Planet Enterprise 2.0

A number of us at nGenera have been discussing internally what it means to communicate and create a supportive, yet fluid culture in the 2.0 era. One of our guys asked the question, “what was your ‘a-ha’ moment when Web 2.0 suddenly made sense and you became a true believer?” I’ve had a number of “a-ha” moments, but my very first was probably when I disagreed with Andrew McAfee (the widely acclaimed father of Enterprise 2.0) and published my POV on my blog. The piece got picked up in an influential blog that gave credence to my argument. I didn’t know Andrew (Andy) at the time, and was slightly terrified to take on a Harvard professor in the blogosphere. But in that single interlude, I realized that my tiny voice could make a difference. I could contribute to a greater discussion without the typical stereotypical handicaps (gender, class, education, privilege) that would otherwise squelch my opportunity to be heard. In other words, the “egalitarian, unstructured, emergent” platform of the next generation web was really that– a deeply satisfying democratic clearinghouse for idea-sharing and progress.

Since that time, I’ve come to know and really like Andy. I was always curious about how his own background might have had some bearing on his ideology regarding enterprise 2.0. I took the opportunity to have a one-on-one with Andy at the Enterprise 2.0 conference to get a more complete picture of his history and path to fame. It didn’t surprise me to learn that Andy grew up in a small town in the mid-west. His parents divorced when he was a boy, and his Mom worked hard as a single mother to give him and his siblings an excellent education. He characterized himself as “socially awkward” and a bit of a math and English geek. Through the pages of the New Yorker magazine, which he read cover to cover, he found a “periscope into something else” that he wanted to belong to. A top student, Andy left high school in his Junior year to become an undergraduate at MIT where he was accepted early. At MIT, he felt he was, “finally among my people.” He described his fellow students as “bizarrely talented in different ways.” He joined a fraternity, pulled off a double major in Mechanical Engineering and French (Humanities) and eventually left MIT with two M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Management. He describes one of the highlights of his life being the day he received his admittance letter to MIT.

As far as foreseeing his web-celeb fame, he could not be more surprised. In fact, he says he had, “No master plan” and “fell into business studies by accident.” Although he worked as a consultant in operations management after graduation for a few years, he found the business professional life, well, boring. He made a decision to return to school to get his doctorate, at Harvard this time. He wrote his dissertation on (gulp) modern ERP and the performance of on-time shipments before and after an R/3 installation.

During our breakfast, I had posited that because of his unprivileged background, he might have a bent toward “subverting the prevailing paradigm.” He said he wasn’t sure. But he said through his own experience, he learned “expertise can be emergent” and that few if any of his peers in college came from privileged backgrounds, but all were vastly talented. He cited the example of his mom who started as a bookkeeper in downtown Chicago and worked toward an accounting degree at night. Today, she’s the CFO of that company.

I think I’m going to disagree (with love) once again with Andy. When you see him tooling around Cambridge on his motorcycle in his leather jacket, you wonder if he’s not just a little rebellious. After all, he’s the iconic champion of turning business and technology on its head– removing the walls that separate individuals and encouraging management to consider there is an alternative to hierarchical command and control. They say there is a perfect job out there for everyone. Andy McAfee has earned the right to lead the culture clash that comes with e2.0. I can’t think of a better candidate.

So, yeah.  I wanted to change the world in my 20s.  In some ways, I thought I could with Unix and my first Mac.  But, mostly, I just ended up talking about it a lot to anyone who cared to listen.  Today’s 20-somethings have the tools to effect change like I never did.  They have instantaneous access to information, strong social networks with which to groupthink and self-organize, and a somewhat unbridled sense of optimism that everything is possible and within their reach.  I grew up in the Me Generation of the Reagan era and although we excelled at the selfish art of Machiavellian achievement, in the end it took my generation down a path that led to, well, the S&L scandal, Enron, one-dot-oh greed, and now, the subprime meltdown.   Our narcissism is our legacy.  

Lately, there’s been some grousing about how the GenYers (Millennials) are overhyped.  I disagree.  I don’t think we’re talking enough about the next generation of “we-wired” digital immigrants.  I know our clients are looking at this demographic set seriously.  The digitally-astute army that’s about to descend on the corridors of power in corporations around the world brings with it a welcome promise of radical change and constructive disruption.  

Larry Dignan, a fellow irregular, wrote recently, 

“So what really happens when these Millennials run into IT departments at large corporations where they are most likely to work? They will run into a brick wall and realize that it makes sense to centralize some IT functions. They’ll realize Web 2.0 is insecure. They’ll realize you can’t share intellectual property on Twitter. They’ll realize that remote data wiping is pretty cool when you lose your phone. Bottom line: If there’s any touchy feeling collision course between Millennials and business, the latter will win.

Why? Ultimately these people have to get jobs–and often these jobs are at places like Johnson & Johnson and General Electric. Sorry folks you won’t be bringing your own management practices–and latest greatest Web 2.0 apps–to those places.”

As it turns out, we talk to companies like GE and J&J all the time.  We’re conducting a large research project right now on “Redefining Employee Computing” with 24 member corporations, many of them global– half are in the Fortune 100 (of those, 6 are in the top 50 and 3 are in the top 10).  I can assure you that the generational “collide” is a high priority board room and management issue.   It’s so strategic, many corporations are preemptively prepping to accommodate the new workforce and rethink their old school management processes.

Here is CTO, Greg Simpson of GE talking about how GE views the Millennials.

It’s that time again when I feel compelled not only to wrap up highlights of the Enterprise 2.0 conference, but to divulge my thinking on where we are in the progression of widespread 2.0 adoption — in our personal lives and at work.

It’s hard to top my impassioned first post on this topic from last year: A Year’s Summary of Personal Reflection. Not only was I drinking the Kool-aid, I was mixing the powder and stirring the pitcher. Where last year I was overwhelmed with the newfound freedom that comes with social networking and collaboration, this year I’m focused more on the practical application of how these tools can drive productivity gains and measurable improvements in business performance.

This year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference highlighted several themes I’ve seen over the past year. 1. frustration, 2. abundance of choice, 3. breaking out of the echo chamber, and 4. dividends. Here we go:

Frustration Canyon

The frustration story comes from two directions ending in the same place. Atop one mountain, we have so-called “evangelists” (like me) who are frustrated with the slow pace of adoption in the ROW (the Rest-of-World who is not gung-ho for e2.0). The adjacent mountain has a crowd of interested observers that can’t see the landscape clearly, are somewhat intimidated by the pace of change, and question the utility behind the hype. In the middle is a canyon of confusion. During the latter half of 2008 and by next year’s conference, we should see this gap closing. As more case studies emerge, and more business cases get approved, the evangelists will no longer seem so freakish, and the potential buyers of e2.0 technologies will have settled into a sensible course of action to web-enable their workforce.

Rejoice in Choice

I caught up with Ismael Ghalimi recently who said he is tracking nearly 800 products in the Office 2.0 database. Agile development methods and low-cost cloud computing alternatives are turbocharging startup activity, breaking down time/cost barriers to product development and release. With the welcome addition of major enterprise vendors introducing 2.0 features and product suites, the choices are ever-abundant to start experimenting with these tools at relatively low and sometimes no cost. I was amazed at number of players I had never heard of at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference… and even more amazed at what they could demo. Standouts for me included Newsgator’s Social Sites, Trampoline Systems, Groupswim, Igloo, and Socialcast. The barriers to adoption may be steep, but the barrier to entry in this category is below sea level. Take some of these products for a spin.

The Echo (Prison) Chamber

Whether it’s Twitter, Friendfeed, Plaxo Pulse, blog posts, or the ever-languishing Facebook… the 1% continues to talk to itself and hone the global agenda for Enterprise 2.0. The goal this year is to do the hardcore missionary work and break out of the echo chamber. If you fancy yourself an e2.0 expert, start investigating industry trade shows (like retail, entertainment, banking, hospitality) where you can illuminate the non-converted. The blogosphere has spawned web celebs in various circles and enterprise 2.0 is no different. It’s important to remember that everyone tracking this space or participating in it is dwarfed by the number of people who don’t even know it exists.

And finally,

Lifetime Dividends

I may be taking a more sober, Realpolitik approach to 2.0 evangelism, but I’m still a die-hard believer. Through the pages of this blog, you can see how my life has irrevocably changed since I started tracking this sector. The reason my life changed so dramatically is due entirely to the rich, personal relationships I’ve formed over the course of a few years. I challenge everyone reading this blog to calculate the economic value of their own social network. Contacts and rolladex’s have been driving business for decades, but the deep, penetrating personal understanding we have for each other is unparalleled in modern history. In other words, relationships scale. With each new Twitter follower, with each new blog reader, I compound the likelihood I will achieve some personal or business benefit from simply connecting to a stranger. The 2.0 web begins and ends with people. Imagine the possibilities when everyone in the world is socially connected. That day is coming. I can only imagine it will yield a greater humanity.

Photo credits: (canyon) John Donahue, (night shot) Nosterdamus on Flickr.

There were workshops yesterday at the Enterprise 2.0 conference.  The first one, Social Computing Platforms: IBM and Microsoft revealed an unlikely sturdy competitor in the sea of terrific startups that are competing in this new arena.  IBM, yes, IBM demonstrated a competitive product.  I had never seen such a thorough demo of Lotus Connections.  It had a terrific UI, more 2.0 features than I could even keep up with, and the woman who was taking us through the demo, clearly “got it.”  Who wouldda thunk?  

By comparison, the SharePoint presentation was, well, uninspired.  There was a healthy back channel chat conversation on the comparison between the two products.  We were particularly damning of the SharePoint product demonstration in the back channel (which is found on the conference’s Clearspace community viaMeebo.)  If you’re coming to the conference, be sure to check out the back channel chat, as I found that the back channel conversation from real customers was much more interesting than the material being presented.

Many of our clients are turning to SharePoint to deliver 2.0 functionality.  From this day forward, I will be urging them to consider Lotus Connections, if they must choose an enterprise vendor for their global operation.  The dark horse here is Oracle.  Over the next few days, including a private dinner with Oracle with the Enterprise Irregulars, we’ll be seeing a lot of what Oracle is bringing to the table.  It would be terrific if there were two good legacy enterprise choices for large enterprises.

Of course, the wide range of excellent startups offer a clear alternative to the enterprise players.  I also attended Dion Hinchcliffe’s Implementing Enterprise 2.0 workshop.  It was a solid roundup of data and commentary on where we are today with Enterprise 2.0.  Dion had a new vendor on the scene, Aegeon, give a short demo of its offering, Spaceo.us.  This product holds particular promise because of its emphasis on bringing existing enterprise IT assets, including SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards, into the social collaboration platform.  Spaceo.us also placed first in Stowe Boyd’s Launch Pad finals.  You can see demos of the producthere.

Finally, thanks to @stevemann, we had a great dinner with friends at the Enterprise 2.0 Mayhem dinner. Here is a short video clip from blogger-extraordinaire, Luis Suarez, whom I finally met in carbon for the first time.

Update:  Luis is saying, “”Knowledge is Commoditised. Connections not!”

I attended a luncheon today sponsored by the Internet Strategy Forum. The invited guest was Forrester’s Josh Bernoff. Josh’s topic was “Winning in a world transformed by social media.” He cautioned the audience to not focus on technologies, but rather relationships and the prevailing deeper social trends creating the “groundswell.” Bernoff describes the groundswell as a “social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other rather than from traditional institutions.”

His presentation was chock full of popular social media/community examples, many of which I’d seen before, but always interesting to see in aggregate. He also outlined how to approach the exercise in leveraging the groundswell with tips on setting objectives, understanding roles, measuring success with metrics, building a business case, etc. The high point of the presentation for me was his discussion related to what Forrester calls, “Social Technographics.” It’s basically a graphic representation of where customers are on the social media activity ladder. Additionally, Forrester claims to have analytical data that will profile your target customers’ social computing patterns by age, country, and gender (that map to the activity ladder). Check out the profile tool. Would be interested to know how they built this tool, but have to admit, it’s kinda fun.

Slides explaining the Social Technographics ladder:

All of this and more is explained in the Groundswell book. You can get more resources at the Groundswell site.

Nice high-quality video interview here with Andy in Tokyo.

This video was originally shared on blip.tv by grl with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license.

TechWeb is offering a free conference pass (at a $2200 value) for a lucky ITSinsider reader. All you need to do is post in the comments why you subscribe to/read the ITSinsider blog and why you want to go to the conference. Special preference will be given to an ITSinsider reader who adds me to your blogroll.

Of course, most readers are already going, so I’m not sure if I’ll get any takers here. If you’ve not signed up yet, and you didn’t win the ITSinsider free pass, you can still register and get $100 off by registering with this code: CMBMEB14 CMBMEB33. The pass is unlimited, so everyone can use it.  The demo pass gets you into see the keynotes and general sessions, launch pad, Enterprise20pen and various networking events.

Very happy to meet you in “carbon” as they say.

photo credit: Alex Dunne on flickr.

Correction: Spammenters*

Shame, shame, shame. I realize Social Media is the new black in the art of PR, but how irritating is this? Tammy Erickson, our in-house workforce guru, published a post today on women’s progress in the workplace on her Harvard Business School discussion leader blog. Her first comment was from Ms. Kimberly Rosenberg who lavishes her with praise then notso deftly segues into how she is using Microsoft Office Live for Small Business (no hyperlinks intended) to increase her productivity.

I sleuthed around online on Ms. Rosenberg, and it appears she has left virtually the same comment on at least 4 other blogs in the past few weeks. Ewwww.

http://www.blissfullydomestic.com/2008/04/an-organized-ho.html

http://experts.internetbasedmoms.com/aurelia/finding-balance-as-a-wahm

http://www.entrepremusings.com/index.php/2008/04/24/why-arent-there-more-rich-women-entrepreneurs/

http://empowerwomennow.com/news-women-entrepreneurs/index.php/how-to-get-your-partner-from-zero-to-hero-in-your-business/

Microsoft Office Live for Small Business product management– what are you thinking? So blatant an attempt to hawk your wares? Buy an ad. There are right ways and wrong ways to engage the blogosphere. Please start feeding any number of the excellent social media blogs that will instruct you on how to do this right. If Ms. Rosenberg works for a PR agency, send her to social media school. Or send her to start doing some homework here (Chris Brogan) and here (Brian Solis).

The smoking gun:

*Update: Thanks to Lara Kretler, the best term to describe this practice is “spammenting.”

It’s that time again, the hallowed Enterprise 2.0 conference is revving up for early June. I was pleased to work on the agenda this year with Steve Wylie, the conference organizer, along with other members of the advisory board. The conference is in its second year and promises to reflect the maturation that occurred in the space over the past 12 months. Although many first-time attendees to the conference will be new to Enterprise 2.0, the concepts and themes have evolved and been refined over the past 12 months. Three out of the four largest enterprise vendors are big sponsors this year (IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle.) I’m personally hoping we see relevant, interesting developments from these large vendors this year.

We are introducing two new ideas to the conference this year which I’m particularly excited about. The first is Stowe Boyd’s Launch Pad where four (whittled down from a larger number by votes) audience-chosen startups will have an opportunity to demo their products and compete for a winning spot for the best launch pad product/service. As there is such a torrent of new products coming onto the scene, this is a great attempt to filter out the most useful based on collective crowd selection. We are considering doing something very similar regarding sessions for September’s Office 2.0 conference based on the SXSW’s panel-picker software.

The second event, or maybe unevent I should say, is called Enterprise2Open. Modeled after “barcamps and unconferences,” this will be a half-day’s worth of unstructured Q&A and sharing hosted by Ross Mayfield. The unstructured, open-type of event has been popular for some time in the development community, but we thought we’d attempt to try it out this year with a non-technical audience. The format provides a no-hassle, informative forum to ask any and all of your burning questions related to Enterprise 2.0 and get answers from peers and folks in the community who may have experienced the same issues. You may want to consider getting your questions and topics suggested in advance by posting them to the Enterprise2Open wiki. You can actually be a presenter yourself, if you bring your own soap box. Just get yourself on the self-organized agenda. The entire session will run in the afternoon on Tuesday, June 11 from 1-4pm. nGenera is sponsoring the event, so I’ll be there with a few of my colleagues and customers.

Speaking of customers, Rob Carter, CIO of Federal Express is giving the opening keynote. A group of us were in Memphis at Fedex’s central distribution facility in March where we heard Rob talk on 2.0 adoption. Rob sees himself as an evangelist himself for 2.0 in the enterprise. I’m really pleased he accepted the offer to keynote on Tuesday morning. One of the conference themes this year is accelerating user adoption. Having notable icons from the F500 executive board room will go far to lower the barriers of trial and experimentation with 2.0 alternatives.

I’ll be at the conference from Sunday to Wednesday. I hope to see many of you there. Please drop me a note or a comment here to let me know if you’re attending. Many thanks to all the folks on the panels I helped arrange.

Photo credits: Jeckman on flickr and Alex Dunne on flickr.

My bad. Sapphire ‘08 was an enormous field of opportunity to mine SAP intelligence on what the company is doing regarding Enterprise 2.0 initiatives. Somehow, I missed that opportunity and find myself with a lot of follow-up todos. A group of us had back-to-back meetings with SAP execs both Monday and Tuesday. To be perfectly frank, I learned more about what SAP is doing in Enterprise 2.0 from a product manager on the show floor in a half-hour (thank you Peter!) than I did from any of the executives. This was partly my fault and no-one’s fault, as well. My fault because I could have done a better job of trolling the show floor and no-one’s fault because in the meetings we had, we had a limited amount of time to speak to the executives individually. My EI colleagues had pressing issues on understanding why SAP’s mid-market SaaS solution Business-by-Design is going to be delayed, as well as other issues involving Business Objects, NetWeaver, TCO, cloud-computing, etc. To interject questions on blogs, wikis, RSS and mash-ups just seemed silly and inconsequential to me, so I mostly kept quiet.

Enterprise 2.0 is just not a burning issue on the minds of top SAP execs (with the notable exception of the CMO, Marty Homlish). SAP execs mirror the same sentiment as our executive clients: they have serious businesses to run– not a lot of time for the giddy consumery stuff. SAP software fuels the nitty gritty of hard-core business processes for most of the largest enterprises in the world. Where blogging (for example) fits into getting a raw material through the factory floor to a finished product, booked in inventory and ready to move through a supply chain is just not obvious to me right now. So the likelihood of an Enterprise 2.0 bolt-on to SAP is just as slim as it is naive.

I’m trying to choose my words carefully here because I don’t want to “open my mouth and remove all doubt” regarding my ignorance of SAP’s legacy business or its product roadmap. If you want thorough, interesting, and thoughtful commentary on SAP, please consult with my Enterprise Irregular colleagues who shine in this arena.

What I did uncover about SAP & Enterprise 2.0, however, was pretty interesting and demonstrates that 2.0 technology is working its way into mainstream SAP software, as well as delivering benefits for SAP customers. I, unfortunately, missed a terrific presentation by Andrew Cabanski-Dunning, Director of Product Marketing for SAP NetWeaver. In Cabanski-Dunning’s presentation, “Empowering the User: Enterprise 2.0 Solutions from SAP”, he talks about engaging the user, community virtual workspaces for collaboration, networks connecting peers and experts, searching all business objects, integrating 3rd-party tools and data with open APIs, wikis and web content publishing, mash-ups, flex and ajax, mobile interfaces, and user adoption. All the buzzwords and key concepts are there. I’m going to follow up with Cabanski-Dunning and see if I can get a personal briefing of this presentation and publish what I learn.

On the collaboration front, a number of gems surfaced. The community efforts are truly paying off for SAP. Through communities such as its one-million member strong SDN (software developer network) and BPX (business process expert exchange), SAP is reaping the benefits of an active and engaged co-collaborative community where collective intelligence delivers benefits for all parties. Where ten years ago, customers had to accept SAP’s view of the world, today customers, ISVs, solutions integrators, and partners jointly weigh in on enhancements and features. I heard one statistic that claimed over 50% of SAP’s enterprise services are now developed in tandem with the community. Other communities include its Industry Value Network, the Enterprise Services Community, as well as the many Industry Standards communities where SAP participates.

The most interesting discussion on the use of next-gen technology for me was a show-and-tell with CMO Marty Homlish. Homlish experimented with a virtual marketing community meeting that included 1800 people over 3 days spanning 15 time zones. Using Unisfair (which is like a Second Life for business) and a collaborative workspace called Plexus, SAP marketing employees contributed over 3,000 user-generated content items over the 3-day period. At one point during the trial, 75% of SAP’s global marketing operation were participating in the live event. Incidentally, the Plexus collaboration workspace is itself an example of a co-innovation built for the community by the community as one of the projects in SAP’s Co-innovation Lab. It is a co-development project between Jive Software, Intelligroup, Wipro, Enthiosys and Adobe.

Finally, I did get the chance to ask co-CEO Henning Kagermann about SAP’s internal social networking product, Harmony. He indicated it wasn’t clear yet what they were going to do with it. Harmony is in use by about 2,500 SAP employees including the company’s “high potentials” and select members of its U.S. community. He viewed it largely as an HR offering and indicated it was “not built on SAP technology.” He mentioned it could be a side-by-side offering in the future, but did not commit to a date for commercializing the product. He hinted that collaborative supplier management could be part of the suite, but didn’t go further.

It was clear to me that SAP was not going to be launching a killer app in Enterprise 2.0, but would rather incorporate social networking and collaborative features into its product suites where it made sense and delivered value to customers. So where IBM has Lotus Connections, Microsoft has SharePoint, SAP will be content to patch 2.0 functionality into its core business offerings, but may not uniquely focus in the discrete social software arena.

Oracle, on the other hand, is making a noisy “me-too” in this space. In the past two days, I’ve seen a lot of interesting developments highlighting Oracle’s interest in positioning itself as a player in Enterprise 2.0. To Oracle’s credit, they’ve done an excellent job in communicating the benefits and logical integration opportunities for 2.0 technologies in its core business applications. See Dennis Howlett’s interview with Charles Phillips and this post from JavaOne at the CNET blog which includes a video. I’m working on a briefing demo with Oracle and will keep you updated with what we discover.

I was complaining last week on Twitter about SAP being late to the party in Enterprise 2.0. Having been around the technology business for a thousand years, a(nother) little bird reminded me of something similar years ago in the outsourcing market. It was 1994 and IBM was seeking relief from the Justice Department about lifting its 1956 Consent Decree so it could compete more effectively for large IT outsourcing contracts. At the time, giants EDS and CSC were leading the market. My prediction was that IBM would dominate over time and the reason could be summed up in two words: installed base. IBM proceeded to trounce its competitors and is today the largest services player in the world. Over a decade later, the fundamentals still prove true. SAP may surprise us all.

I’m headed out to SAP’s SAPPHIRE ‘08 U.S. conference, this year held in Orlando. The conference is an annual pilgrimage for most of my Enterprise Irregular brethren. Over two dozen of us are going to the U.S. gig and will be given access to SAP’s executive leadership to get all our questions answered.

This will be my first SAPPHIRE. My interest in going is to ascertain if, how, and when SAP is going to incorporate 2.0 functionality into its massive ERP offerings. Of all the leading enterprise vendors, SAP has been conspicuously absent with real offerings in the space. Although SAP talked a good game and demoed a solid internal product, Harmony, at last year’s SAPPHIRE, we haven’t heard anything all year on the commercial possibilities for Harmony or how 2.0 collaborative features will be integrated into SAP’s legacy products. At least I am not aware of any. Of course, there will be a swat-team of SAPers in Orlando who will swarm me and set me straight if I am wrong.

What I find so odd, ironic about SAP in this space is that the company is, by far, the most progressive in reaching out to the blogger community– does the very best job at this and sets the standard, in fact. It has hired two leading social media experts, Shel Israel and Maggie Fox to help SAP with its marketing efforts, and many senior execs make heavy use of social media tools i.e., Twitter, blogging. The SAP developer network which makes use of a wiki for collaboration is over 750,000 people strong. In this ITSinsider post from last year, you’ll see in the comments how SAPers noted they make use of several wiki vendors and have certified Jive software forums for its NetWeaver product. Clearly, SAP “gets it.”

So, why so far ahead in using the tools and so behind in offering them simultaneously? This is the single question on my mind as I arrive in Orlando. I’ll be flanked with smart guys, so I feel pretty safe.

Most of us will be twittering from the conference. I will be respectful of the conference-spam factor and will only post items I think are uniquely important. If you have a question, you’d like asked of any SAP executive including Leo Apotheker and Henning Kagermann, just send me a DM to @ITSinsider on Twitter. I’ll do my best to get it answered.

BSG Alliance, my employer, changed its name to nGenera (en-gen-ER-a) this week. I really like the new name and logo. Because we’ve grown so fast (acquiring 5 companies in less than a year), it was important to mash-up all the humans under one single identity and brand.

I’m sure someone in my company will correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it was my idea to center on this meme we call “Next Generation Enterprises.” We kicked around a lot of strategic messaging ideas in the early days and this one stuck. Everyone and their half-brother is now moving into the space we scoped out about a year ago. Of course, we are ahead of the game and have a strong revenue story, so we can be smug for about 5 seconds.

The nGen meme comes to us by way of our in-house guru, Don Tapscott. Most readers of my blog should have already seen Don’s talk this year at one conference or another. I’m incredibly proud to be associated with the think-tankers up at Don’s research organization in Toronto. If you aren’t feeding the Wikinomics blog, today’s the day to start. Terrific bits of brilliance on the 2.0 scene come out of there on a daily basis.

We also have a deep and wide reservoir of expertise in the Talent arena with voices such as Tammy Erickson who is blogging on Harvard Business Online. One of the areas where we excel is pegging trends in the demographics of the workplace. Don refers to the cohort of kids who’ve grown up digital as N-Gens. In Don’s talk, he tells a story about how he thought his son was a prodigy when he was young, but soon realized all his son’s friends were prodigies too. They’re born digitally wired.

So it’s this particular slice of our nGenera story I want to focus on in this post– how different the “youngsters” are from us. This weekend I took my son and his friends to see “Shine a Light” the Martin Scorsese concert film of the Rolling Stones. I kid myself that just because I share an appreciation for 70s bands with my son, I’m cooler than my parents. I’m so not cool in his eyes at all.

I already blogged a while ago about how my son is a guild master on World of Warcraft, but the latest development came this year when his 6th grade teacher asked the class to take a keyboarding speed test. I remember taking typing in high school. A passing grade was 40 wpm, and it was tough for most of my peers to pass that test. My son Alex types 118 wpm with one error. He’s 11.

In the past month, Alex figured out how to use iMovie. He is now the neighborhood film director/producer/publisher. I am arranging for tutoring lessons so he can learn Final Cut from an nGenera GenY who works in our office. Like Don’s son, my son seems like a prodigy to me, but he’s just a normal nGen kid. He lives online. T.V. is a background noise if it’s on at all. He goes to school with his iPod, txts his friends with his phone, and IMs from his MySpace page most of the night, while surfing YouTube for skating videos.

Is Enterprise ready for my son and his friends? No. That’s my mission for nGenera: To make work like play so you can make more money doing what you do.

I’ll leave you with one of Alex’s videos. Taking a page out of Debbie Weil’s comment handbook, feel free to leave a comment for Alex. “No need to say you know me.”

What is your nGen story?

I was flipping through The Economist this morning (one of two publications I subscribe to) and this headline caught my eye:

The story details about how hundreds of small investors self-organized and forced a decision reversal and reimbursement of investment funds. This is a terrific example of the power of citizen collaboration and crowd-clout. I’ve started reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Shirky details several examples along the same lines. If you have some time, watch Shirky’s talk from Harvard last month.

From the Economist piece:

People who would never have met in real life, from pig farmers and retired loggers to MBA students and pastors, created a formidible interest group.

This piece also busts two myths: only kids on Facebook and Facebook is dead.

This bugaboo of a word “social” is the irritant with social software in the enterprise. Social just has too many negative connotations in corporate circles from socialism to socialites. I once heard from a Wall Street executive that he was no longer permitted to use the word “social” when describing 2.0 opportunities. It made senior management uncomfortable. Similarly, if there is more emphasis on social than networking, our clients raise the justifiable question of employee productivity. When we talk about collaboration and breaking down barriers with earnest information-sharing and knowledge harvesting, the conversation is more intriguing. But, realistically, can technologies engender cultural change? That is the $5 billion dollar question that will be answered over the next few years.

I heard recently from a manager at a large bank who is rolling out a corporate-wide social network to over 100K employees that the greatest challenge the bank is facing relates to change management, not any particular issue with the technology at all. Even the grand-daddy of Enterprise 2.0 case studies, DRKW, enlisted a consultant to shepherd adoption throughout the organization. ZDNet blogger and fellow Irregular Dennis Howlett recently posited that, “While the benefits of collaboration may be blindingly obvious and the path laid out on a platter, it is only by first understanding the absolute requirement for top down, wholesale DNA change that you stand a hope in hell of making these technologies work within the enterprise.”

At BSG, we recognize that these changes are going to be painful and slow for some large companies. In fact, we have research that proves just how ineffective organizations are when they’re not transparent and openly collaborative. My colleague Andy Shimberg led a major study last year that involved over 1,000 executives and project managers that analyzed over 2,200 projects. The net result was largely undiscussed and ignored problems underlie almost all project failures. Five primary areas were discovered that impeded success:

• Fact-free planning– padding budgets, ignored estimates and timelines
• AWOL sponsors– when leadership and support suddenly disappears
• Skirting– work arounds, scope creep, projects approved with no resources
• Project chicken– avoiding speaking first for fear of blame/retribution
• Team failures– all participants have different masters, non-performing team members

Estimated failure rates ranging from 72 to 91%* cost companies hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Imagine the cost-savings corporations would realize if only these folks started communicating and collaborating and avoiding the harsh realities of “Silence Fails” outcomes? It’s just plain unrealistic. The technologies we had prior to web 2.0 would enable employees to “speak up.” Email, telephones, even notes passed under the door could have prevented huge cost overruns and errors, but technology– old or new– won’t fix these problems. When employees are economically linked to questioning authority, there is a downside to voluntary collaboration.

I shudder, but I do remember hearing this before. It was over a year ago we heard Enterprise 2.0-downer Davenport publish these remarks:

Such a utopian vision can hardly be achieved through new technology alone. The absence of participative technologies in the past is not the only reason that organizations and expertise are hierarchical. Enterprise 2.0 software and the Internet won’t make organizational hierarchy and politics go away. They won’t make the ideas of the front-line worker in corporations as influential as those of the CEO. Most of the barriers that prevent knowledge from flowing freely in organizations – power differentials, lack of trust, missing incentives, unsupportive cultures, and the general busyness of employees today – won’t be addressed or substantially changed by technology alone. For a set of technologies to bring about such changes, they would have to be truly magical, and Enterprise 2.0 tools fall short of magic.

As liberating as they may be, as fun as they may be, Enterprise 2.0 tools simply won’t change basic human nature. It will be a new opportunity for change management or perhaps business social process re-engineering that will enable these tools to deliver on their powerful capability for the enterprise.

*”CHAOS Chronicles,” Standish Group, 2004 and Kaplan and Norton in “The Strategy Focused Organization.”

On the eve of the sixties social revolution, my older brother turned me onto science fiction writer Robert Heinlein. “Stranger in a Strange Land” is one of Heinlein’s classics. It’s the story of a human raised on Mars who returns to Earth and introduces radical transformative ideas to Earth’s culture. This book, originally written in 1961, reappeared in the recesses of my memory this week, as I found myself relating to the main character. Over the past month, I’ve been involved in a few client meetings where we have introduced sets of our clients to “the edge.” Never in a professional situation have I felt so removed, so different, from my client peers.

There are two programs I’m directly participating in that should yield some interesting results. The first is a multi-client study, “Re-defining Employee Computing” and the second is our IT Leadership Development Program. Sensitivity to corporate internal discussions prevents me from listing here which of our clients are participating in these programs, but rest assured, these are some of the largest corporations in the world with some of the largest IT budgets.

The experience has been eye-opening for me, as we, in the Enterprise 2.0 community, tend to immerse ourselves in the echo chamber of those who already have crossed the mental chasm to web 2.0 freedom and collaborative sharing. Our clients are not resisting the changes afoot. They’re eager to learn about social media and web 2.0, but they face hard realities concerning what to even invest their time in, let alone their budget– which, by the way, is mostly already committed to legacy apps and operations expense.

I’m aware that the so-called “revolution” is being waged in departmental groups of large enterprises, but in order to reap the true benefits of enterprise 2.0, IT must embrace the transcendental experience. Despite the flood of information flowing every day onto the web on Enterprise 2.0 and social media, the largest firms in the world are now just becoming introduced to these concepts. It’s important to keep this in mind even if we think we’ve seen it and heard it all.

Along these lines, a YouTube interview from CIO Magazine…