How Web 2.0 Will Change the Way Business Gets Done

Emanuele QuintarelliDecember 5th, Milan

Community Management

Knowledge Management Dream

• Current technologies not able to capture knowledge (HBS 2005)

– 21% - overwhelmed– 15% - it diminishes the productivity– 26% - it is overused– Only 44% - it’s easy to find inside the intranet (Forrester 2005)

• The burden on the enterprise information worker intensifies while productivity suffers (IDC 2006):

– 24% time spent searching for and analyzing information

– A company can waste $5.7M (1000 knowledge workers)

KM is the past. We need to stop wasting hours of time searching and focusing on the business task at hand.

Knowledge Management aimed to elicit tacit knowledge, best practices, relevant experience from people throughout a company and make this information widely available

The Bottom Line

A better way is needed to store, locate and retrieve corporate data useful for information workers’ tasks at hand

• Consumption and access barriers:– Multiple applications, credentials, silos, interfaces

– Rigid central management and configuration

– Long change cycles by IT department

– Complex and painful integration

• Consequences of inefficient data consumption– Low quality/Small quantity of work performed.

– Customer dissatisfaction

– Efficiency reduction for continuous reworks

– Employee attrition and poor corporate morale

Enterprise 2.0 – A Definition

• Search to find what you are looking for

• Links to understand what’s important and to provide structure

• Authoring content as an interlinked work of many

• Tags to let classification emerge

• Extentions to leverage to provide suggestions

• Signals (rss and emails) to notify about content updates

“Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers”

(Andrew McAfee)

Examples of Enterprise 2.0

• Enterprise Blogs and Wikis

• Project Management

• Collaboration

• Enterprise Tagging

• Enterprise Rss

• Widgets & Mashups

• Social Networks

• Suites

Enterprise Trends

1. Simple, Free Platforms for Self-Expression: email, blog, wikis, photo/video sharing, social bookmarking, etc

2. Emergent Structures: building tools that let structure emerge

3. Order from Chaos: filter, sort, prioritize and stay on top of the flood of new online content

Three broad and converging trends concerning the changing relationship between those who offer technologies and those who use them.

Enterprise 2.0 vs Traditional Enterprise Software

• Freeform: Only minimal upfront structure

• Simple: Any barrier to use means lower adoption

• Software as a Service: Online software is more productive and useful

• Easily Changed: Many common IT tasks back to end-users with feeds and widgets

• Unintended Uses: Open APIs, RSS and mashups to easily wire pieces together

• Social: Enabling freeform collaboration is the key. Results can be reused by others 

Business Value and Adoption Drivers

• Why adopting these technologies*?– Efficiency gain: provide efficient interaction with people, content and data

– Competitive pressures a strong driver

• Why not to adopt a specific technology?– Perceived lack of need is a major reason for non adoption

– More pressing concerns are also likely to stop adoption

* Online survey with 119 CIOS about 6 technologies (blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, content tagging) – Forrester Dec 2006

IBM - Wikis to Spur Innovation

IBM uses wikis to bring people together and spur innovation

WikiCentral uses wikis as a collaboration tool to help formulate new ideas, develop and manage projects, create documentation and build a collaborative network of innovators across divisions and geographies.

IBM uses wikis to bring together clients, partners and IBM employees. DeveloperWorks is a comprehensive, technical resource for developers. Developers from many companies and geographies discuss and build valuable content related to products, solutions, industry standards, training programs

Redbooks team is currently piloting wikis for authoring and publishing technical documentation built by clients, partners and IBM experts to get hands-on and document experience with technical solutions. Wikis make team authoring and publishing easier and more accessible

(67.000 registered wiki users, 4.000 wiki instances, 56.000 pages)

(27 external wikis for developers)

Conclusions

• An informal organization can provide tangible benefits for enterprises: – business efficiency (paradoxically)

– reduced operational costs

– improved customer satisfaction

– Improved corporate morale

• These tools are beginning to plug into traditional enterprise data sources such as CRM and ERP

Collaboration between workers is becoming far more dynamic, and the availability of essential business data is resulting in better business decisions and larger revenues

Is informal, bottom-up organization a revolution in how enterprises work?

Thank you

Emanuele Quintarellihttp://www.socialenteprise.it

info@socialenterprise.it