One of the more interesting blog comment series I've read recently is the ongoing discussion about Lotus Notes over at Rod Boothby's Innovation Creators blog.
A couple of weeks ago Rod posted Lotus Notes - The Asbestos of Enterprise IT. In it he lambasted Lotus Notes' usability, among other things. This has led to some back and forth - and mudslinging - that when read in the right light tells us a lot about the advantages entrenched platforms have in large corporations when they compete with up-and-coming Web 2.0 "newcomers."
All in Web 2.0
Mike Stopforth called me from South Africa last week to chat about Web 2.0 in the enterprise. We talked about a lot of things. One topic that piqued my interest was how different technologies are adopted at different rates in different cultures.
Let's Get Real about Enterprise Web 2.0
As I talk with friends, prospects, and clients, and as I cruise the blogosphere, it’s beginning to look like some sanity is emerging into the world of “enterprise web 2.0.”
Luis Suarez recently blogged and podcasted about social bookmarking services. He highly recommends BLINKLIST, a service that I have not used.
I have been using RAWSUGAR, COGENZ, and CONNECTBEAM, so I also have been forming some personal opinions about social bookmarking.
I learned basic data analysis techniques by studying the relationship between demographics and political opinion poll responses. As an undergraduate in a graduate Political Science course at Ohio State University I used 80 column punch cards (send me an email if you don't know what that means) to instruct an IBM mainframe computer to crosstabulate age, sex, income, and race data with voting behavior and political opinions.
Now you can do the same stuff online with little more than an Internet connection and a browser.
Well, it's official: according to a special report in Ziff Davis' "CIO Insight" magazine, Web 2.0 is coming to an enterprise near you!
While the date on the main page of the report is October 2, 2006, though, the articles in this collection actually stretch back a couple of years.
Introducing Collaboration Technologies to the Enterprise is a Challenge
One of the interesting topics that came up several times at last week’s The New New Internet conference here in Northern Virginia was the challenge of how to introduce collaborative tools into an organization. This is a topic that is well reviewed in a recent post by Shawn Callahan in the Anecdote web site titled Why People Don’t Use Collaborative Tools.
I've had some time to ponder this past Wednesday's ExecutiveBiz New New Internet conference in McLean, Virginia. It was organized by Dion Hinchcliffe and other Web 2.0 luminaries to discuss corporate applications of a wide range of collaboration, social networking, and software development technologies and processes.
Given the difficulty of doing Return on Investment (ROI) analysis for IT projects, how do you justify an Enterprise Web 2.0 project?
In a comment he left on my How Much Will Your Enterprise Web 2.0 Project Cost? post, Vinnie Mirchandani suggested that one place to start would be to look at the criteria used in the past for evaluating large IT investments.
After Wikipedia's editing caused premature deletion of an evolving Enterprise 2.0 article (the correct term is now "enterprise social software"), I decided to investigate the costs associated with Web 2.0 applications in the enterprise.
When considering the potential system integration costs of an enterprise web 2.0 project, one of the first things to do is to identify potential system-related “ripple effects” (if any) of introducing an enterprise web 2.0 system into the organization. We also need to consider the cost implications of addressing and managing these ripple effects over time.
Professor Andrew McAfee has an excellent series of posts related to the application of “return on investment” (ROI) calculations to enterprise IT. His posts deserve a close reading. He gets some flack for seeming to argue against measurement, but as he explains in his second post, that’s not his point; he’s basically saying that too many business cases that rely on a haphazard or incomplete calculation of IT benefits are flawed, incorrect, incomplete, or self serving.
The title refers to the Wikipedia article that was begun last week and mentioned by Andrew McAfee in his blog. It was a brief article that repeated a few of McAfee's ideas and began listing some relevant links. Recently, though, someone deleted the Enterprise 2.0 article. Gone.
Rod Boothby (or someone using Rod’s name) recently stopped by and left the following comment attached to my recent accelerating network effects post:
IBM’s Luis Suarez in 5 Key Steps towards Adopting Web 2.0 within the Enterprise provides a pragmatic and experience-based list of five tips on how to introduce Web 2.0 technologies into the enterprise.
The IT Director in a Large Manufacturing Company Discusses "Baby Boomer Brain Drain"
Last week I interviewed “Ferris” (not his real name) about how his company is handling the pending retirement of senior IT staff.
Ferris is the IT Director in a large manufacturing company. Ferris’ company doesn’t have the mix of custom legacy Cobol and Assembler based mainframe systems that Boris the Insurance Company CIO has.
Professor David Wolber has used a social networking tool for people-tagging called Peoplicious to create an "expert systems" group -- "those interested in tools for locating experts" -- from the links included in John Tropea's survey article called The different ways of finding experts.
One of my recent blog postings is included in the Tropea article, so I'm included in Wolber's "expert systems" group.
We hear a lot about the customer- and user-side benefits of Web 2.0 -- the collaboration, the rapid development and deployment, and the rapid formation of "communities" around common interests.
As a change from this it's a pleasure to read some clear thinking about the business models that support Web 2.0, especially models associated with open source, software as a service, and software as an "appliance."
The July 24 print edition of the Wall Street Journal (Robert A. Guth's "Is It Time to Dump Your Desktop," page R1) provides an overview of the current state of web-served replacements for typical desktop applications like spreadsheets, word processors, and email.
Once upon a time I helped manage a complex post-merger system consolidation project where two mainframe based systems were being integrated. The client hadn’t done a lot of projects like that and hired outside consultants to help with the project planning, management, and execution.
We found out quickly that a few key client staff members were extremely scarce resources. One was a senior consultant who had been brought back by the client after his retirement. He was, hands-down, THE absolute expert on the target system’s very large and very complex database. I’ll call him “Alex.”