant information and aggregating people’s activities, what supposes it’s interfaced with as many other applications as possible, should they be social or more traditionnal. What implies the applications in question already exist and are used.

So the rich profile is the perfect entry point to discover tools and usages provided other tools and usages pre-exists. Sounds like chicken and egg. Vendors know that and all social tools include their own profile that makes the most of the use of the tool. Obvious solution. But is it the perfect one ? In fact it can be questioned.

The fact is for any enterprise, profiles share one characteristics with employee directories they are often the visible part of : they’re worth only if unique and used by all. Things are actually different  : in most organizations many social platforms coexist, each having its own profile, relying on its own data, what makes people have as many profiles as applications they use, each of them being, of course uncomplete. Moreover, even when an organization has chosen an unique tools, it’s not always accessible to all empoyees.

So a situation where some employees have many profiles relying on different sources, some don’t have any, and not every employee can see all profiles is not uncommon at all. Not a comfortable situation.

Hence the questions : is there a room for a directory relying on rich profiles, distinct from any applications but able to rely on all the existing and future ones, avoiding data dispersion and multiple updates. Is something missing on the market ? Will organizations need to connect all these data by themselbes with lots of specific devs ? Will a vendor manage to make the profile of their solution a market standard because it will easily interface with any tools and even its competitors ?

D’où la question : n’y a-t-il pas une place pour un annuaire reposant sur des profils riches, distinct de toutes les applications mais pouvant tirer profit de toutes, existantes ou à venir, évitant la dispersion des données et les mises à jour redondantes ? Existe-t-il un trou dans l’offre du marché ? Les entreprises vont elles devoir assurer elles-mêmes la mise en cohérence de ce patchwork de données à grand renforts de développements spécifiques ? Ou alors un éditeur va-t-il réussil à faire du profil lié à son produit celui qui, en s’interfaçant avec mille et un autre outils deviendra le standard de facto

This is something I’ve been thiniking about for a long time and seems to make more and more sense.

Filed Under: Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , ,

And the best enterprise social network platform on the market is…

November 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Summary : at a given moment in any enterprise 2.0 project, a choice has to be made about the tools that will be used. And,, the “specialist” is often asked the same question : “Tell me what’s the best tool on the market”. That’s a tough question regarding to the number of parameters to take into account and, in fact, there’s no “best tool on the market” but rather “tools that fit the most a given context. However, with hindsight and as organization’s maturity is increasing, the criterias that are used to define such a tool are evolving. For a perenial, scalable and coherent project that will avoid the “social bubble syndrome, I came to the conclusion that businesses should  qualify an environment and application services rather than an application as such.

I can’t remember how many times I was asked what social platform to chose, what was the “best one” in my opinion. That’s a question I’ve never been able to answer.

First, because it’s impossible to suggest a tool regardless to its purpose. Do you want a tool to screw or hammer ? Both a hammer and a screwdriver are excellent tools to do DIY but if the objective is not known there’s a real risk of suggesting to buy a hammer while there’s a screw issue.

Then, because many factors hav to be taken into account. Its functional richness, its ergonomy (very subjective), how easy it is to implement it quickly, the need or aversion for Saas, its ability to integrate with existing tools, its coherence with the prevailing technologies in the organization…not mentionning a lot of factors that may sound surprising but may be essential in a given context. Depending on the need, each of these points will weight differently what will lead the organization to make a choice that will be theirs.

Last, because it will always be a matter of compromise rather than a matter of choice. Anyone who have ever tried to conduct an exhaustive researche on social tools or, like me, has to know and work with a lot of platforms will tell you the same thing : there’s no perfect tool on the market and even if some are marking themselves out, a given need will make us chose a tool that we would never have considered as a possible first choice before. Even worse : by dint of trying more and more platforms, we are often disappointed with the one that’s chosen, whatever its name is. Everyting being a matter of compromise, we chose the one that is 70%, 80%, 90% like the “ideal tool” as we could dream it but does not exist. And we spend our time saying “xxx software does it better”…knowing that if we have chosen xxx software we would have regreted something from yyyy soft that was the other option.

What’s wrong with compromises is that, by chosing something that averagely meets all the needs, you can end with something that specifically meet no need at all and see all business departments launch pirate projects and go to find an alternative platform for their own needs.

So my answer used to be “try to fing the tools that fits your needs the best and avoid tools that are so neutral that despite they won’t raise any issue they won’t solve anything either”. And once done “learn to love what you have since you can’t have what you love”. Far from being satisfying.

I don’t even mention the cases when businesses have to chose two tools because any couldn’t do the job alone.

Now I’ve refined my criterias. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Employees are not middleware

October 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Summary : the reason why employees balk at using many of the tools they’re provided with is because they are asked to articulate different ways of working and type of informations together and bridge the gaps between application silos. Not only all of them don’t have the required skills to do that, to understand how and why they should articulate things together but, moreover, they don’t have the time to bridge between tool. For a long time they’ve been asked to do a kind of middleware job. In the future, organizations won’t avoid the cost of a deeper tool integration in order to replace people’s time that’s not scalable by a technological layer that is. That’s also true for enterprise social software.

The less we can say is that organizations have been investing a lot to make employees more productive by making their tasks easier to perform but employees really balk at using the tools that are supposed to make their life easier. At the beginning many thought that it will be different with enterprise social software because it’s made of tool that people use and appreciate in their personal lives. But, at the end, the conclusion is still the same : an incredible portfolio that can help to face nearly all situations…but very few adoption.

Let’s try to think as the average employee. In front of him, on his screen : an email client, a portal, a document management system, one or two activity specific application (ERP, CRM…), a social network, an instant messaging client… Enough to do everything and solve all his needs and channels for every kind of interaction : structured, unstructured, synchronous, asynchronous, within a defined project group, within open topic-centric communities…

The truth is that organization made a bet. They bet people intuitively know how to articulate these logics and tools and behave as information smugglers.

- articulate logics : work with structured activity centric tools and go to find relevant information to make decisions in a social network for instance.

- articulate tools : use a CRM, then find some information in the social network, then in the ECM, come back to the CRM then use the portal… Aggregate all the informations about someone from the official directory, his activities on the social network, his contribution to wikis etc…to be sure this is the right person to contact to solve a business problem.

- being information smugglers : a discussion in a tool may help to generate an information in another, an information here may be the cause of a conversation there.. To make the system work, information has to move from one tool to another. A report from the CRM to share in a group space, a discussion inside a community to link to an action in the CRM… In the best case people copy and past, in the worse they make screen shots…and end doing nothing because it makes them waste too much time. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Software is business by nature, information social by purpose

August 6, 2010 By Leave a Comment

At the first times of the coming of 2.0 tools in the workplace, they used to be conscientiously locked into secured experimental bubbles in order to tame them in a safe context. This kind of approach showed its limits and its counter-productive nature.

- the tools in questions were isolated from traditional applications (directories, workflows, business tools) they didn’t communicate and exchange with. Yet the proper of these tools was to improve discussions and information sharing. None of these are spontaneous and most of times they are caused by a situation, a context, a stimulation. What makes a situation, a context “happen” in the workplace ? Elements coming from business tools. Consequence : discussion was kept away from what caused it, problem solving from what constitutes the problem. Result : no participation.

- consequence of the previous point : the utilization of these tools was not integrated in user’s work flow. Since a tool is not linked to business systems, the usages and interactions it supports is not linked to business either. Moreover, it was a key lessons from many experimentations : the tool didn’t have to impact people’s day to day job, bring any change or confusion.What a paradoxical situation for many users : since discussions, sharing, exchange are parts of knowledge workers work flow, everything was done to make social software be used for anything but that.

So, integration and unification of both work and information flows are indissociable.

Slowly, reasion is taking the upper hand and the importance of integrating social software in the existing application landscape and in employee’s work flow is now understood by most people. A better integration of social applications with business applications is needed and that’s good.

But isn’t there something that sounds strange ? That means that, first, the value proposal and the positionning of these tools was not clear for all players and, second, that no lesson was learnt of many years of trial and errors : building bridges means than there is no understanding that we’re talking about one sole things.

Saying that social and business have to be more integrated shows that the first is not seen as being a part of the second yet. It means that they are still thought separately.

So it seems surprising :

- that many players in these field consider they are social before being business and are too focused on their own beliefs to understand business needs and constraints. Social is a means that is there to serve the business and not an end business has to give a reason to exist.

- that many companies still think that “social” is complementary since it’s a part of the very nature of business, most of all at times when communication, in all its forms, is key to execute many process. But, to some extent, it’s less serious than the previous point that, once fixed, will stop confusing the way businesses understand these things.

A product is “business” or is not. There’s no room for “almots” or “yes but”. Any information is not social or business. It’s business or not and has to be able to be the subject of “social” actions. Moreover we can wonder if the strongest barrier to social software adoption is the fact we tried to socialize people inside new tools instead of making it possible for them to “socialize” information wherever it is without having to launch any new tool that adds the impressive list of already existing one and forces them to split their attention to take one more information source into account while what stimulates information production inside the tool is always outside the tool and can be found anywhere, in any other business application.

sParadoxically, Social software will be a major and adopted trend the day when there will always be business applications in the workplace and social will be a transparent layer nobody will even notice. Articulting social with business, building bridges may be a a good first step but in order to create value for and with users one more step will be needed : fusion.

PS : I purposely use quotes when I say “social” or “socialization”, admitting that I’m using comfortable buzzwords that gives senses without having to say what it exactly means. Maybe explaining, and even debunking, the S word is necesary. Let’s say that, applied to information, it means the ability to share it, push it out of its original container and interact on / around it out of any organized and planned approach. Applied to people it would mean enabling them to identify, connect to and interact with / on people out of any beforehand defined system.

enterprise-social-software, intégration, logiciel d’entreprise, social software, social media

Filed Under: Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , ,

What’s new at Lotus ? Coherence, openness and value

February 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment

connections-logoI rencently had the chance to attend Lotusphere in order to gauge the feeling of what what happening at IBM/Lotus. I took some time to write this post because I was not sure of the point of view I had to take.

It was obvious that “I saw tools doing this and this” was not relevant. In the enterprise 2.0 solutions arena I don’t think this is the point. There are many tools that help to create communities, wikis, social networks, twitter-likes… So when you are IBM (or Microsoft) you must have everything in your portfolio while smaller competitors may focus on only one part of the E2.0 offer. Notice that the latters tend to enrich their offer what makes  products  looking more and more similar with the risk of including a very good application into a suite that is not as good.

In short, if you’re looking for a product benchmark I think there are enough things writen on the web. In my opinion the point is elsewhere. Being able to make bricks coherent, being able to provide user with a coherent experience in various contexts, find one’s place in the workday workflow. And, last but not least : demonstrate that the needs of organizations are understood and that a clear and relevant vision of the future exists.

Let’s see how things are doing.

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Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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