January 22nd, 2010
I had the opportunity to speak with the CEO of Cubetree last night and one of the things we talked about were some of the lessons Cubetree has learned over the past 2 years of being in business. I first became acquainted with Cubetree at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco where they won a best-in-show award. For those of you not familiar with Cubetree, they offer an enterprise social software platform that large organizations can use internally to collaborate and improve how they do business. Carlin shared what he considered to be the three most important things that he learned over the past two years with enterprise social business.
- Tools still depend on a champion to drive usage, someone that is passionate and knowledgeable who can help move things forward. It’s not obvious to everyone at an enterprise company why they would want to post status updates, share that what they are working on, or collaborate with other employees. Broadcast communications are still crossing the chasm and the best way to deploy them along with enterprise software solutions is to have a champion on board that you encourage.
- If there is a business problem being solved (or business driver) that is focused on transparency and communication then this really helps out the company champion. This focus on transparency and communication gives the deployment a push forward.
- ROI takes a while for a company to figure out. Giving freemium versions (which Cubetree does) has been effective because it lets the champion take the platform to the front door. This is interesting because not all of the other software vendors out there offer a freemium version of their platforms.
If you recall, a little while ago I posted that companies interested in enterprise 2.0 need to take strategy seriously; Carlin echoed that sentiment and cautioned that companies really need to have a strategy in place to get this done. You shouldn’t do anything just because it is the new cool thing to do. However, eventually in order to stay competitive this shift is going to happen, especially as companies begin to notice that their competitors are able to recruit better talent, complete projects quicker, market more effectively, and overall operate more efficiently.
Carlin mentioned something interesting in terms of goal setting for the enterprise. The lager the goal the longer it takes to achieve that goal. Therefore it might be better for companies to focus on several smaller goals instead of on one massive goal that can take several years to achieve. As Carlin mentioned there is still this giant revolution that is taking place in people’s personal lives that is beginning to transition into their professional lives the shift towards enterprise 2.0 is at the forefront of this.
Finally, we spoke on the future of Enterprise 2.0 which Carlin believes is going to be a dial tone for employees and companies in the coming years. When asked on the future of mobile in the enterprise Carlin (and I agree) said that the killer use case hasn’t really been established yet. Overall we had a great chat on some very interesting topics and I’m hoping you will find the above information informative. Let me know what you think.
TAGS: cube tree, enterprise 2.0 strategy, enterprise social software, lessons learned, Social Business
November 25th, 2009
The Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Council released the results from a survey they conducted with its members (77 responded out of around 100). The results from the survey revealed a lot of interesting information about Enterprise 2.0 and how some of the largest companies in the world are adapting to the change. I questioned the validity of Enterprise 2.0 a few weeks ago because I didn’t believe that enough companies were committed (in terms of time and money) to actually make this change happen (even though I believe they must). If you read that previous post you will understand what I mean. I’m particularly interested in the survey because Chess Media Group is involved in social business consulting.
So where are we in the whole Enterprise 2.0 adoption cycle according to the Council?
As you can we’re still quite early with over 60% of the companies believing that we are still in the early adoption and/or innovators phase of Enterprise 2.0. I’m not that surprised with these results at all. Based on the conversations I’ve been having with companies in the space, I know this is something they are thinking about and trying to plan for; however they are still not actually acting. This is going to change throughout 2010.
The report says that budgets are quite healthy but with 41% of the companies looking to spend $500k or under, I don’t see how this can be possible. Software vendors such as Jive or SocialText charge around that price for an enterprise size client annually, and we’re just talking about the tool. There’s also needs to be an entire strategy developed and rolled out (not to mention a team created). The budget needs to be spent on developing the strategy and not on paying for the tools (at least not yet).
The good news though is that a lot of companies are more realistic with their budgets placing them in the $1 mil+ range which is something that I think is much more realistic for an enterprise. These companies are looking for global solutions and that is going to cost time and money. Personally, I would love some more clarification on exactly where these budgets are going, i.e. tools or strategies?
What’s also interesting is that 34% of the companies surveyed said that they have multiple projects in the pipeline which are going to be rolled out. 26% of companies said they have some sort of pilot project running and 30% of companies said that they already have some projects implemented. Keep in mind that this is based off of the 77 companies that responded to the survey so we’re only talking about around 25 companies that actually have multiple projects in the pipeline. The enterprise space is huge, and it’s great to know that a few companies are out there leading the way.
Some of you may be surprised by these numbers but perhaps not. Overall, it looks like there is a pretty even distribution among the four choices as to who is leading the Enterprise 2.0 charge. It appears that management (alone) is not the core driver behind the Enterprise 2.0 push. It’s also interesting to see there is an equal percentage of this shift happening with both users and managers on either a per chance or orchestrated basis. In 2010 I’m hoping we see a much more orchestrated approach to this effort. The fact that the user driven force has been the greatest for E2.0 speaks volumes in that managers are clearly listening to what their employees are saying and doing.
Finally we have the dreaded ROI number to deal with. Clearly most companies are not able to see or understand the ROI from their efforts. I think the key challenge is that ROI for a lot of social media and social business doesn’t come when you expect it to. One day an employee can share something on a collaboration platform that might save the company millions of dollars across the board, however that change might not happen in the first 1-3 months. The point here is that we are talking about an evolution of business. Perhaps as a starting point we can look at things such as increased employee productivity and time saved on trivial tasks (such as email or searching for documents).
I think the report does a great job of shedding more much needed light on the Enterprise 2.0 space, however this report only tells a small part of the story. What do we even mean by Enterprise 2.0? If a company implements an internal collaboration tool such as Jive, are they now an Enterprise 2.0 company? What if they have multiple tools in place? Can you see where the line here gets a a little blurry? Furthermore, I want to understand where the budgets are being spent and how these programs are being deployed. I’m pretty sure that most of these budgets are being spent on tools and not on strategies, I’m also not convinced that these companies are deploying on a global scale; perhaps just departmentally to start. Either way there are still a lot of unanswered questions in my book, especially since I think that a lot of companies are still in the testing phase and are not too sure what to do or what to expect.
What do you think of the report? Have any questions?
TAGS: adoption council, Enterprise 2.0, enterprise 2.0 council, enterprise 2.0 strategy, Social Business, social business strategy
