Pretzel Logic – Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 has a parallel universe.

The first one that gets a lot of the press – product suites that offer Facebook like enterprise social networking, Blogs, Wikis, Activity Streams etc.

The second is what’s been traditionally called Unified Communications – led by companies such as IBM and Cisco that are making a strong showing in the social and collaborative category. Depending on their pedigree, the concept of enterprise 2.0 or the new enterprise collaborative and social backbone goes beyond what we have come to know as the enterprise 2.0 toolkit. Voice, Video, Conferencing, Virtual Meetings are front and center to how these companies look at collaboration and enterprise 2.0.  Stuff that’s somewhat conveniently left out of the first enterprise 2.0 bucket because its not simple for upstarts to offer these heavy weight capabilities. Yet, if you can be objective, these capabilities absolutely make sense in an integrated fashion as we move to a new working model.

And so I was really pleased to see the news that PBworks is now offering Click to call capabilities within its platform. That’s an early example of a solid use of traditional communication metaphors to augment and improve the social and collaborative experience.

As Leena Rao on Techcrunch says:

The beauty of the integration is that the conference calling feature is an extension of the collaboration platform. Users can call anyone with a single click who already has a PBworks profile or manually dial in any number. PBworks Voice runs on the open source FreeSWITCH telephony platform and phone systems are hosted in PBworks’ own datacenter.

Is PBworks now a IBM or Cisco competitor? Hardly. Those companies have a far more robust offering and deal with far more complex headaches that very large organizations have. But  PBworks approach and philosophy of customer centricity that brings strip down versions of heavy weight features will make them extremely compelling to many customers that want a miniature, light weight version of what an IBM can offer. No bloated software – just the good stuff and at a price they’re target market can stomach. It’s awesome to see them not get caught up in some altruistic version of ‘out with the old and in with the new approach’ to enterprise social computing.

They are not the only ones doing looking at traditional and new  (see Jive Software and Business Objects, for example) but I hope we see even more examples of this. In other words, Enterprise 2.0 steps out of the box, focus on what the customer really needs to be effective, objectively offer newer AND traditional forms of communication  and interaction metaphors in context. Whether that means folding in voice and meetings, or an embracing the role that structured systems will always play in the enterprise.

Lots of pontification today on whether the iPad will become that third device that removes the claustrophobia of surfing the web on a mobile device, yet takes some of the clunk away from a regular laptop.

Om Malik on GigaOm has one of the best analysis on this, saying:

Despite their evolution, laptops and desktop computers as we know them are essentially work tools. They’re designed for content creation — be that of writing blog posts (or a book), editing photos or creating videos. On the iPhone, we create content of another kind — personal, communication-centric content.

The consumer web is slowing moving away from ‘Read and Write’ mode, back to ’Read More, Write Little’ status as I tweeted earlier today. But not as we saw in the pre-social days before blogs and wikis.

We’re going to be writing more than we ever did, just a lot less every time we do. Tweets are 140 characters, the Re-Tweet is the new gesture to simply express acknowledgement or endorsement, LinkedIn imposes character limits on some of the fields in Groups, Yelp Reviews are a paragraph or so. And auto posts from Tumblr and Posterous to Facebook are primarily visual media uploads with a few lines of description. Lots of limits on each gesture. But many many more of them.

That’s just touching on the writing elements of our web experience. Gaming, enjoying videos with your family at the dinner table,  and other visual consumption models are overdue for some fresh blood as well. 

And so the iPad will sell and will sell big. Save a few really ridiculous omissions (seriously? no webcam?) it’s the perfect device for the type of text based communication that’s becoming more and more prevalent. And sadly its the optimal device for the attention deficit online world we’re participating in, every day.

I recently contributed a report on the concept of Real Time in the Enterprise, published by my friends at GigaOM Pro – the research arm of the wildly popular GigaOM Blog Network.

The concept of the real time enterprise is going to be top of mind for many organizations over the next 24 months. Amongst other things, one primary driver will be organizations waking up to the fact that their customers and prospects expect to engage in real time, whether on public social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, or on company managed community forums. As a result, critical processes within enterprises need to be re-wired to be able to respond to real time customer inquiries whether that be order status, product knowhow or access to experts. Supporting the end customer is now everyone’s job and so-called “enterprise 2.0” solutions have the ability to let key people rally around the customer in more efficient ways.

We’re seeing it in our work already where this is not just some data problem that IT is interested in solving. Line of business executives are looking to understand the optimal information flow design in the context of discrete performance acceleration opportunities in the areas of customer service, channel distribution, sales and marketing collaboration and the supply chain. Whether its revenue or cost efficiency, all these executives all have a number on their head and are increasingly convinced that latency means cash left on the table.

Feel free to drop me a line if you’d like to learn more about the topic or the report, or if you’re interested in learning about what this means for your enterprise.

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The report is for GigaOm Pro subscribers but here’s the Executive Summary:

Real-time communication and collaboration in the enterprise represents a significant shift in how employees, partners and customers interact and collaborate to drive organizational performance. The growth and acceptance of so-called “Enterprise 2.0” platforms and applications promise to break down closed communication and collaboration loops by moving discussions and data access from email, content management and rigid process applications to activity streams, wikis and API-based data access.

Together, these new interaction formats enable real-time communication and access to information emanating from within these new collaboration suites as well as from external systems. The result is a real-time flow of information from the people and systems that are critical to business functions for each employee, all accessible from a central dashboard.

The widespread proliferation of real-time tools in the enterprise will, however, require concerted analysis of what process and information flows truly warrant real time access. The notion of “right time” vs. “real time” will become more important as organizations decide what consumption models work best for individual users and the tasks they are responsible for. The speed of “real time” also will be limited by how fast traditional applications in the enterprise are able to process and publish information. However, the existence of extensible APIs now make it easier than ever to tap into multiple systems to extract information as soon as it’s made available.

While the concept of real time has existed for more than a decade, a new crop of collaborative suites from vendors such as Jive Software, Socialtext and Socialcast provide this facility out-of-the-box. Traditional enterprise software vendors have also announced their intention to provide real time collaborative and data access capabilities. Notable mentions include Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010, Salesforce Chatter, Google Wave and IBM’s Lotus Connections.

In 2010, expect to see the concept of the real time enterprise ascend the hype cycle. Enterprises will begin to analyze how real-time access can help discrete business processes such as customer interaction, sales intelligence, lead generation, partner interaction and employee project collaboration, and they’ll begin to evaluate the switching cost of moving their systems and data to platforms that have real-time as part of their solution sets. Customers and prospects are interacting with each other and with enterprises in real-time making it imperative for the enterprise to structure its own internal and external processes to respond to customers as fast as possible. Expect this shift to be one of the primary drivers for considering a real-time architecture.

Read more: http://pro.gigaom.com/2010/01/report-the-real-time-enterprise/#ixzz0cJXzIFXn

Update: Reviews of the Report on:

• GigaOM (Startups Fight Giants for the Real-time Enterprise http://ow.ly/ViWw) 
• WebWorkerDaily (The Real-time Enterprise http://ow.ly/ViXU)

Telcos will start looking at picking up affordable SaaS Enterprise 2.0 suites. Why? As mindshare starts to get split between Email and Microblogging/Activity streams, telcos and CSPs that offer white label business email hosting for the SMB market will see these as a natural extension. In the SMB market, standalone solutions are key to allow for simple, cheap distribution directly as well as via small reseller partners that don’t want service and customization headaches. E2.0 SaaS offerings meet those criteria. In addition they offer ready plug ins into other popular SMB apps such as SalesForce for those that want integration.

That could mean a huge buyer market outside of the traditional enterprise players who seem to prefer build as opposed to buy scenarios (Salesforce Chatter, TIBCO Tibbr, SharePoint 2010, SAP Constellation, etc).

If I’m somewhat correct, expect the likes of British Telecom, Singtel and Comcast etc jump in. If I’m very right and my commoditization assessment from last year holds true, we’ll see more players such as RackSpace and XO communications start to pay attention as well.

Agree? Disagree? Fire away below. I’d love to hear other views and bets on which vendors might be juicy candidates if you agree with my swag.

I don’t do product announcement reviews here on Pretzel Logic. But since I do focus on how social computing/Enterprise 2.0 can accelerate process performance, this announcement by MindTouch and SnapLogic coming together to focus on process optimization is welcome news.

From the MindTouch website:

Organizations that have embraced the benefits of web-based applications are now able to to integrate applications across traditional boundaries and more effectively visualize data for better collaboration. This solution, offered at a sub – $5,000 price point, brings all of the benefits of an traditional EAI solution, without any of the cost, development or maintenance headaches.

Alex Williams at ReadWriteWeb concludes:

On the one hand it is affordable and simple to implement. But those factors may be a hindrance, too, as some companies are not quite accustomed to the lightweight systems that SnapLogic and MindTouch embrace.

I totally get where Alex is coming from but specifically in the context of the mid market buyer, I’m not so sure. There’s a resurgence in the BAI (business application integration) space and a lot of it is focused on lighter weight integration and often at the presentation layer. Moreover, expect Enterprise 2.0 / Social Software investments to fuel more of this in the coming years. Even TIBCO, the heavyweight EAI provider has embraced this approach with the upcoming release of Tibbr. And since this is being done in the context of a collaborative, social context (powered by MindTouch) it has the potential to go beyond simple asynchronous dash boarding capabilities by providing data access “in the flow” – of collaborative constructs. You still need to execute based on your performance objectives but this is potentially powerful from a platform perspective.

As I’ve said earlier, the holy grail of accelerating business performance via Enterprise 2.0 constructs is the marriage between process and social. That’s partly achieved by surgically folding in data with conversations and collaboration to support discrete business activities. We’re going to see a lot more of that and its great to see MindTouch be one of the companies that’s embracing this early.

Congratulations to all involved.

The official release here. More coverage from Oliver Marks, CMSWire and eWeek.

This morning brings a new relationship in the Enterprise 2.0 Services arena: Hinchcliffe and Co, an enterprise ‘web 2.0’ consulting and education provider, Asuret, an enterprise risk mitigation software and services provider and Socialtext, a social software provider join forces to deliver the first stack of services and software to take organizations through planning and technical implementation of social software projects.

Together, this alliance is set up to offer requirements and technical design, the necessary project risk management levers and finally, a well respected software suite to bring it all to life. Coming out at the customer end are solutions for social collaboration, intranet redesigns, customer communities, corporate social media, Social CRM and finally Business and Industry Social Networks.

As seen in the diagram below, the overall stack of service covers includes architecture and design, technology selection and application, as well as project management.

To compliment methodology and implementation experience brought about by Hinchcliffe and Co., the Asuret software + consulting service offers project risk management methodologies and processes to identify pressure points that can derail engagements in areas of stakeholder alignment, executive sponsorship, project management, business case and the like.

The promise of this alliance centers on the reality that in many cases adoption of Enterprise 2.0 tools today is low and that most organizations are still learning the social computing ropes. Moreover, as with any large scale IT project, social computing engagements also face skepticism around the management of risk, control and trust. The group plans to bring structured methodologies, risk management tools and with Socialtext, mature social computing software package to holistically deploy social software solutions.

There’s certainly a place for such a partnership where IT is looking for strategic technology services combined with mature social technology. The IT manager has been severely burnt in the past due to lack of a comprehensive program management methodology and ineffective risk mitigation controls. Both led to more delays and consulting change orders than she would like to remember. This alliance of course has to prove that it has the execution wherewithal to get business results and reduce project risk but as far as a framework goes, it’s clear that a lot of careful thinking has gone into the design of this service set. Oh and there are some very smart folks involved here so there’s no reason to doubt their ability to pull it off.

Another thing I particularly liked is the implicit acknowledgment that social transformation doesn’t always mean throwing out incumbent process and technology whole hog, in favor of social. The answer lies within a balance of best in process-laden technology (e.g. CMS) and new open constructs. As seen in the diagram above, this partnership is designed to help customers leverage existing investments in content and knowledge management and business intelligence and fold in social computing, where applicable.

The Enterprise 2.0 services market is beginning to take shape but is still very young. At this time, the ‘E2.0′ discussions that command the airwaves are taking place primarily at 2 levels: 1) Ten thousand feet above the customers head and 2) deep down in the trenches around tactical tool selection and post deployment adoption. Both important in their own right. However, there’s plenty of room between these two for alternate value propositions. This alliance serves as a credible option for many of those projects in the middle, especially ones that are spearheaded by the IT department.

I’m personally excited to see this alliance enter the ‘Enterprise 2.0’ services space. We can’t have a market without a marketplace so the more credible service providers that surface, the better for customers and the ecosystem in general. Congrats to all involved.

Here’s the official statement and some good write ups by CRM champs Paul Greenberg and Esteban Kolsky.

Disclaimer: Dion Hinchcliffe and I both serve on the advisory board of the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

The Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston ended earlier this week. This post covers my overall impressions about the conference material. Apologies in advance for a longish post.

Overall Thoughts

Given my insane meeting schedule and my objectives for the conference, I used 3 criteria to pick sessions. Here’s what I was looking for:

a) Practitioners before cheerleaders, skeptics and early adopters. Were there enough practitioners in attendance?

b) Did the event generate adequate tangible advice to show practitioners what works and what doesn’t, how to sell this internally, and finally, how to drive adoption?

c) Did the environment encourage their participation?

Two Thumbs Up to the first 2 questions. As to C, so, so. There were a good number of practitioners from companies such as BoA, Raytheon, Alcatel-Lucent, Allstate, Humana, M&M Mars & Eli Lilly. And a good number of tactical sessions. So in my book, all up, I think the conference was a success for those who wanted to be able to put learning to work.

On the other hand, the conference was a bit too Vendor centric – not in terms of attendance necessarily but in terms of who had a louder voice. There were in fact a lot of practitioners in the audience. I just wish their stories could have been heard.

A quick disclaimer: This re-cap reflects my favorites from sessions I attended; not across all available sessions. I missed some superb stuff but I’m sure others will speak to those.

The Good Stuff

Looking at it from a practitioners standpoint, what impressed me most was heavy weighting towards content on tactical insights that practitioners can use when they get to work, tomorrow. Sessions covered some long range thinking but plenty of actionable tricks and how tos that can let implementers and program managers sleep well at night.

Mike Gotta moderated Community & Social Network Sites: Think Adoption, Not Deployment. Dan McCall, Kishan Mallur and Erik Johnson cited specific examples how they generated buzz on the cheap, got influencers to become evangelists, and created a sense of ownership. The session was peppered with clever, even quirky tips such as a button called “shady” for questionable content that needed moderation, to creating stickers as invite codes that a user can distribute at their discretion. Genentech for instance, calls their social network GenePool and they tell their users “don’t pee in the pool”, as a way to encourage clean, relevant interaction. Again, not brain surgery but tactical marketing ideas that generate buzz. Ben Kepes of Cloud Ave was nice enough to live blog the session, here.

Another favorite session was Lee Bryant’s Transition Strategies for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption, that showcased specific details on how to manage separation anxiety when transitioning from 1.0 to social computing environments.  For instance, Lee described methods to illustrate the similarities between an RSS Reader and Email on a Blackberry. How to highlight the customizable nature of a social network over a static phone book. Or how to gently transition from a stogy old one way Intranet to a by-directional collaboration platform. All in all, tricks that a practitioner can act on soon after returning from the conference. For a more detailed analysis, Sandy Kemsley has a great write up, here.

I’m a little biased here because I read or listen to pretty much anything Marc Smith and Kate Niederhoffer say or write and because I believe that Analytics/Intelligence is going to be a huge differentiator in this space. So it was a treat to attend Metrics in the Hands of Users. Marc, Kate and Daniel Debow kindled a great discussion on how to drive, visualize and measure performance via less geeky constructs. I’m convinced that articulating the sociological and psychological (respectively) considerations as a catalyst for Enterprise 2.0 transformation can play a big role towards both executive buy in and successful execution. Moreover, my sense is that correlating the use of social computing as a way to respond to (not change) basic human nature can make it all seem achievable and less daunting. Contrast that with sermons on the glories of wiki based collaboration or the promise of orgasmic levels of workforce liberation via the use of a Twitter-like public status update. I wish this session was not at the tail end of the conference. We need more of this, up front.

Reality 2.0: Getting Started with Enterprise Social Networking by Mike Gotta was possibly one of the best research efforts I’ve seen on the topic of Enterprise Social Networking. Mike does a superb job of objectively “telling it like it is” whether its vendor capabilities/holes or inherent execution considerations such as the focus on deployment when it should be on adoption, or the threat to middle management and the curse of social caste systems. Lots of lessons not only for adoption but also excellent material to set expectations with LOB executives on risks that need to be mitigated, upfront. Bill Ives has an excellent post on this session, here.

Again, there were others that also had good insights. And I think the baseline research done for Open Enterprise is a treasure chest.

On to the sub optimal stuff.

Conference Format – Get Micro: Some of the most repeatable ideas and common problem sets I heard surfaced in conversations over dinner and in the reception area. Many from senior program managers, architects, and even executives who were ridiculously smart but not necessarily the kind that want to walk up to a microphone in a 300 seat auditorium.  Early lifecycle categories such as E2.0 need more casual break out sessions to foster discussions where repeatable problems, ideas and insights emerge. These off hand discussions I had included insight such as the limitations and possibilities of leveraging social computing tools on the BlackBerry. Which vendor apps really afford a customer centric mobile interaction model vs. those that are simply riding the polish and hype that comes with the iPhone developer platform. What’s particularly working for sales reps in their orgs? And on and on. My sense is that a lot of good insight was left of the table and we need a format that brings these topics to the surface.

Objectivity: This certainly wasn’t germane to most sessions but in some cases, there needed to be a clear distinction between research findings and objectivity on behalf of the speaker. When it’s research, it needs to be presented as findings, not tilted towards the preferences or enthusiasm of the speaker. And when an expert, who happens to be a vendor, is invited to a topical panel, little less product highlighting and more industry based knowledge sharing needs to be enforced. If I feel like I need to hire you (as a consultant) or buy your product (as a vendor) to really get the benefit of your opinion, then something’s lost.

Closing

So, as a practitioner, I think the conference brought a lot of actionable learning to the table and that’s a big win.

Personally, I can’t put a price on what I got out of these 4 days. I got to meet and thank a ton of folks who comment here on Pretzel Logic. I met folks whose stuff I read and learn from, every day. We exchanged a lot of ideas, opined on what’s hot and what doesn’t have legs in the space. We closed down bars.

This is the first of a series of posts on the conference. Next up are take aways on the space, distribution models and what customers should be asking of service providers.

Finally, a big thanks to Susan Scrupski – I might not have made the trip out but I did, and for that I’m grateful to her.

Other posts on the Conference:

That’s a comment that one of the leading Enterprise 2.0 vendors made to me recently.

This morning, Socialcast, provider of a micro-messaging platform announced that it’s moving to a ‘free-mium’ model. Meaning, get all the user and administrative features for free, regardless of company size or usage needs. For those of you not familiar with Socialcast, it a micro messaging platform that enables collaboration and sharing by unlocking discussions from closed email into an open environment. What started off as Twitter for the enterprise now looks more like Friendfeed for the enterprise – a model that I think has significant promise for the enterprise. The product used to be about $1 per user per month and is now completely free to use and administer. Socialcast plans to make money by enterprise deployments and charging for premium services such as directory integration, analytics and consulting.

TechCrunch thinks that there won’t be a need for paid services. I can’t disagree more but that’s another post. ReadWriteWeb believes “there will certainly be large government and enterprise customers who require self-hosting and consulting services.”

So the real question for me is: Are we on the path to super sonic commoditazion in the Enterprise 2.0 market before even a single vendor has truly broken out & dominated the space?

Some History

In the early days of Enterprise 2.0, the market was crowded with Wiki providers, many of whom painfully realized that the commercial market was too crowded and that the likes of Media Wiki (the free software that is used to power Wikipedia) made it increasingly difficult to charge for Wiki based products. Moreover, making a scalable business case from using a pure play wiki product was an increasingly difficult way to get the kinds of market valuations that a venture capitalist expected.

Enterprise Wiki, tagging, RSS and bookmarking providers quickly re-cast their solutions from Wikipedia and Delicious for the enterprise to Facebook for the enterprise providing rich social networking features, user profiles, blogging capabilities and the like. That market saw changes in dynamics as well, thanks to a very crowded and increasingly indistinguishable offering set, coupled with constant pressure from open source/ free forum offerings. See what BestBuy achieved with Drupal for instance.

Today

The next wave of differentiation amongst Enterprise 2.0 providers was going to be based on content creation as well as smart aggregation, fueled by micro-messaging, integration, aggregation, activity streams and the concept of the real time enterprise. Whilst this phase of evolution shows great promise, its also an area that’s going to require serious data integration to ensure that you can truly fold in data and content or surface intelligence from anywhere. Not just from the base social computing applications in your suite (user profiles, workspaces and wikis, etc) but also from third party internal and external systems in the enterprise such as LinkedIn and Salesforce.

Where this notion of commoditization before monetization further crystallized in my mind was when I read the announcement of Google Wave – “a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year”.

With Wave, Google is offering a real time messaging and activity stream platform that developers can use to create applications or amp up existing offerings. Its still early and unproven and will probably only work for SaaS offerings. But if it delivers on its promise, its a ridiculously more sophisticated incarnation of what Enterprise 2.0 vendors have spent a huge portion of their development budget on, for the last 12 months. Thanks to Google, it’s now available as a platform technology, for anyone to leverage. Ouch.

Going Forward

So assuming that the software stack continues down this path to commoditization, what’s left to make money on? Directory Integration? Application Integration? Change Management Consulting?

That might work for Socialcast given that its backed by True Ventures, the experts in realizing ungodly valuations from open source / free services (True Ventures is the backer of Automattic, the makers of WordPress. ‘nuff said). But how is that going to play out for other venture backed firms that have no interest in valuations that a services business generally commands.

I see 3 areas:

• Maybe we will see more business models similar to what Alfresco or Acquia have, where there’s a commercial alternative to a base open source platform.
• Or we will in fact start to see competition based on which software vendor can help organizations move into an Enterprise 2.0 design by focusing on specific business processes. That’s something that goes far far beyond selecting and deploying a social computing tool set. I know personally that SocialText, Jive Software, Newsgator and Traction Software are taking this seriously. I’m sure there are others.
• Analytics based monetization. There’s tremendous value in knowing what programs and efforts generate content and knowledge that helps the organization accelerate performance. Social computing breaks this information down in ways that were not possible before. There’s tangible value in business intelligence as a way to improve operational efficiency.

BTW, there is another lesson to be learned from all of this. Guess which class of Enterprise 2.0 vendors will read this post and simply shrug off my assertion? Those that are fixing known functional business problems such as customer service, sales acceleration, marketing intelligence and the like. They have a defined customer and a defined set of business problems that they fix (and as important, don’t fix), a known integration road map and a defined competitive landscape to navigate.

I can’t think of another time in the history of software or another area of enterprise software that has seen commoditization emerge so quickly in its evolution.

How do you think the Enterprise 2.0 market will shake out?

Last week was absolute mayhem on the work front for me and I missed out on the Google Wave news cycle. This past weekend, I dug into the video and some of the commentary that emerged. I’m in general agreement with those that believe that the applicability of Wave to the enterprise can be huge, but at some point in the future.

Overall two things struck me:

First, if Wave gets the traction it desires and in fact starts to look like a standard, its going to give birth to a huge services opportunity that will surround the wave platform and the litany of social software offerings for the enterprise (Blogs, Wikis, etc.). Already Appirio, a company that I’m quite impressed with, has taken a stab at illustrating how this might play out in the enterprise. Here are some basic use cases:

Imagine the following:

• Project Waves: Bridge the gap between your under-used project wiki page and the day-to-day email and IM traffic among the project team. Get new project team members up to speed quickly by having them “playback” the critical waves in the project workspace.
• Sales Waves: Collaborate on deals in an environment rich with context from your CRM system, embedded as gadgets within the wave. Turn everyone in your company into a member of a virtual account team that contributes ideas on how to do more business with your most important accounts.
• Support Waves: Stop endless loops of customer support email. Engage your customers in a wave that evolves as their needs change. Resolve their issue faster, and create reusable waves for customers with similar problems.

Second, every Enterprise 2.0 vendor is thinking about how this can potentially simplify and accelerate their product roadmaps and architectures.  And whether some re-tooling is in order if Wave does deliver on its stated promise. This stuff screams real time and is a promising foundation to realize a Friendfeed inspired utility for the enterprise. At the risk of sounding cynical, I also wonder if this is yet another step towards commoditization of the social software stack. Add to that the closing in of Open Source from the other side, as described by Jevon MacDonald over on the FastForward Blog today.

If there’s one analysis on the subject that you can dig into, it should be this one from Dion Hinchcliffe. Dion opines:

Its egalitarian and federation-friendly design is intended to create an entire open ecosystem for communication and collaboration that Google is not-so-modestly touting as the reinvention of digital interaction circa 2009.

Wave is still very early as demonstrated by the glitches in its launch video, below. And it still relies on Google Gears in lieu of pending changes to the HTML standard.  Its ridiculously promising though and can inject the concept of real time into core workflows and processes, far beyond micro blogging.

Here are some other very good perspectives on the subject that I liked and thought I’d share:

• Jeremiah Owyang: Google Wave to bring Web 2.0 lifestyle to work.
• Richard Waters: Google Wave: a secret weapon for the Enterprise?
• Elias Bizannes: Google Wave will take a generation.
• Hutch Carpenter:  Google Wave and the Enterprise: Beautiful Potential, Faraway Dream

And here’s the official video:

Last week, I had the opportunity to review a draft of The Guide to Online Community Management, published by the ReadWriteWeb team and edited by Marshall Kirkpatrick. Simply put, if you’re planning or considering a community effort at your organization, this is a must have. The report provides answers to any “ifs, ands & buts” with regard to the strategic importance of community engagement.

Most readers of this blog come from larger organizations. I’ve kept that audience in mind when reviewing this report.

Overall Impressions

To be honest, about 15% into the report, I struggled with the idea of buying a premium report that was largely peppered with quotes from articles that I’ve read before. However, as I kept reading, it became clear that report does a great job of identifying major trends, challenges and opportunities emanating from specific community efforts, backed by rich and sometimes opposing expert opinion. What you end up with is a set of succinct recommendations that organizations can consider and evaluate in the context of their own business objectives.  Should you publish a blog? Should you invest in a Facebook or a Twitter presence? Should you hire a full time or part time community manager? How to guarantee that your community efforts will fail? The pros and cons are nicely laid out for you, complete with real word experiences from practitioners, consultants and vendors. All of this to help with not just planning, but also practical execution.

On to specific areas that really resonated with me…..

Addressing ROI – Head On

I was quite surprised to see so many consultants and vendors either advise against quantifiable return or set a tragically low bar for success measurement. Thankfully, the unrelenting focus on ROI in this report clearly shows how community based engagement can be justified at large organizations. Ultimately, in my opinion, it boils down to whether you have the tenacity to attach the value of community management to specific business activity or not. What the report does well is to contrast and highlight examples of both approaches that enterprises can learn from and apply accordingly. Citing scores of case studies from companies such as Zappos, Dell, and WholeFoods, enterprises should be able to quickly identify what types of community efforts make sense for their business, and market place in general.

“The Morning After”

Since a good chunk of my work centers on execution planning, I was especially thrilled to see a sub section within the ROI discussion that was devoted to life after launch. As important, stakeholder expectations that need to be set with respect to ongoing operational requirements, changes in the customer engagement dynamics and new opportunities that emerge from maintaining a thriving community. For instance, on the issue of getting disillusioned because only a fraction of registered users regularly interact, Rubicon Consulting Principal, Michael Mace advises:

Managing a community is hard work and labor intensive. The report cites detailed case studies on how to beat the odds. For instance, Ex-Microsoft SharePoint Manager, Lawrence Liu (now at Telligent Systems) realized that the cost per incident was 90% lower when it was dealt with in the community forum as opposed to commercial phone support. With that in hand, he goes on to illustrate how he leveraged his success with the enthusiast community to create a business case for more dedicated in-house community support:

In terms of execution, the report also details useful how-to’s on topics such as hiring rock star community managers, establishing required resource commitments to ensure community health and sharing insights with relevant constituencies in the organization about what prospect and users want. Some of this is probably after-the-fact ROI, since you don’t know what direction the discussion will take until its’ had some time to gestate. The take away is that that once you get started, your list of benefits and value proposition for the community can continue to grow, beyond what you initially planned for.

Ancillary benefits that Community Managers can deliver across the organization

Beyond ROI that’s tied to the intended use case, the report discusses how other departments can gain from community efforts such as customer led innovation, recruiting, and awareness and research in the areas of marketing. Forrester Research Social Media Analyst Jeremiah Owyang says:

There’s some valuable discussion about how to generate leads in the context of B2B from community efforts, but this is an area where I believe that the report could have challenged interviewees even more. You’ll see some great examples at the end of the report about how sales reps engage on Twitter and surface qualified leads through conversations. But are two hours on Twitter more productive than say 5 qualified cold calls? Maybe; maybe not.

The end game

Overall, the only major component that’s missing for me is a deeper view into what a community managers’ career (and the programs they create) can look like in years to come. As new paradigm shifts in how to accelerate business performance emerge, there’s usually 3 phases to deliver lasting value:

Experiment > Operationalize > Institutionalize

This report has the first 2 phases covered. Experimentation is self explanatory and the report showcases some very effective emergent models. Operationalizing involves setting up a central command post that can incubate and manage these new work models as they bloom (much like what Dell has achieved, also covered in the report). Finally, institutionalizing requires that you get off the side lines, go to where process-laden, structured activities live, and improve, integrate with or take–out these inefficient forms of working. That’s where it can get truly transformational, towards an Enterprise 2.0 design. Business process management via ERP achieved this at larger organizations. In contrast, knowledge management largely failed at infiltrating each business activity and becoming institutionalized. How will the community function turn out and what are the risks that may cause it to fizzle? The good news is that we are beginning to see DNA-changing progress, primarily in the area of community based support. Helpstream is one company that’s leading the charge on this.

From a career standpoint I’ve always felt that today’s brightest community manager’s will not grow into VPs/CXO of Community or Social Media, etc. Rather, the very best ones will actually take over as leaders in charge of primary business functions such as Brand, Marketing, Customer Support etc. The catalyst will be successfully making relationships (not process) central to driving awareness, innovation, lead generation, support, and the like. This report confirms that hypothesis.

All that said, what the ReadWriteWeb team has done is brilliantly articulate how you can start and operationalize vibrant communities. And that’s what most enterprises are pondering, today.

The RWW Community Management Aggregator

Finally, this report is like the gift that keeps on giving. To respond to the dynamic nature of best practices as well as technology innovation, this report comes with a portal called the “The RWW Community Management Aggregator”. This important utility will keep subscribers up to date on the latest news, thought leaders and case studies in this space to make sure you are listening in the right places.

I fully expect that in the near future, this news aggregator will begin to surface insight into how to institutionalize community engagement in the context of specific lines of business activity.

Congratulations to the folks at RWW. Get a taste or buy the report here.

More reviews on the report here:

Jason Falls: ReadWriteWeb’s Guide To Online Community Management A Must Have For Businesses

Dawn Foster: ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management

Beth Canter:  Newsmastering for Professional Development 2.0 Dashboard