THE INFOBLOG
Company news, plus our musings on Enterprise 2.0, organizational culture, knowledge workers, and information management.
Why Enterprise 2.0 Will Fail
Scott Gavin recently listed the Top 3 Business Benefits of Enterprise 2.0 inside the company firewall.
- Personal Information/Knowledge Management
- Expertise Identification
- Collective Intelligence
I was glad to see someone discuss the internal benefits, because the E2.0 conversation lately has focused on the external benefits — how E2.0 can help marketing and sales.
The case for organizations reaching out to their audiences via social media is easy to make. If you want to improve your outreach efforts, you either have to go where the people are or create an inviting place for people to gather.
The case for E2.0 inside the firewall is considerably more difficult. As Tom Davenport points out, is essentially the case for what used to be called Knowledge Management, or KM. The term KM fell out of favor with consultants and analysts because it didn’t deliver enough of these benefits. There are a lot of folks hoping that flexible, easy-to-use “2.0″ applications might succeed where centrally managed KM failed.
But it likely won’t, because most E2.0 vendors are doing it wrong.
If the #1 benefit is personal knowledge management, why are all the big players selling to the CEO, CIO, and IT departments? Where are the tools targeting individual knowledge workers?
Missing in action
I can think of two reasons why we haven’t seen a flowering of office productivity applications.
1. The Free Brigade — Companies don’t think they can make money from ordinary people anymore. Even if software companies came up with killer applications that helped people manage their daily tasks, email and files, they don’t think they would be able to get people to pay for it. Perhaps their software will get pirated. Maybe some college students will throw together a free and/or open source version that will destroy their market. Or — the most common reason I’ve heard — is simply that employees don’t expect to pay for software they use at work.
2. The Microsoft Effect — Microsoft owns the corporate desktop computing environment. Period. Software vendors fear to challenge the hegemony of the Office Suite, afraid that they will suffer the fate of Word Perfect or Netscape or any number of other products and vendors that have tried, and failed, to break Microsoft’s lock on desktop computing. Despite the fact that Microsoft Office applications have been around for more than 15 years (an eon in software industry) and despite the fact that they have known deficiencies for managing information that the Content Management and Knowledge Management industries have exploited for years, there has been little or no direct competition in this space.
The Enterprise 2.0 distortion field
These two factors cause all Enterprise 2.0 vendors to compromise in one of two ways.
- While promising personal benefits to knowledge workers, they actually take their marching orders from senior management, who purchase the software.
- While promising to help individuals with their daily flow of information, they live in fear of deploying software to workstations and laptops, where all information is received and all the work is actually performed.
This means that most Enterprise 2.0 Software vendors violate at least two of Andrew McAfee’s criteria for an Enterprise 2.0 tool: Freeform, frictionless, and emergent.
Because many of these tools have a management bias, and will subordinate individual initiative to central control, they sacrifice being freeform and emergent. Because many of these tools will be based in the cloud to avoid the tyranny of the Microsoft desktop and corporate IT, they sacrifice the frictionless flow of information inside the firewall.
Ironically, the companies that actually deliver best on the E2.0 promise are ones that would never consider themselves enterprise software.
More Patent Foolishness
I seem to have software patents on the brain lately. After I wrote about our decision not to move forward with Infovark’s provisional patent, several recent articles and blog posts have caught my attention.
What started the latest round of software industry soul-searching was an article in the Harvard Business Review written by Nathan Myrhvold regarding his company, Intellectual Ventures. It’s called The Big Idea: Funding Eureka. His company aims to make money from enforcing patent rights created by both in-house and independent inventors. You can read a recent profile of Intellectual Ventures and its strategy in the New York Times.
I didn’t know about Intellectual Ventures at the time I wrote our blog post, but it’s exactly the sort of company I was thinking about when I described the collect ‘em, trade ‘em patent game. Intellectual Property lawyers call it a Non-Practicing Entity or NPE, but most folks in software and technology would call it a patent troll.
Big tech companies have a lot of time, money and effort invested in their patent portfolios, and they are very worried about the impact companies like Intellectual Ventures will have on innovation.
The venture capital community is also concerned. Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures thinks that software patents are the problem, not the answer. Other prominent VC bloggers, like Fred Wilson and Brad Feld, agree.
Changes in the wind?
It looks like the idea of software patent reform is gathering momentum. Business method patents, like Amazon’s famous “one-click” shopping cart patent, have always seemed wrong to me. I also dislike the idea of software patents in general. A computer is fundamentally a machine for doing math. If mathematical formulas are not patentable, why should software be?
But it’ll be a long, hard road to get the law changed. And there’s only so much change that a reinterpretation of existing law, like the In re Bilski case, can bring about.
For one thing, investors must be persuaded to stop putting a premium on businesses and start-ups with patents pending. Companies that have patents must stop using them as competitive weapons — ways to tangle and trip up their competitors in red tape. Accountants must stop treating patents as a corporate asset or as capital.
Ultimately, companies will still pursue patents so long as they have a financial incentive to do so. And the companies that own patents have a vested interest in keeping the status quo. Even some of the VCs that back patent reform admit that they advise their portfolio companies to protect what they can.
There are enormous incentives to play by the rules, even when the rules themselves are broken.
The Second Biggest Mistake of Enterprise 2.0
I imagine most folks begin their journey toward Enterprise 2.0 by saying, “I wish we had some of these Web 2.0 tools at my company.”
Actually, I imagine that people are more specific than that. Substitute Wikipedia, Facebook or Twitter for “Web 2.0 tools” and you’d have the starting point for most organizations.
What happens next can determine the success or failure of your Enterprise 2.0 effort.
Watch your step
The Tao Te Ching reminds us that “a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step.” Taking that first step is important.
I’ve read lots of advice regarding that first step. Probably the most common advice is to know why you you need the tool. It’s not enough to want to be “more 2.0.” What objectives do you want to achieve with the new technology?
Many Enterprise 2.0 bloggers are quick to point out that you must be specific. The answer can’t be “to work better together” or to “share information more effectively”. If you can tie the technology to the improvement of a specific work process or output, you’ve got a much better chance of the enterprise 2.0 implementation succeeding.
But I won’t spend any time on that, because frankly, the “Why are we doing this?” question comes up all the time during an implantation. If you have to justify resources for your enterprise 2.0 effort, you’ll get asked this question repeatedly. And if you don’t have a specific answer, the E2.0 effort won’t get underway, period.
Look before you leap
The second biggest mistake companies make is picking a specific tool or technology too early.
Software evaluation practices at many organizations are backwards. You evaluate the features and functions of one tool versus another, and then you ask the question, “how do I buy?”
It’s tempting to consider the tool or technology in the abstract, separate from issues of support, maintenance and training. Don’t fall into this trap! Most software works. But whether it will work for you or your team is about much more than its features and benefits.
How you buy software is the second biggest challenge to implementing Enterprise 2.0.
I think it might be better to consider these question in reverse: “What sort of vendor relationships do I want? What sort of product does that imply?”
For example, do you want your own IT shop to implement the product, or do you want to bring in outside consultants? Is a pay-as-you-go cloud solution feasible, or do you prefer to own the solution outright?
These provider arrangements have almost nothing to do with the technology itself. Frequently, they’re left out of the evaluation process. In the government sector, buying a software product is often a different line item than buying consulting services. Sometimes they fall under different contracts altogether. Trying to force a one-stop-shop vendor into this procurement model can be a disaster in the making.
Before picking a tool, you should know what your team is able to support. Finding a tool or a vendor that matches your procurement process can be more important than the tool itself.
Think broadly about a focused implementation
The good news is that companies today have lots of choices when it comes to implementing Enterprise 2.0 solutions. You can construct a deal that works for all of the groups involved. But that often means that you can’t be wedded to a particular tool or technology at the start. You have to know what sort of financial and working arrangements will suit your organization first.
Ribbon Hero uses game design principles to help users learn Microsoft Office
Kathy Sierra, design and usability advocate, is famous for saying, “If you want people to RTFM, make a better FM.” In 2007, Danc, a game designer and author of the Lost Garden blog, claimed that any user activity that can be learned, measured, and returned as feedback can be made into a game.
An alternative to Minesweeper?
Some folks on Microsoft’s Office Labs team took up the challenge. They’ve released a game called Ribbon Hero, which helps users master the Microsoft Office “ribbon” toolbar.
Danc discusses the design philosophy behind Ribbon Hero and shares his thoughts on turning a traditional application design into one that incorporates learning, fun, and a sense of accomplishment.
I’ve always thought that computer games have a lot to teach the rest of the software industry about design and usability. It’s fascinating to see software developers putting those ideas into practice.
