The Software Abstractions Blog

Enterprise 2.0 and the Culture of Collaboration - Part II

This is Part II of a synopsis of the book The Culture of Collaboration by Evan Rosen. This post is written by guest author Sham Karandikar. Here's the link to Part I.

Effects

True global companies go well beyond marketing, selling and supporting their wares worldwide. They design, assemble and produce both products and services concurrently around the world. Today's Global Collaborative Enterprise (GCE) is a collection of inter-dependent companies that engage in the shared creation of value, often in real-time. The GCE exploits time zones and global work-sharing to design, assemble and create products and services 24 hours a day.

For example, Boeing has re-invented itself as a global collaborative enterprise which includes the supply chain, customers and even the customer's customers (i.e. airline passengers). Boeing's largest multi-media room in Everett - where employees can participate in video and web conferences and share 3-dimensional CAD/CAM software - is named the Global Collaboration Center. Moscow, for instance, is almost exactly on the other side of the world from Everett, with a time difference of 11 hours; so, when Everett is sleeping, Moscow works; and vice versa.

Types of Collaboration

Collaboration can be classified into three types, based on the level of interaction among the participants:

1. Low-level:  Involves exchanging information through threaded text discussions, video conferencing, web conferencing and document-sharing.
2. Mid-level: Involves a more elaborate collaboration tool set, that allows companies to share information with external organizations via the web. These organizations may be partners on some projects and competitors on others.
3. High-level:  Involves designing parts, plans, tools and processes concurrently among global partners.

High-level collaboration is truly the highest form of sharing. At Toyota, product designers, manufacturing specialists and business partners connect globally through its visual and virtual communications system, which reduces cycle time, enhances product quality and boosts production efficiency. Toyota now manufactures vehicles at over 50 sites in 26 countries and must bridge many regional cultures as engineers collaborate.

Boeing and Toyota are setting the standard in the aerospace and automobile industries respectively, utilizing the best talent regardless of location.

Conclusion

As the culture of collaboration permeates work and life styles, our habits are changing faster than we realize. While asynchronous interaction has its place, collaboration is increasingly rich, real-time and spontaneous. Increasingly, businesses are rejecting bureaucracy as wasteful and costly. In contrast to red tape and a serial approach, we create greater value when we engage one another directly, design products concurrently and collaborate across functional, business unit, corporate and regional boundaries. The current economic trend is to exploit the best talent at the best price, regardless of geography. The clear lesson from Toyota, Boeing, Dow Chemicals, Mayo Clinic, Proctor & Gamble and other organizations is that good decisions include the perspective of people throughout the organization at every level. The necessity of maximizing time, talent and tools in the global economy gives the culture of collaboration an edge. The quest to innovate and create greater value drives the desire to collaborate as organizations embrace the global collaborative Enterprise.

This point - that the global collaborative enterprise has to design, assemble and create products and services concurrently around the world - is explained very well in Evan Rosen's book. Following the lessons of the leading corporations described in the many examples in this book is essential in order to survive and thrive in the economy of the future; I highly recommend this book. Good Luck.

                  

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Enterprise 2.0 and the Culture of Collaboration - Part I

This two-part article is a synopsis of the book The Culture of Collaboration by Evan Rosen. This post is written by guest author Sham Karandikar (my dad) - who has been active in the field of Information Technology longer than I've been living.

Introduction

The world is changing at an ever-increasing rate. New technology has changed our lifestyle completely.  It was not very long ago that the concept of Teleconferencing was beyond our imagination. But now you can chat, discuss and seek opinions from others all over the world as easily as you can from the person in the next office. At the same time, the world is getting so compressed that many corporations have become multinational - some of them operate in over 30 countries. In this situation, adopting a collaborative approach is imperative in order to get total involvement from employees located all over the world

This change is explained very well in the book, The Culture of Collaboration: Maximizing Time, Talent and Tools to Create Value in the Global Economy, by Evan Rosen. The book not only focuses on the theory of collaboration, but also provides lots of live examples to back it up.

The book explains how globalization has created unprecedented opportunities for maximizing resources. Realizing these opportunities however, requires a cultural shift. For example, the changing economics of the automobile industry required faster concept-to-delivery cycles; in response, BMW determined that tele-cooperation was the best way to achieve that goal. Thus, globalization is driving changes to business models, in order to maximize benefits by introducing the culture of collaboration. The name of the game in this changed world is real-time: shorten product development cycles, reduce response times, enhance interconnectivity and enable the free flow of ideas among global partners.

Examples

• The Mayo Clinic was founded on the principle of collaboration. The book spends some time exploring this use case. For example, the Mayo Clinic has already implemented a satellite-based video conferencing network; for each new case, the coordinating doctor immediately assembles a geographically distributed team to evaluate the problem. Because of its track record, and a culture that embraces collaboration, Mayo is experiencing soaring demand.
• Toyota is another company that has exported a collaborative culture: make decisions slowly by consensus. Toyota's culture provides a stark contrast to many organizational cultures that value internal competition; such as Enron, which hired and rewarded only the very best and brightest, and is now in bankruptcy. Internal competition delivers results in the short term but collaboration builds long term value. One outcome is that Toyota has a stable workforce, which is a significant competitive advantage.
• The Dow Chemical Company, which creates value through collaboration, was perhaps the first company of its size to conduct all of its video conferencing over a Converged IP network. Called Dow-Net, it introduced i-Rooms and digital white boards that let users in 43 countries connect via Polycom video conferencing equipment to any Dow site while collaborating on applications and data.
• Proctor & Gamble has embraced spontaneous interaction since the company first made instant messaging available to employees in 2000. P&G employees increasingly connect with each other in real-time so that ideas fly and team members concurrently make better, quicker decisions.
• The World Bank is comprised of 10,000 employees from 184 countries, who provide loans and share knowledge globally. To help developing nations deal with globalization, the World Bank  encourages collaboration among globally dispersed staff. Building trust is a critical success factor in effective collaboration. Drawing on their global knowledge, cross-cultural collaborators can spark synergies and create greater value.

Dissolving Barriers

Within organizations, barriers develop among departments and functions. Marketing develops its own culture but has difficulty in interacting with sales. Product Management and Engineering disagree over product direction and avoid interaction. There was a time when many organizations refused to give employees Internet access because of fears that people would surf the web instead of work - yet another manifestation of an archaic Command & Control approach. Most organizations now realize that blocking such access interferes with information flow and idea generation. Encouraging interaction among people with common interests reinforces cross-functional collaboration.

Taking the example of the Mayo Clinic, perhaps the most important role the SPARC unit plays is to break down the barriers among functions. Because of its methodology for innovation and a physical environment that encourages brainstorming, SPARC consistently succeeds in cross-functional collaboration. The convergence of voice, data and video over IP has forced people, who previously had little or no contact, to collaborate.

Another trend enabling collaboration and breaking down barriers is the implementation of common processes and systems throughout the organization. For example, the use of common processes and systems allows Boeing to easily move people from one aircraft program to another and to share tasks.

Thus the culture of collaboration dissolves the barriers of time and distance, delivers awesome results and creates value. Deriving these benefits, however, requires an understanding of both the potential and the limitations of the tools involved.

Continued in Part II.

                  

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A Unifying Framework for Web 2.0

What, exactly, is Web 2.0? How does it apply within the Enterprise and to the web at large? What technologies are involved and what are the benefits?

Ross Dawson, of Future Exploration Network tackles these questions in his recently launched Web 2.0 Framework, an excellent work which describes the many aspects of Web 2.0, both within the Enterprise and on the web at large. This unifying framework is remarkable because it brings together the definitions, characteristics, mechanisms, major players and outcomes of Web 2.0, in a simple and intuitive way.

Ross describes the objective as follows:

The intention of the Web 2.0 Framework is to provide a clear, concise view of the nature of Web 2.0, particularly for senior executives or other non-technical people who are trying to grasp the scope of Web 2.0, and the implications and opportunities for their organizations.

I see this as a critical area: in order to effectively sell the ideas of Enterprise 2.0 to the CxO, we have to be able to explain the mechanisms (the "how") in simple terms and focus on the expected outcomes in terms of helping the organization meet its goals ("the why"). Web 2.0 is made up of many different parts. Like the story of the Blind Men and the Elephant, when we focus on a variety of specific perspectives, we experience it in different ways; the framework does a great job of taking these different aspects and putting it all together.

 

 

One area ripe for discussion, where my thinking diverges somewhat from Ross's framework, is in the Emergent Outcomes section. I see three core outcomes from an implementation of Web 2.0 technologies:

• Personalization
• Collective Intelligence
• Semantic appreciation of content

In many ways, I see the other items - finding relevant content, enhanced usability, visibility of interesting content and even community - as inherent in, or following from, the three core outcomes described above.

In any case, this framework certainly moves things forward in the collective wisdom about Web 2.0; I look forward to continuing this discussion further.

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Cogenz - Social Bookmarking for the Enterprise

One of the simplest ways to get your feet wet in the Web 2.0 world, is through the use of social bookmarks, such as del.icio.us, furl or backflip; once you realize how easy it is to get involved, you can then ease your way into the other "social participation" tools like wikis and blogs. Could the same hold true for introducing these concepts into the Enterprise?

del.icio.us for the Enterprise

A new service from Cogenz, Ltd. is aimed at this nascent market. London-based Cogenz is launching it's new Enterprise 2.0 social bookmarking service. The Cogenz solution, described concisely as " del.icio.us for the Enterprise", is a hosted subscription service that's available in three flavors: Team, Workgroup and Enterprise.

I played with the demo available on the Cogenz web site. The service closely follows the del.icio.us model, complete with browser buttons and tagging; existing users of social bookmarking services will find it a snap to start using this new service (indeed, it even allows for integration with del.icio.us). Additional capabilities include private bookmarks, search features and RSS/email subscriptions.

One feature I would love to see in the future is a mechanism to find out more about a user who has bookmarked items for a particular tag. Unlike del.icio.us, whose semi-anonymous nature and minimalist registration is one of its biggest features, I think within the Enterprise, it is both acceptable and important to provide some context about the user - e.g. when looking for users interested in a particular topic, it is quite valuable to understand what department the user belongs to, what her geographical location is, whether she is on-site or at a customer location, and so on.

The similarity of features with public social bookmarking services is certain to be a tremendous advantage for Cogenz in terms of ease of user adoption; in the long term, however, I imagine that more sophisticated features can be added that meet the needs of power users within the Enterprise.

Benefits

In any case, this type of service can provide tremendous benefits to an organization. It provides an immediate impact on personal productivity, by enabling employees or teams to save, organize and retrieve bookmarks in a systematic fashion - as the amount of information on the Web explodes, this is a critical capability in and of itself.

In addition, though, there are the network benefits - an ability to aggregate what others within your team, department and company find interesting and make it visible in a loosely organized fashion. A strong focus on social bookmarking with tagging, is a great enabler for discovering information of interest, building up communities and finding experts on a given topic, within an enterprise. As a collection of independent actions, social bookmarking offers an effective way to gather collective intelligence without any of the issues that are usually associated with a team (groupthink) or a mob (irrational behavior).

Differentiation

Cogenz seems to be targeting a slightly different problem and target market than others in the world of Emergence Software. As a quick round-up:

• Trampoline Systems (with its recent funding ) targets social analysis and collaboration
• Atlassian and Socialtext focus on Wikis for the Enterprise
• Blogtronix focuses on internal blogging
• Teqlo, Coghead et al focus on mashups
• itensil targets process management

Cogenz's solution, instead, attacks Enterprise 2.0 from another dimension by focusing exclusively on social bookmarks. ConnectBeam is in a similar space, but seems to be targeted at a different market segment, that of a large-scale enterprise that is looking for a "hardware applicance"-type solution.

Conclusion

Overall, Cogenz seems to be a powerful solution targeted at a specific, fairly narrow space. I have no doubt that it will prove valuable to mid-sized (and smaller) organizations trying to dip their toes into the E2.0 space. Larger organizations will probably look for a "heavier" solution, where social bookmarks are integrated into a more comprehensive social-emergence offering.

Conference 2.0: Corporate Events go virtual!

What do you get when you combine WebEx with Second Life, with a dash of LinkedIn thrown in?

The answer might very well be a new product being unveiled by Unisfair at the Web 2.0 Conference next week, called Virtual Events for Enterprise (that's a mouthful, I wish they'd just call it VEE), billed as "the industry's first B2B virtual event solution".

What does it do?

Unisfair, based in Menlo Park, CA, has already been hosting online events for a few years. Focusing largely on media and publishing trade shows, they've hosted over 200 such events; now they're targeting their virtual events for the Enterprise.

The new Virtual Events product models an Enterprise-level conference (or some other Corporate event, such as a large sales meeting or training session), in a 3D world, in the same vein as Second Life. It features interactive, on-demand events, with persistence; the event stays around for up to 90 days, providing a rich destination for prospects, partners and employees. This virtual world supports multiple "conference tracks", simultaneous sessions, polls and surveys; it also enables Live interactions among attendees, presenters and exhibitors, providing rich professional networking opportunities. Finally, it provides strong support for data capture and reporting, creating a business intelligence gold mine for the marketers who host the conference.

The User Experience

I got a sneak peek at this product before next week's launch, and I have to say that I'm impressed. The good news was that it needed no special client downloads (although it required Flash and RealPlayer). I was able to log in and start playing with the product pretty quickly, and to paraphrase a famous line from a Tom Cruise movie, they had me at first contact! Immediately on login, I was immersed in the beautifully rendered setting of a business-oriented virtual world, standing in what was clearly recognizable as the lobby of a conference center. With simple, intuitive movements of the mouse, I was able to navigate into and interact with a fully-functional presentation area, exhibition floor and "resources" area. I could seamlessly view presentations, interact with the booth presenters and communicate with other attendees, with little effort.

The fact that this 3D virtual world is closely modeled after the real-life elements of a corporate event, makes it extremely easy to use - there are no new concepts to understand, no new metaphors to be learnt. I imagine that even relatively non-tech-savvy users will be able to learn to use this application and become comfortable with it in no time.

I had expected network speed to be an issue, but found the application to be very responsive. The pre-loading of different modules and presentations took a little bit of time, but there were no annoying pauses or gaps once each section was running - similar to levels in an online game.

Highlights

I like this product for several reasons, summarized below:

• The Cool factor: 3D immersion, navigation, beautiful scapes - that should count for something, at least among the techies
• Ease of use: This product requires no special downloads and models existing concepts, making it really easy to participate
• Rich interaction: In terms of the interactivity among participants, the user experience is significantly better than a "Webinar". The interactions are bi-directional, richer in context and multi-level (e.g. "multiple tracks" at a virtual conference), and provide more control to the user - such as, attending multiple sessions that happen to be live at the same time.
• Cheaper: At the same time, this solution is a lot cheaper for the marketing department than a physical conference, while arguably providing the same (or larger) opportunity for lead generation and brand management activities
• Bridges geographical divides: The conference presenters are only present virtually, and could be widely distributed geographically in the real world
• Time zones and localization: Virtual Events supports a “follow the sun” concept where a live event can take place in different locations in the same day, with localization of presentation content
• Persistence: The virtual world is preserved for a period of time after the live event, providing a rich resource for prospects and partners to participate and learn
• Business intelligence: Since the event is virtual, it goes without saying that marketers get a tremendous opportunity to track user behavior, participant interactions and levels of engagement; the data can later be analyzed in detail
• Discovery: A virtual event provides great networking opportunities for participants - they can find presentations and resources on topics of interest; locate friends and others with shared interests; and in general, communicate, collaborate and interact with a wide variety of people

Concerns

Of course, no product is perfect, and I have several concerns about this one. The main ones are listed below:

• Speed: This is, of course, potentially a big issue. A requirement for high-speed access is a given, but there is no stated requirement for any special level of connectivity. As the number of users increase, however, if the application were to slow down, it would significantly degrade the user experience.
• Hardware requirements: Nothing special, it only needs a browser, with Flash and RealPlayer (or some audio player). The application is supposed to check your system for required downloads, initially when you register.
• Unfamiliarity with 3D worlds: Not everyone is a Second Life user, so the paradigm may be new, especially for many corporate users. But the interface is intuitive enough that even non-tech-savvy people should be able to use it without much trouble
• Creation and Design: There is likely to be significant effort required for the initial set up of your virtual event. Unisfair provides training, "booth creation wizards" and templates to help streamline the process; however, I would guess that it's likely to require a web/flash designer to make this process work well (Note: I did not get a chance to play with the designing or reporting parts of this application, so I'm guessing somewhat on those parts.)
• Expense: Since this product is likely to be targeted initially at large enterprises, with the attendant long sales cycles, I'm guessing that the cost factor is likely to keep smaller and mid-level players locked out for the time being

Conclusion

It will be interesting to see how quickly (and how much) corporate events move into the virtual world. One possibility is that the choice of physical vs virtual does not have to be exclusive; it's quite possible that some conferences in the future could combine a physical presence for local attendees with a concurrent virtual conference for remote attendees (as is already happening ); further, attendees could potentially interact across this barrier.

Overall, I think virtual conferences are poised to take off - the advantages to participants, of rich interaction coupled with freedom from geography, time and physical limitations, are just too hard to ignore. Marketers, of course, love this approach, because every facet of a virtual conference can be instrumented and analyzed at length for extracting business intelligence, and it's much cheaper than a physical conference. If this space explodes, the new Virtual Events product puts Unisfair into a great position to leverage that growth!

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Update 1:
This post is also syndicated on the Read/WriteWeb.

Update 2:
One of the concerns listed in my writeup was the effort required for setup. The Unisfair folks pointed out to me, in an email, that the process is simpler than I had expected:
the product comes with templates that exhibitors can select and brand with colors, graphics and custom content, using a booth wizard. The web/flash design for the environment is provided by Unisfair, so the set up stays simple for clients.

Shrinking the World Wide Web

The folks at The Web's Too Big feel that - you guessed it - the web has gotten way too big, making it very difficult to quickly find quality content. So they're doing their best to shrink it, for a very specific domain, to a manageable level to make finding things easier; in other words, they're building their own proprietary Vertical Search Engine.

Searching for PR firms in the UK

The first vertical tackled by this search engine is a search for UK PR agencies and PR information. The user enters a search term which is used to search for information on the sites of these agencies. For example, I typed in "fast food" and got an impressive list of results from a variety of search firms: Levick Strategic Communications, Black and White Communications, Edelman, Layzell PR and so on. (Caveat: Not being involved with the PR world, I personally have no idea if this set of results is relevant and useful - any PR folks out there care to comment?)

Mike Bygrave, one of the co-founders of thewebstoobig, explains it as follows:

The Web's Too Big:PR is a two-part B2B service, comprising a vertical search engine and a lead enquiry system, which provides interested parties with a simple way of searching for and engaging with UK PR agencies.
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The search engine is primarily intended as a place where users looking to hire a PR agency can do some research and find a suitable agency. Google indexes something like 8 billion pages; some of the new vertical searches index 'only' several million pages. At The Web's Too Big we're trying to take a completely different approach, by selecting a narrow vertical and indexing only sites that fall firmly within that vertical. It's impossible to know exactly how many PR agencies (with websites) there are in the UK at any given time, however we're absolutely confident that we currently index well over 90% of them. Our site users know that everything they see on our site will be very closely related to PR - they're not going to be bombarded by random advertisements (particularly from keyword scammers).
...
The lead generation part of the site was really just a natural progression from the search engine; it allows users to bypass the research element if they want to - they can simply enter their PR requirements into our enquiry form, and then send it off to up to nine pre-selected PR agencies. This saves the user a lot of time and hassle, and it provides the PR agencies with 'hot' leads.

Unique service: PR enquiry

One unique offering from thewebstoobig is their "send enquiry" service that allows you to contact a list of PR agencies directly. You supply some key information about your needs (such as industry, location, timeframe, budget), and your request is matched up with a list of PR agencies; from the agencies' point of view, it works as a lead-generation service, thus providing value to both users and agencies.

 

 

It was the "send enquiry" service that got me interested in looking at this site in detail; this type of service is a perfect illustration of the power of vertical focus.

As I've said before (here and here ), creating specialized, unique services for a particular domain is where VSEs can excel. By focusing relentlessly and with depth on the needs of specific users segments within that domain, VSEs can create unique, defensible value propositions and differentiate themselves, in the minds of users, from the larger mainstream search engines like Yahoo and Google. At the same time, by attracting very specific sets of web site visitors with well-defined characteristics, they can offer, in effect, highly-qualified prospects for marketers.

This seems like a winning situation for all constituencies - users, because they can quickly and easily cut through the clutter; the business, because it can focus on the given domain; and marketers or advertisers, since they can target specific demographics and user types. Only time will tell if specialized search engines like thewebstoobig can divert a significant portion of their target audience away from Yahoo! and Google, or whether the mainstream engines will somehow co-opt this type of functionality into their own offerings. More on that in a future post ...

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