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.

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Written on: 02-03-09 · Written by: Sameer Patel · 3 Comments »

This entry is filed under Profesional Services. Connect on .

  • http://www.itsinsider.com itsinsider

    Hey Sameer. My heritage experience was grounded in the IT Services market. ITSinsider actually stems from an early blog where I was once “the” ITS insider. :-)

    I agree the SIs need to get smart about this. Accenture, Booz Allen, Cap Gemini, and now Deloitte (carefully listed in alpha order) are building practices here. This phenomenon is not dissimilar to what happened during the dotcom run up when e-Services (Scient, Viant, then, Razorfish) firms got really smart about moving big customers onto the web.

    The trouble is, it's still REALLY early. Listening to SAP's customer call today, hard reality smacked me once again when I realize so much of what we, in the echo chamber, take for granted is completely foreign and viewed as somewhat silly among those who run serious businesses. I think we will begin to see firms crop up to meet this challenge who are 2.0 savvy. It's a whole raft of expertise that's required, however. The easiest part is the technology.

  • http://www.pretzellogic.org Sameer

    Hi Susan
    Thanks for stopping by.

    I agree, its still very early and I hear similar things from some senior mgmt folks at large firms that I worked with over the years. That said, this round of technology innovation (what we call 2.0) has the ability to show results, good or bad much much faster. So it should be easier for SIs to make a judgment call on ability of specific programs (tech+services+switching costs + risk mitigation) to bring significant value for their customers.

    In the last round of innovation, the inflection point came when these conversations moved from just IT to include business unit heads and CXOs.E-services and traditional SI's played a big part in making that transition happen. I used to work in the strategy consulting group at one of the eServices firms (USWeb/CKS, marchFIRST) and we saw this play out. Big customers moved in fast once the CXO or business unit head saw the threat and opportunity clearly.

    One last thing: The big SIs and consulting firms such as Accenture, Deloitte and BAH don't get due credit for driving the shift and are often wrongly considered laggards. I'm hopeful that this time they participate in the discussion we're all having.

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