We Enterprise Irregulars have been talking in our online forum about the paucity of Enterprise 2.0 case studies —  examples of companies that have deployed behind the firewall some of the new collaboration/social technologies and philosophies that have proved so powerful on the Web.  I was about to cite DrKW, but the community essentially said "Yeah, we know that one.  What else is out there?"

It’s a good and important question.  At some point we have to move past saying "These new tools are going to make a difference" and start saying "Here’s how these new tools have been making a difference."

I’m working on a couple interesting case studies at present, and will share findings once they’re finished.  In the meantime, we would love to hear from you.

What’s the track record to date?  Who’s had experience with the Enterprise 2.0 toolkit —  wikis, blogs, tagging infrastructures, RSS feeds, prediction markets, etc. —  and what has that experience been?  

How long have the technologies been in place?  What have been the adoption and use patterns?  Did Enterprise 2.0 take off immediately and spread like wildfire, did it go nowhere fast, or did something in between happen?  

Has the experience been positive and have participants ‘played nice’ with each other, or have there been instances of vandalism, trolling, flaming, etc.?  Have there been any security problems or breaches?  Have there been any unintended consequences, whether positive or negative?

What kind of organizations have been deploying these tools?  Big or small?  For-profit or not?  Geek-heavy or not?  In what industries?

Have the installations been done with the awareness and blessing of senior management and/or the IT department, or have they been stealthy?

And what have been the results?  What, if anything, can you take to a hardheaded pragmatist to demonstrate the value of the new tools?

We’re eager to hear as much of the story as you’re able to tell, at any level of disclosure or anonymity.  Please tell us via a comment here or an email to me.  I’ll treat emails as confidential unless you specify otherwise.

We’re looking forward to hearing from you…

.

I have an article in the current (November) issue of Harvard Business Review intended to help non-technologist managers make sense of the huge range of available applications and also to clarify their roles in IT efforts.  The full text of the article is available online for the month of November, and reprints can be ordered here.  

The editors at HBR did a great job pulling quotes from the article to summarize its points, so let me just reproduce them here:

Classifying IT into three types can help leaders understand which technologies they must invest in as well as what they should do to maximize returns.

Once the company’s business needs are clear, the technologies it requires will come into focus.

The biggest mistake business leaders make is to underestimate resistance when they impose changes in the ways people work.

    Please do check out the article and let me know what you think, either with a comment here or an email.

In my MBA course this past spring our classes on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 went very well.  They were a mix of case studies, lectures, and show-and-tell discussions.  I left most of the classes thinking I’d accomplished one of the most important objectives for any teacher —  staying at least 1/4 step ahead of the students.  I’d simply spent more time looking at the technologies and thinking about their implications than my students had, which helped me maintain my slim lead.

I felt good about my odds of staying ahead of them in this area until I realized that Web 2.0 ‘happened’ after today’s MBA students left college.  Highly unscientific sampling shows me that the second years I’ll be teaching this spring were most likely to have graduated in 2001.  Let’s look at what’s happened between then and now.

2001

• Wikipedia adopts egalitarian editing policies in January of 2001, and receives its first Slashdot mentions in March of that year.

2002

• Blog indexing and search site Technorati is founded.
• Social networking site Friendster launches.

2003

• Social bookmarking site del.icio.us comes online.
• Google buys online blogging service Blogger from Pyra Labs.
• Online blogging service TypePad launches.
• Myspace launches as a social networking site.

2004

• Photo sharing site Flickr launches.
• thefacebook, later Facebook, launches at Harvard.
• Lightweight online project-and-collaboration-management suite Basecamp launches.
• Gmail launches in April.
• The first Web 2.0 conference takes place.
• Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley launch Wikia, a free wiki hosting service.
• eBay buys 25% of craigslist.com.

2005

• YouTube launches in February.

2006

• Google calendar launches in April.
• Google acquires Upstartle, makers of the Writely collaborative text editing suite, early in the year.  Google announces Google Docs & Spreadsheets, both of which have collaborative features, in October.

This year’s college graduates matriculated in 2002, entering environments of higher learning characterized by ample bandwidth, pervasive computers, constant tasks and deadlines, and great desire for socialization.  Look back over the list above at the tools that have come on line since they’ve been in college to help them with their work and/or their play.

When they take jobs, do you think they’ll willingly stop using such tools?  Will they happily switch over to legacy corporate collaboration technologies that are less freeform and harder to search, make them jump through more hoops, restrict their privileges and access based on their position on the org. chart, and generally have a ‘pre-Web 2.0′ look and feel?

Many, if not most, knowledge workers sit in front of computers for large portions of the day.  The applications they use probably have a large impact not only on their productivity, but also on their mood, and on their affinity for the organization that put the tools in front of them.  

Let’s say that The Economist and others are right and the global war for talent really is heating up.  I imagine that an increasingly important front in that war, at least for new entrants to the skilled workforce, is going to be the technology environment built by companies —  the one within which they expect their people to do their work.  Environments that support the way smart young people want to work, and are used to working, are going to look comparatively attractive.  

I also imagine that when smart young people look at the Intranets and collaboration technologies currently in place at a lot of companies, they’ll find them (to use a polite term) quaint.  And I doubt that quaint is what they’re looking for.

I’m glad we teach via the case method at HBS, because I feel like my slight lead over my students in understanding the new tools and collaboration modes is about to vanish forever.  In a case discussion I can rely on them to teach each other about the latest trends and tools.  In a lecture I’d have to do that, and something tells my lectures on the topic are quickly heading for quaint status in their eyes.

I spoke at the Office 2.0 conference last week, which was superbly organized by Ismael Ghalimi and his colleagues.  It was great to meet so many of the enterprise irregulars, who I’d been interacting with only digitally up to that point.

The highlight of the event for me was the chance to hear from and meet Esther Dyson, who has been a leading technology observer, analyst, and theorist for some time now.

The conference opened with her being interviewed by CNET’s Dan Farber.  This was bad news and good.  Bad because I was up next, and she is an incredibly tough act to follow.  Good because one of her strongest themes around the future of IT-supported work (at least as I heard her) is also one that I find critically important, and that I stressed in my speech.  

Esther sees a need for what she called "lightweight project management" or "lightweight workflow."  This is software that (to paraphrase and extend what she said —  Esther, I’m sorry if I’m misrepresenting any of your ideas) would let one user quickly set up a business process —  a linked sequence of tasks performed by people with different roles —  deploy that process across all the people and groups involved in executing it, then monitor progress toward its completion.  

To take a trivial example, let’s say three co-authors and I, each at a different school, are getting a paper ready to submit to a journal.  We’ve got to

1. finalize the analyses,
2. revise the results and conclusions sections based on these analyses
3. check all the references and finalize the bibliography
4. give it a final once-over
5. do all the formatting and housekeeping required for the journal we’re submitting it to

We’ve agreed which one of us is responsible for steps 1,2,3, and 5, and that we’re all responsible for step 4.  We’ve also all agreed that we want to get the paper submitted within two weeks.  At this point, what I’d really like is a Web-based tool that lets me flowchart this process, say who’s responsible for each step and what the deadline is, and set up some kind of document check-in and check-out repository.  The tool would then take responsibility for telling each of us when work was ready for us, and also for bugging us as deadlines approached (and passed).  It would also have a dashboard that any of us could use to learn at a glance how far along the process was, who was on the critical path, and whether anyone was behind schedule.  

I realize, of course, that this is not an easy system to develop.  Robust yet lightweight document version control, for example, is hard to accomplish.  It’s also not a system whose exact features and functionality are clear at this point —  should my co-authors, for instance, have the ability to change the process I define and deploy?  Finally, it’s pretty clear that lightweight workflow software is going to have to walk a particularly delicate balance between providing structure and being easy and appealing to use.  If it doesn’t propose and enforce enough workflow it won’t be a sufficient improvement over emailing documents and updates around.  If it feels rigid, unfriendly, or hard to use, in contrast, people will abandon it and go back emailing documents and updates around.  For this tool, in other words, the 9X problem of email looms particularly large.  

The reason I’m excited about this type of tool despite the above caveats is that it fits in a potentially large blank space in a picture of corporate IT.  At the Office 2.0 conference I showed the picture below.  It divides end-user-visible information technologies into three categories:  those that facilitate discrete tasks, those that define then deploy structured interactions in the form of business processes, and those that allow unstructured and unplanned interactions.  I label these Function, Enterprise, and Network IT, respectively. 

Each of these categories is currently well-populated, but the boundary regions between them are not.  Or at least, not yet.  My loose working definition of ‘Office 2.0′ is the lowering of the barrier between the task and the unstructured interaction.  This trend is epitomized by Google’s announcement, on the day of the conference, of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which are exactly what one would expect:  web-based and group-based tools for creating documents and spreadsheets.  Google D&S gives many types of knowledge worker the choice between working individually, or as part of a team.  If they work within a team, they no longer have to use two pieces of technology (Word and email, or Excel and email) to get their job done.  Instead, they use one tool that spans a previously existing boundary.  

Esther’s proposed tool for lightweight workflow would span another boundary —  the one between structured and unstructured interactions.  This would be a welcome technology for at least two reasons.  First, it would match and support the semi-structured ways that lots of knowledge work (like the paper completion effort described above) gets done. 

Second, it could also help appropriate business processes form and solidify over time.  As I wrote earlier, the best configuration for a given business process isn’t always clear in advance, yet the enterprise systems we have don’t typically lend themselves to quick-and-easy process tweaking.  They’re great for embedding a process once it’s developed, but not so great at experimenting and iterating to come up with a good process.  So lightweight workflow software could be both an end in itself and a means to accomplishing other ends.

We’ll always have a need for technologies that rest squarely within the borders of the task, the structured interaction, and the unstructured interaction.  CAD systems, ERP, and email are not going anywhere.  And we’ll continue to see new beneficial technologies appear within each of these categories.  I agree with Esther that a wiki is simply a container, but that’s exactly what we need for some purposes.  When I launched my course wiki at the start of last semester I didn’t want it to have any traces of structure, workflow, or hierarchy.  I wanted those to appear over time based on what my students did with the tool.  

I imagine that some of the most interesting near-term corporate technology developments, however, will come at the intersections between today’s technology categories.  Clever technologists and entrepreneurs are going to take advantage of the current ‘building blocks’ of IT —  abundant bandwidth, lively browsers, fast development environments, more link-able applications, etc. —  to build tools that cover and support more of the modes of corporate knowledge work, and that cross current lines rather than staying within them.  

I  have to confess that I’m not up to speed on all the applications and sites that currently provide something like lightweight workflow.  I understand, for example, that Itensil does something close to this, but I missed the chance to get a demo from them at the conference.  I take some comfort from the fact that if I’ve overlooked the ’silver bullet’ tool then Esther has, too, since she talked about lightweight workflow as a desideratum rather than a done deal.  If you know of good boundary-spanning technologies, please leave a comment and tell us about them. 

I got to moderate a panel on Enterprise 2.0 at Longworth Venture Partners annual conference this past week.  A pleasant surprise for me was that all four panelists —  Jeff Nolan, Ismael Ghalini, Zoli Erdos, and Rod Boothby — were members of the ‘Enterprise Irregulars.’  This is a group of bloggers assembled by Nolan to ponder the future of enterprise software.  As we were getting our microphones put on I asked Jeff if I could join, and he told me I was in.

Also pleasant, but perhaps less of a surprise, was the level of optimism expressed by all panelists about the future spread of Enterprise 2.0 technologies like blogs, wikis, mashups, and a host of yet-to-be-developed-and-named tools to let knowledge workers work the elements of their enterprise systems —  data and business processes — in unstructured ways.  

I brought up the 9X problem of email:  the idea that any new collaboration technology will have to be nine times better than email in order to displace it.  The irregulars didn’t seem that bothered by it.  All of them told the audience stories from their personal experience about how eager users are for something better, and how quickly they make the switch to Enterprise 2.0 tools.  

I also asked how important line managers were in helping this switch take place.  Jeff and Ismael didn’t see much of a role for them.  Jeff talked about how quickly and easily wikis spread within SAP when he worked there, and Ismael told how he organized next week’s Office 2.0 conference using office 2.0 technologies and virtually no paper, and how the tools and processes he used were flexible enough to accommodate the vendor qualification and invoicing processes of all of the conference’s sponsors.  Zoli, on the other hand, talked about the steps he took when he ran a startup to encourage his team to use new collaboration technologies.  His remarks reminded me a lot of what I heard from DrKW’s Darren Lennard when I talked with him about getting busy investment bankers to stop using email and start using Enterprise 2.0 tools.  

Rod told somewhat different stories.  He’s been working for a while to get large mainstream organizations to change their modes of collaboration and knowledge management.  He wasn’t as optimistic as some others that "if we build it, they will come."  He’d seen plenty of management teams that were indifferent to or confused by the new technologies, and how hard it was get momentum when this was the case.  To be sure, he’s also seen success stories.  He told the audience, for example, about how effective wikis could be for letting groups develop Sarbanes-Oxley compliance policies.  But overall, his experiences seemed different than those of the other panelists.

We didn’t have enough time to pursue the issue, but I wanted to ask the Irregulars about the possibility that the tools we’re so interested in are destined to be niche technologies.  The niche will be inherently novelty-friendly and tech-friendly workplaces like the ones inside startups and technology vendors.  This is a big niche, and if Enterprise 2.0 technologies succeed only in such workplaces it doesn’t mean at all that they’re failures.  It does mean, though, that they’re not going to have an impact on most companies or most knowledge workers.

Another possibility is that Enterprise 2.0 takes off quickly in tech-friendly environments, then slowly penetrates other ones, perhaps as worker and managers migrate into them or perhaps as entry-level employes demand the kinds of tools they’re accustomed to using on the Web.  

In summary, this panel discussion helped bring into sharper focus the important question around Enterprise 2.0 technologies.  It’s not "Will these tools succeed anywhere?"  It’s "What determines where these technologies will succeed, and how quickly?"  What are the most important drivers —  industry, employee demographics, managerial willpower?  What else?  What do you think?