The consumer is the enterprise

On the list of SMB-approved services is Box.  Box, at it's simplest is a cloud-based file storage service, (but has grown tremendously to become a serious player in the enterprise collaboration space), provides a flexible, simple, and eminently useful solution for storing, sharing, and collaborating on documents and files.

Box is led by CEO Aaron Levie who recently shared some interesting comments and observations about the changes in how enterprise software is being developed, purchased, and deployed at an event in London, (documented here on the Cytalk.com site), and are worth noting for both software providers and software customers as well.

I recommend reading the entire piece, but below I've pulled out below what I think is the most important, (and maybe seems like it's obvious but it really isn't), observation about how cloud deployed enterprise solutions differ from their legacy and traditional IT-dependent forebears, and what that means for both software solution providers and the modern HR organization using (or looking to begin using), cloud-based enterprise technologies:

The shift to cloud and mobile changes the way software is bought and deployed. “This shift means the onus more than ever is on the vendor. If we don’t stay competitive, if we don’t build whatever that that next thing is the user wants to do and build it in as simple a way as they expect from the consumer tools they are using, then we will get swapped out.”

By making it simple for users to deploy solutions, companies like Box need to be aware that they’re also making it easy for customers to replace them with something new. “You will either get swapped out because IT will swap you out or just because people will stop using you because they’re using a consumer solution, And because it’s SaaS, they’re only paying for what they use — and you stop getting paid”. Levie sees these forces as a Darwinian engine driving software evolution.

Any enterprise software vendor that doesn’t actually think they’re in the consumer business really doesn’t understand where the future is going.” It’s a future that he believes will carry on changing the industry. “That use-centric approach will see a very different set of vendors playing in the space. Existing vendors will have to change rapidly or become irrelevant to the world of the future.”

It seems like we've been talking about the idea of the consumerization of enterprise technology for quite some time now, but up until fairly recently the dialog and the emphasis has been around product design, user interfaces, and the shift towards mobile and tablet applications and solutions. There has been much less focus on the processes by which enterprise solutions are evaluated, acquired, implemented, and, as Levie is talking about, replaced by other solutions.

Levie's take is really interesting and hopefully a signal that in the near future enterprises (and the actual people in these enterprises), will wield more power, influence, and have more impact on how the solutions they use every day are built and leveraged. Slick interfaces and an iPhone app are great, but until enterprise solutions are forced to engage and delight the actual users in the enterprise or risk a quick replacement, then the tools we use are work will always seem less attractive than what we use in our personal lives.

Have a great week everyone!

Socialcast: Collaboration Beyond the Enterprise

Today the enterprise collaboration solutions provider Socialcast (a VMWare company), announced a set of new features to augment and extend the capability in their already impressive collaboration solution. For readers that might not be familiar with Socialcast's solution, it primarily serves as an internal enterprise activity and interest stream, where colleagues can share status updates, links to relevant content, share files, and easily create internal groups organized along organizational or project lines. More recently, Socialcast launched a product called Reach, which gives customers the ability to easily embed and include the core collaboration platform in any number of enterprise systems like ERP, CRM, or other knowledge management platforms, thus taking 'collaboration' closer to the places and systems where the work gets done.

Today's announcement of the new capability that allows enterprises to dynamically create external collaboration groups, and that extends the collaboration platform to an organizations' partners, customers, or even social media fans and followers; is a natural extension of the Reach tool, taking the collaboration environment beyond the walled garden of the internal enterprise, to wherever and with whomever leveraging the platform makes sense.

External Group View - image provided by Socialcast

Beginning today, users of Socialcast can create dynamic groups to invite contractors or suppliers to collaborate on projects, connect more effectively with joint venture partners, or even conduct on the fly customer and follower focus group discussions by simply sharing a link to an external group on Facebook or Twitter, and invite followers to participate. It is a great piece of functionality, and one that attempts to begin to address the more flexible and fluid ways that organizations, teams, and individuals are getting work accomplished today.  

The other interesting feature that Socialcast announced today is a new organizational charting feature that not only can graphically depict the traditional organizational relationships and hierarchy (automatically generated from Active Directory or LDAP), but also can include insight into the external relationships with customers, suppliers, etc. that the organization's employees have developed over time.  This new and hybrid type of an 'extended organization chart' is a novel idea, and one that over time in many organizations could prove to be just as valuable as the traditional, internally facing org. chart.

These new features continue to strengthen Socialcast's position in the enterprise collaboration technology space, an increasingly crowded market where Socialcast competes with offerings from Yammer, Salesforce Chatter, Socialtext, and others.  Where Socialcast appears to have an edge, is in their realization and reaction to the changing ways of task and resource organization in many enterprises, the need for a collaboration solution to support much more flexible methods of collaboration beyond a separate and isolated tool, and with the ease of deployment and administration that allows the solution to take hold rapidly across and outside the enterprise.

I don't write too many 'new product announcement' type posts, because frankly, most of them are not all that interesting. But I have been a fan of the Socialcast platform for a while, have used the collaboration tool in some of my HR Technology classes, and do feel that in a crowded space that Socialcast has consistently had intelligent approaches and ideas to better enable enterprise (and beyond) forms of collaboration.

More and more, success for many organizations will be at least in part determined by how they can best manage and extract value from a disparate, diverse, and fluid ecosystem of internal and external resources, and products and solutions that can help manage and support this new framework offer organizations some clear opportunities and advantages.

You can learn more about Socialcast and today's announcement at www.socialcast.com.

Enterprise 2.0 and HR

Tonight on the HR Happy Hour show we will discuss Enterprise 2.0 with Professor Andrew McAfee, the person that first used the term 'Enterprise 2.0'  (back in 2006), and the author of the essential book on the subject 'Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools For Your Organization's Toughest Challenges'.

The show can be heard live starting at 8PM EDT - here, and using the player below, or via the call in number 646-378-1086.

 

 

What is Enterprise 2.0?  Why is it sometimes simply passed off as 'Facebook for the Corporation', or simply as a diversion or distraction from the 'real' work of making products, delivering services, or simply keeping existing processes running? Why do many in HR shrug E2.0 off as another set of IT technologies that they would rather have nothing to do with?

Perhaps it is because for many, if not most, organizations the ability to continue to invent and produce products the market desires, or the skills and capabilities to deliver valuable and sought after services has become much more tied to the organization's capability in capturing and sharing knowledge, in connecting its people with each other (and the external community) more effectively, and in creating environments where ideas can be generated, and the best of these ideas lifted to the top.

These challenges that organizations are facing can be met by an ever growing class of collaborative tools and technologies, platforms that support, guide, and enhance all the things that the best people do naturally - create, share, enhance, and innovate.  Any many organizations have begun to leverage these platforms internally, with more joining the ranks of 'Enterprise 2.0' converts every day.

But as we will talk about on the show, just deploying a fancy new collaboration platform inside an organization does not guarantee all the promise of E2.0 will immediately be realized.  Considerations of the business issues that need solving, the relationships of the participating employees and groups, and the culture of the organization all need to be taken into account.  

It is fashionable to talk about these kinds of transformative projects as having little to do with technology, but rather to classify them as change management efforts, with success mostly to do with understanding and influencing people's behavior in the organization.  

If that is true, then who in the organization is better positioned than Human Resources to define, architect, and help lead these projects to success?

And what better place than the HR Happy Hour show for Human Resources professionals to learn more about Enterprise 2.0 from the person who coined the term, and authored the only essential book on the concept?

I hope you can join us tonight for what should be an interesting and informative show.

What the pitch says about the technology

You are the CEO, CFO, or CHRO of a medium to large size organization and receive this pitch to deploy some new technology from your CIO or Director of IT: Flickr- Marshall Astor

We’re going to deploy some expensive technology that makes it extremely cumbersome for anyone to share information throughout the company. We anticipate that people will use it to enter transactions, run reports, process workflows, and complain to their colleagues about the new system, how they were not trained adequately, and how they long for the old system.

We’ll recruit an initial set of users, drawn from both high and low places in the company, and including very few formal and informal leaders.

We will create and issue detailed guidelines and policy statements, we’re not going to trust our employees and it will be easy to make mistakes, but hard to correct them. We’ll monitor usage, and if anyone misuses the technology we’ll eventually figure it out, and take corrective action.

We’re going to run this pilot for a year or more, at the end of which we’ll report back to you with lessons learned and benefits received.

Crazy right?  Would you as the decision maker buy-in to this project?  Wouldn't you be wondering just who in their right mind would bring you such hopeless pitch? 

Expensive, highly inflexible, will take forever to deploy, and most of the users will hate it?  Sounds like the kind of project that will get you fired.

How about if the pitch was changed just a bit - and you heard this coming from the mouth of the CIO?

We’re going to deploy some cheap technology that makes it extremely easy for anyone to share information throughout the company. We anticipate that people will use it to post insights, point to good content, ask questions, and tell their colleagues what they’re working on, what they’re seeing, and what they’re learning.

We’ll recruit an initial set of regular contributors, drawn from both high and low places in the company, and including both formal and informal leaders.

Rather than coming up with and issuing detailed guidelines and policy statements, we’re instead going to trust our employees and make it easy to correct mistakes instead of hard to make them. We’ll monitor contributions, and if anyone misuses the technology we’ll learn about it quickly and take corrective action.

We’re going to run this pilot for x months, at the end of which we’ll report back to you with lessons learned and benefits received.

Last week on Andrew McAfee's blog, McAfee offered the preceding as a low-key 'Enterprise 2.0' technology sales pitch.  The pitch at the very start of this post is my (hopefully) creative modification of McAfee's pitch for a traditional, big enterprise technology.

The key to the Enterprise 2.0 pitch, and to the underlying types of technology that are being pitched is simplicity, flexibility, and usefulness to BOTH the individual and to the organization.

Big, classic enterprise software projects like ERP or Supply Chain Management are by definition expensive, time consuming, and incredibly inflexible. Drop $5M on a large ERP suite and you are living with it for a long time.  Heck, in big organizations just keeping the restrooms stocked with TP is a big, complicated undertaking.

But the difference in the tone of the two fake pitches is, I think, telling.  People and organizations are desperate for more technologies that the Enterprise 2.0 pitch promises, while continually being drawn back into the familiar and painful clutches of Enterprise 1.0.

Do Amazing Things - E-Book

Chris Ferdinandi from the Renegade HR blog had a great idea a few weeks ago, enlist a number of HR professionals and bloggers and collaborate on an E-book project.

The premise : Write a short piece for the HR practitioner focusing on the question - 'What is one thing that the HR pro can do in 2010 to get better?'

Twelve contributors combined to produce the completed E-Book - 'Do Amazing Things: Things you can do to become a better HR Pro in 2010'.

Chris has a post on Renegade HR with the official announcement here, and the E-book can be downloaded as a PDF file here.

I was really pleased and honored to participate in the project offering a piece on how to better understand and leverage collaboration tools and technologies in the organization.

There is so much excellent insight and information in the E-book and I really encourage you to head over to RenegadeHR and download and share the E-book far and wide.

The contributors you will find in this excellent resource:

• China Miner Gorman from SHRM
• Michael VanDervort from Human Race Horses
• Lance Haun from Rehaul
• Karla Porter from the Greater Wilkes-Barre Chamber in PA
• Paul Hebert from I2I
• Jim D’Amico, recruiter extraordinaire
• Victorio Milian of Creative Chaos Consultant
• Ben Eubanks from UpstartHR
• Steve Boese from Knowledge Infusion
• Nathaniel Rottenberg from Rypple
• Trish McFarlane from HR Ringleader
• Jessica Lee from APCO Worldwide

Do something amazing in 2010!

Great job Chris and everyone else who participated in the project!