Year-End Thoughts On Enterprise 2.0 & Social Software

A partial list of points-to-ponder:

• Enterprise 2.0 is not a "market": A market should have some common definition along with identifiable boundaries that can be measured with metrics (many of which would be related to financial measures). The industry can identify a "portal market", an "enterprise content management market", and even a "collaboration market". However, when it comes to Enterprise 2.0, the "market" remains very ambiguous. If we are thinking in terms of a solution space, perhaps that's a better descriptor - but the word "market" should probably be avoided when it comes to Enterprise 2.0.
  • By the way, to confess, I sometimes inadvertently use this term as well to group a collection of technologies into a solution space - which I think is what most people are actually referring to when the market term is applied. Enterprise 2.0 is more about how social software is used by people vs. what the social tool actually is. You can use tools in ways that are not aligned with the intent of E2.0. 
• Enterprise 2.0 is not a "project": When people talk about "Enterprise 2.0" projects, I often do an internal translation and listen for the real business solution they are delivering. I'm not always expecting concrete requirements that are strongly process-centric (solutions that directly or indirectly impact sales, marketing, customer service, etc). But I am expecting some intent to address a business or organizational pain point/opportunity even if the focus is on something intangible. Many E2.0 projects are focused on people-centric solutions that promise to deliver "soft" benefits related to community, employee engagement, talent management, learning, collaboration, etc).
  • When I sense that the term "Enterprise 2.0" is being used as a desired end-state in-and-of-itself, I cringe. These efforts remind me of the well-intentioned but often misguided KM projects of the late nineties. Organizations should not pursue Enterprise 2.0 for the sake of Enterprise 2.0. 
• Enterprise 2.0 is not THAT big of a deal: The industry has expanded the solution space of Enterprise 2.0 to encompass so many other domains that the term risks becoming irrelevant. Enterprise 2.0 does not address all patterns of communication, information sharing, cooperation, collaboration, community-building, and social networking. And that's ok. Really. Sometimes a meme takes on a life of its own and its success breeds the seeds of its own destruction. The thinking behind E2.0 filled in a critical gap that was long-missing in collaboration and knowledge management circles. The thought-leadership that the E2.0 community has put forth has added tremendous value. However, it (E2.0) remains a piece of the puzzle - it is not the only puzzle piece.
• • For instance, I've read various articles and posts about E2.0 being equated with "contextual collaboration" - sorry, but that term has been around since the late nineties (defined by Matt Cain of Meta Group, now with Gartner Group). Contextual Collaboration referred to the embedding of collaborative services within the context of line-of-business application. It has though taken the industry a long time to actually mature the underlying tooling and infrastructure to enable such solutions on a broad scale.
  • I've also read recent posts that propose that E2.0 become more process-centric. I would point folks back to the original thinking behind the term "contextual collaboration" which was very much a process-centric view of how collaboration can be improved within structured work activities. At one point (late nineties/early 2000's), Microsoft sometimes used the term "directed collaboration" in this regard while IBM talked about contextual collaboration as the "fuzzy front-end" of process-centric work.
  • Process-centric collaboration has been discussed on-and-off for a decade. It is not new - although there are new possibilities of integrating social tools into business applications - still, the definition and intent has been around for some time. What we are hearing now are new lyrics to an old tune - which is great by the way. Let's just add some historical context to the notion of process-centric E2.0.
• Social Software still needs a definition: Unfortunately, we (the industry at-large) use the term but I'm not sure we're all on the same page when it comes to what the terms means. There are a lot of people who equate social software to specific tools, specifically: blogs, wikis, tags, bookmarks, and social network sites (e.g., a "Corporate Facebook" destination site for communities and networking). McAfee does not clearly define the term even though it forms the foundation of his Enterprise 2.0 definition. Defaulting to Wikipedia is a debatable decision I think - the definition in Wikipedia meanders across a lot of territory and does little to put social software into context when it comes to E2.0. E2.0 community should perhaps work within the Wikipedia guidelines to refine the generic social software definition. Better yet, Wikipedia's "enterprise social software" should be scrapped as another option and recast to support the Enterprise 2.0 term.
• • There are some interesting dilemmas created when an industry relies on tools themselves to define what something is rather than a definition that classifies things by attributes, characteristics, and behaviors. I've seen people list tools that have been around for ages like instant messaging as being related to Enterprise 2.0. More recently, anything that is new seems to automatically associated with enabling Enterprise 2.0 solutions. It might be absolutely correct to label tools such as micro-blogging and activity streams as technology enablers for Enterprise 2.0. However, what about augmented reality ... what about video solutions like Cisco's Show-And-Share?
  • Being able to identify what is, or is not, "social software" is important (at least I believe it to be). Perhaps the social software definition I prefer is one from Clay Shirky who has stated simply that: “It's software that supports group interaction.“ Shirky has other interesting points on social software that are worth remembering: “Every time social software improves, it is followed by changes in the way groups work and socialize“ as well as "one consistently surprising aspect of social software is that it is impossible to predict in advance all of the social dynamics it will create".
• Emergent Social Software Platforms (ESSPs): If we look at the evolution of social software and platforms over time, the concept of ESSPs becomes more realistic. Social Software Platforms and ESSPs are not totally new, they have been incrementally improving as infrastructure and networks have matured and externalized interfaces and services:
• • If we adopt a more expansive definition of social software, then when you look at collaboration over the past 20 years, there have been other examples of "social software" - including tools such as email and groupware. One could make an argument that in the late eighties and early nineties, Lotus Notes was the dominant ESSP. However, during that time, ESSPs were severely constrained by platform, infrastructure, and network barriers. 
  • If we look at collaboration in the late eighties and nineties, most information sharing and collaboration strategies focused on improving worker productivity. Later on, things shifted more towards activity-centric improvements (work groups and teams). In general, ESSP solutions were localized and also lacked visibility and transparency in terms of people's participation and contributions). Finally, these older incarnations of ESSPs often did not scale well and were difficult to integrate with other tools. As platforms, infrastructure, and networks matured to where they are today (including more standardized interfaces), we actually have legacy social software platforms.
  • It's important I believe to delineate between social software platforms and "emergent" social software platforms. We should also look at ESSPs over time - that is, to place them into a historical context. If there are ESSPs, then are there simply SSPs? When does a platform transition from being emergent to being "not emergent"? I believe these are important points to understand so we can think of social software and E2.0 as part of an evolutionary trend rather than a recent phenomena. Older ESSPs were fine in their days (focused on personal and team productivity or semi-structured work group activities). However, these legacy ESSPs (perhaps better described now as simply being an SSP) had capabilities within them that are no longer needed. As various platform, infrastructure and networking capabilities became externalized into common services, a new class of social software platforms was made possible - setting the stage for the industry to accept the idea of Enterprise 2.0, etc. 

Comments

[Stephane Croisier]

@janusboye was saying yesterday: "WCM vendors with social software features the big thing for 2009. Predicting that social software vendors will not add WCM in 2010"

This is probably true and another trend for 2010. E2.0 and Social Software is mostly about managing Content. Most ESSP have taken a top-down user-centric approach but are now lacking some more robust content platform infrastructures. Meanwhile all WCM are adding "social content composites" on top of their platforms from a more bottom-up approach. Social WCM: another trend for 2010?

[Philsimon]

Mike

Good post. I agree that there's a great deal of confusion surrounding the term "Enterprise 2.0."

Andrew McAfee and others define it as more of a social or collaborative term. I understand this definition but think of "E2.0" more broadly to include MDM, BI, SOA, clouds, SaaS, open source, and a bunch of other newer technologies available to organizations.

I think that the subject is so important that I decided to write a book about it, along with help from many experts.

** End of shameless plug**

Phil

[Abbe]

Thanks for helping to educate the masses about what enterprise 2.0 is and what it can mean to a corporation or other organization. @samepagewiki

[Emma_Daniel]

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