Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2011: Scenes from a Growth Market

When I toured the Exposition area at this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, two things quickly became clear:

• There are a lot of vendors offering nearly identical social networking products.
  
• For now, the market demand for these products seems is big enough that all these vendors are surviving, and a market shake-out doesn't seem imminent.
  

Heck, the market seemed crowded when I first covered this conference three years ago. Though a few of these vendors have had layoffs and restructurings, the field remains just as crowded today, giving customers a lot of products and services to choose from.

With products are nearly identical (Facebook-like interfaces, support for Twitter-like activity streams, configurable user profiles, etc.), vendors are differentiating themselves by emphasizing implementation details (SaaS vs. on-premise), go-to-market strategies, a few especially advanced features, and pricing. For example:

• Blogtronix differentiates itself in part through its enterprise-class security, highly configurable customer profiles, and low pricing ($1/user/month).
  
• ClearVale by BroadVision claims to be unique in its ability to share information across internal networks and external networks, such as support sites (though other vendors claimed they could support this, too).
  
• IGLOO Software, which spun out of the RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie's Centre for International Governance Innovation, differentiates itself by its SaaS delivery and (perhaps not surprisingly) its support for the BlackBerry platform.
  
• Microsoft SharePoint offers integration with Lync, Microsoft's unified communication client, and with Office programs such as Word. Additional social media services are available through integration with software from partners such as Newsgator. Incidentally, SharePoint is apparently the file technology "under the hood" for Microsoft's new Office Live services.
  
• The Port, which had focused on non-profits in the past, is now focusing on providing social media tools that could be bundled in business platforms such as Netsuite and SAP.
  
• ThoughtFarmer, whom I've written about before, positions itself as a provider of intranet solutions. Co-founder Chris McGrath told me they're still finding customers who have primitive intranets (just few static Web pages and a file server) and who know they need something more modern, comprehensive, and flexible. At the show the company announced a new SaaS version of their platform.
  

Similar feature sets, different approaches. Customers can compare the offerings and pick the one that best meets their needs.

LiquidPlanner 3.0

Another Enterprise 2.0 exhibitor that I've written about before is LiquidPlanner. This Seattle-based start-up offers project management software that works with estimates and probabilities, rather than forcing users to work with "hard numbers" that all-too-often turn out to be incorrect guesses. Considering the complexities of any team project, LiquidPlanner's probability-based approach to project planning Just Makes Sense. At this year's expo, the company was showing off a new UI and a new feature that enables tasks to be shared across projects. If you're interested in improving the accuracy of your project management efforts, I would recommend checking them out.

Final Thoughts

The keynotes at the conference featured stories from big companies such as Deutsche Bank, and there's no doubt that the Enterprise 2.0 revolution is making slow but steady progress in global enterprises.

But when I hear ThoughtFarmer's stories about small companies interest in replacing an old IIS server with internal wikis and blogs, and I hear the Blogtronix folks talk about 20,000 downloads of their open source Sharetronix software, I can't help think there's an even broader revolution taking place across thousands of small companies interested in finding better ways to communicate and collaborate. That's a good thing for these companies and their customers. And how fortunate for these small companies that so many vendors are working hard to create innovative collaboration platforms that get better every year.

Using Social Media to Manage by Objectives

The New York Times recently ran an interview with Mark Pincus, the C.E.O of Zynga. It's an interesting interview. Pincus talks about the importance of employees feeling like they're in charge of something: everyone should be C.E.O. of something. He also talks about hiring people who are still hungry for success and managing people by asking them to articulate a few key objectives for the week.

Regarding his method of managing, Pincus says:

John Doerr [the venture capitalist] sold me on this idea of O.K.R.'s, which stands for objectives and key results. It was developed at Intel and used at Google, and the idea is that the whole company and every group has one objective and three measurable key results, and if you achieve two of the three, you achieve your overall objective, and if you achieve all three, you’ve really killed it.


We put the whole company on that, so everyone knows their O.K.R.'s. And that is a good, simple organizing principle that keeps people focused on the three things that matter — not the 10.


Then I ask everybody to write down on Sunday night or Monday morning what are your three priorities for the week, and then on Friday see how you did against them. It’s the only way people can stay focused and not burn out. And if I look at your road map and you have 10 priorities for you and your team, you probably don't know which of the three matter, and probably none of the 10 are right.


I can look at everyone's piece of paper, and their road map shows every item you were going to do and your predicted results and actual results, and then the results are in red if you missed them, yellow if they're close and green if you passed them. I think road maps are a great principle just for managing your life. It keeps everybody focused, and it lets me know what trains are on or off the tracks.

For me, the phrase that leapt off the page here was "piece of paper." Sure, one could track all these objectives on paper, but I think it makes more sense to post this information on blogs or wikis, where the objectives would be visible to all and where tagging could be used to tie individual objectives to larger departmental or organizational objectives. In other words, instead of using paper, use Jive or MindTouch or Thought Farmer. That makes the objectives amenable, too, to importing into BI tools or simple graphing tools sometimes included in these platforms. And if some objectives are sensitive or confidential, role-based access controls could be used to make them visible only to authorized managers.

There's been lots of talk about how social media platforms help workers share information and expertise. The oft-cited example is a worker discovering which colleagues in other departments have relevant expertise. Social media platforms help people discover and nurture such connections.

I hope that in the coming years, more organizations realize what powerful tools these platforms can be for strategic planning: for collecting information for use in strategic plans and for disseminating and tracking strategic objectives. Let's use these platforms for sharing information up and down the organization, as well as across, and for making strategic objectives visible and understandable to all.

All That Data

None of my clients were exhibiting in the demo area of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, so when the demo floor was open, I had the opportunity to stroll through the aisles and talk to various vendors instead of manning a booth and explaining a particular product or technology to passersby.

The Enterprise 2.0 movement—applying Web 2.0 technology to problems and processes within the enterprise—promises to transform the online experience of workers in companies large and small. Instead of being deluged with email and interrupted by IM, workers can access company news and information in RSS feeds when it's convenient. Instead of emailing Word documents to everyone on a team and trying to coordinate all the changes and comments, authors can jointly edit documents with tools like Google docs. The table below summarizes some of these changes:

Category	Web 1.0	Enterprise 2.0	Benefits from New Approach
Knowledge sharing	Email and irregular postings on portals	Wikis and blog posts	Publishes data in a more permanent format Makes information easier to discover Reaches stake-holders outside one's immediate group Enables non-technical users to post information without requiring custom clients or help from IT
Notification of changes and news	Email and phone calls	RSS	Occurs automatically when blogs or wikis are updated Reaches all interested parties, even those the author might not know about

(For more about this new way of working, and some thoughts on the pros and cons of email in particular, see this recent post by Harvard Business School's Andrew McAfee.)

Clearly, these platforms and portals are going to store a lot of data. How do we make it searchable? How we enable a product manager for a new leather cleaner product to find the blog post from three months ago that discussed product requirements for a similar product being developed by a partner in Switzerland.

One solution is to apply tags—meta-data keywords that summarize the content of a blog post, Web page, or some other piece of content. For example, the tags for that product requirement blog post might be "leather cleaner, research, product requirements, survey, partner, Switzerland."

Thomas Vander Wal is a consultant who has spent a great deal of time thinking about tagging and classifying data. He coined the term folksonomy to distinguish a bottom-up approach to classifying data, in which users apply the tags they think are relevant, from more traditional top-down approaches that rely on formal vocabularies and specialists in information taxonomy.

Getting users in the habit of tagging content and tagging it usefully can be a bit of a challenge, however. As Vander Wal pointed out in his presentation at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, you can end up with problems like users not tagging content at all or using tags that are so general they prove useless in future searches. He gave the example of a company promising to reward workers who tagged documents, then discovering that workers were meeting this requirement by applying tags like "document." More tags are better than fewer, and overall, however they are applied, tags must serve the purpose of distinguishing one document for another.

The creators of software tools have a role to play here. They can create applications that prompt users to tag data. Some applications might even analyze data as it's being entered and propose tags for it.

Shortly after Vander Wal's talk, I found myself strolling through the demo area, wondering how the many social collaboration programs on display handled this important issue.

At the Microsoft booth, I heard from someone demoing SharePoint that customers simply don't use tagging all that much. The idea of tagging, in this person's opinion, was not turning out to be a success.

At the ThoughtFarmer booth, I met Darren Gibbons, the co-creator of the ThoughtFarmer intranet solution, and the president of OpenRoad Communications. I asked Darren what he thought about tagging. Should be automated? Left to individuals? How could it be made to work?

Here's a video with his answer, which is that tagging works best when it benefits both the tagger and the community overall.



On the next aisle, I got talking to Padmanabh Dabke, the founder and CTO of a company called SpigIt, about the challenge of creating meaningful tags on a large scale. SpigIt makes software that enables companies to collect from large communities of employees and customers, then rank the ideas to decide which ones should be pursued. In addition to offering guidance for investment, the software helps managers identify which employees and customers are consistently coming up with the best ideas.

Nabh pointed out that some older technology—namely, expert systems—could be applied to sort through the torrent of data in online communities and aid in speedy classification. (Pardon my shaky camera work in the first few moments of our conversation.)



Any conclusions? Yes. It's clear that companies are replacing or upgrading their old Web 1.0 intranets with these new, easier-to-use community platforms. Workers are getting used to blogging and using tools like Wikis and RSS feeds. Tagging will make all these tools more useful, and the best practices for tagging will probably combine user habits, helpful user interfaces, and powerful processing engines like that described by Nabh.