Should you be thinking about Enterprise 2.0 in 2010?

While I talk a lot about innovation on this blog I’ve steered away from Enterprise 2.0. If this is a new concept to you then don’t worry. You’ve not missed much. In very simple terms, think of it as blogs, wikis – that kind of thing – but used in a business context. I reserve most of my discussion on this topic to my much more curmudgeonly blog over at ZDNet. There I call out those who, in my opinion, are jumping on the fashion led bandwagon, sometimes in what I see as irresponsible ways. In my critique, I’m not always rarely polite often opting for the Yorkshire inherited ‘call a spade a shovel’ approach. That’s because there is far too much mild mannered and uncritical doffing of the cap for my taste. I suspect the same would be true for many of my readers over here. People sometimes get upset at that but hey – I’m concerned about value from IT investments, not just shiny toys. Euan Semple pegged me very well when he said:

Dennis is more of a revolutionary than the rest of us he just gets grumpy at people pissing around.

Other people see me as a ‘referee’ to the conversations surrounding this topic. Mark Fidelman for instance says:

In my opinion, he’s [that's me] doing us a favor by pointing out the gaps in our claims and the flaws in our products.  We made him a E2.0 Referee because he’s never afraid to call foul.  In fact, we need more referees like him that keep the industry from going out of bounds.

It’s not a bad assessment and in truth it is nice to be recognized when many would prefer I shut up.

Recently, I have taken a slightly different position to my normal dismissal of the term and its proponents. The first and admittedly dense post on this topic can be found here. I have always felt that E2.0 mavens have missed the point of asking the question about how you include social computing tools that typify E2.0: blogs/wiki/Twitter etc, into the context of work processes. I don’t really see these tools as a separate category of IT spend though there are plenty of arguments for including them separately in IT investment budgets. Mark Masterson thinks I give insufficient credit to those who have been quietly toiling away on this topic. It’s a fair point. He provides a series of links and examples in this Tweet message. They make useful and informative reading to the broader topic.

Developments by my pal Sig Rinde got me thinking again. Some of you may remember Sig from my 34 minutes post back in February, 2008. Recently, he figured out a way of reducing the amount of time we spend messing around trying to get things done rather than adding value. A good example might be finding a relevant tax case or wondering about the application of a particular Taxes Act section or simply organizing an M&A team. Another scenario might be the spotting of trend data that lead you to developing some thought leadership for your client community. Sig has added ESME into Thingamy. ESME is a Twitter style application that I was involved in during 2008 and which continues to be developed as an open source project.

Here is a screenshot showing Thingamy using ESME as a communications mechanism inside the Thingamy process engine. You can see some task assignments on the left and ESME on the right. It is simple, easy to understand and fits into the flow of what we’re trying to get done.

In our knowledge based economy I have long held the vision that professionals will absolutely want to have these kinds of tools embedded within the portals they use. I am thinking that a partner/management portal cum dashboard might include information about SaaS clients, recent activity and updates to client work, tasks related to those clients and relevant messages/document links and other media needed for that work. That has always meant that stand alone services like SocialText – fine though it is – ultimately become features or components. These should be embedded within the portal/dashboard representing the current state of processes the practice is running.

At the commercial end of the SaaS market, we’ve already seen Salesforce.com talking about embedding Chatter into its offering. Coupled with Financialforce.com, it could become a powerful way of helping to reduce the rust belt of office waste while trying to get things done in a collaborative environment. David Terrar is not as convinced.

I am aware of other developments by Wordframe in this general area that sound exciting. It’s all talk at the moment so there is little of value for me to say. I am hoping that I’ll see something concrete in the coming days. If so then I’ll post my thoughts here, along with an analysis of how these styles of tool fit into the future practice landscape.

So – should you be thinking about E2.0? My answer here is a tentative ‘yes.’ There’s a lot going on and developer organizations are starting to think hard about how it all comes together in a way that delivers value. Right now it’s a case of watch this space, dip your toe in the water, ask lots of questions and find out what can be achieved both now and into the near term future.

Tagged as: Enterprise social software, Open source, Twitter