Note to SI’s on Enterprise 2.0 – Go ahead. Be a Tiger.

Good to see IT powerhouses paying attention to Enterprise 2.0. In this post, consulting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu talks about how “enterprises are looking at how they can harness the hierarchy-flattening, information-sharing, team building power of social networks.” They go on to list out a number of social mechanisms such as Syndication, Mashups, Social Networking that are being studied by large IT organizations.

It’s a very succinct summary that will get large enterprises to start to pay attention, if they haven’t already. And it’s a net positive for the Enterprise 2.0 space and so I applaud Deloitte for starting to pay attention early on and engaging in the discussion.

I realize this was a very high level piece but 2 things jumped out at me:

First, there’s heavy focus on platforms that enable content creation. Little coverage on managing the fire hose that’s will emerge shortly after the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. What’s missing is adequate representation of what Andrew McAfee refers to as Signals in his famous Slates architecture (search, linking, tagging, authoring, extensions, and signals).

Second and on a more ironical note, the Bottom Line section ends with:

“Telecommunications operators and IT solutions providers need to invest in ESN [Enterprise Social Networks] so they have the expertise and credibility to deploy these solutions if or when they become more broadly adopted, and start becoming a more significant source of revenues.”

The first point about Telcos and IT solutions providers investing in these tools themselves to gain expertise is all well and good. But the second statement about services firms waiting for broad adoption and significant source of revenues made me chuckle.

SI’s are the ones that have traditionally driven broad adoption and thereby created cash cow services business around new applications.  Also, I realize that there is such a thing as too early when recommending products, but as trusted consultants, it’s up to them to identify sources of value well before anyone sees it and to recommend and deploy solutions that can give their customers competitive advantage.

End of rant.

So to all you SI’s out there: Start evangelizing Enterprise 2.0 concepts and encourage your customers to experiment with them. Go ahead. Be a Tiger.

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, SI

Posted On: February 3, 2009

Posted In:

• Profesional Services

3 Comments

Written By: Sameer Patel

SVP, Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP