What do I need to know about Enterprise 2.0 and why do I need to adopt?t

Enterprise social software, also known as Enterprise 2.0, is a term describing the emerging use of social software and Web 2.0 technologies like blogs and wikis inside the firewall.

In contrast to traditional enterprise software, which imposes structure prior to use, this generation of software tends to encourage quick and easy usage firstly, and allowing structure to simply emerge.

Web 2.0 like SaaS is changing the way software is built, consumed and delivered compared with traditional software development practices.

Employee Empowerment:
Without any planning documentation, without any scoping and without any project manager - changes can quickly and easily be made by any individual in the organisation.

Moving from a Top-down paradigm where everything is structured and controlled to a bottom up model where grass roots level users are empowered to make improvements.

Communication Channels fall into 2 categories:

- Channels - person-to-person OR person-to-group - email, instant messenger - stored in a tunnel and available only to those at either end of the tunnel.

Channels create a private conduit between the sender and receiver. Other parties don't know that the email was sent, and can't consult its contents.

- Platforms - group-to-ALL OR person-to-ALL - Wikis, Blogs, Intranet sites - available to everyone and can be augmented by everyone. Information is made available to all across the organisation and is not limited to the select few that have previously communicated about it.

Wikis, del.icio.us, Flickr, Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube, on the other hand, are all platform technologies. They accumulate content over time and make it visible and accessible to all community members.

Specific Web 2.0 tools that have been adapted for enterprise use include hypertext and unstructured search tools, wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, tagging, folksonomies, RSS, social networking tools and mashups for visualization.

Problem with conventional KM software:
As McAfee states.
"Groupware actually imposed a surprising amount of structure on people's interactions, and that because Enterprise 2.0 technologies let structure emerge, rather than imposing it, they would be more popular.

Consider how high this sets the bar. Email is freeform, multimedia (especially with attachments), WYSIWYG, easy to learn and use, platform independent, social, and friendly to mouse-clickers and keyboard-shortcutters alike."

We need more 'Comfort Apps':
Email like search is what Dion Hinchcliffe calls a 'comfort app'. It is easy to use, easy to learn and universally used. We need to create such applications to proliferate Enterprise 2.0.

There exists a sharp difference between the look and feel of most corporate technologies, and most Web 2.0 ones. My favorite Web 2.0 sites are elegant, uncluttered, and bright; they have a jewel-like quality to them. I can't really say the same about most of the corporate systems I've seen and used.

Why is it difficult to get consumers and employees to change their behaviour?

As Harvard's Andrew McAfee expalins,many products fail to catch on with their intended audiences despite the clear advantages they offer.Here is a summary of his explanations:

Misconception: Consumers are not highly rational evaluators of the old vs. the new products, lining up pros and cons of each in mental tables and then selecting the winner.

Actuality [RAS]:

• We make Relative Evaluations, not Absolute ones. When I'm at a poker table deciding whether to call a bet, I don't think of what my total net worth will be if I win the hand vs. if I lose it. Instead, I think in relative terms -- whether I'll be 'up' or 'down.'

• Our reference point is the Status Quo. Comaprisons are made against where I am at that point in time. "If I win this hand I'll be up $40; if I lose it I'll be down $10 compared to my current bankroll." It's only at the end of the night that my horizon broadens enough to see if I'm up or down for the whole game.

• We are Loss Averse. A $50 loss looms larger than a $50 gainnot much affected by how much wealth one already has. Ample research has demonstrated that people find that the pain of a prospective loss of $X is about 2 to 3 times greater than a gain of $X is pleasurable.

When combined, these three lead to what the behavioral economist Richard Thaler has called the "endowment effect:"

We value items in our possession more than prospective items that could be in our possession, especially if the prospective item is a proposed substitute. One in the hand is worth two in the bush essentially.

Consumer will underweight the prospective benefits of a replacement technology by about 3X and overweight by 3X everything they're being asked to give up.

We mentally compare having the prospective item versus giving up what we already have (our 'endowment'),

but because we're loss averse giving up what we already have (our reference point) looms large.

Users are subconciously influenced by the following 3 challenges.

Challengs [GIT]:

- Timing: adopters have to give up their endowment immediately and only get (potential) benefits sometime in the future.

- Benefits are not Guaranteed: the new product might not work as promised.

- Benefits are usually Intangible: making them difficult to enumerate and compare.

Developers are blinded by their new reference point:

Gourville also highlights that the people developing new products are very dissimilar from the products' prospective consumers. You don't go work for TiVo (to use his example) if you don't 'get' the potential of digital video recorders and think they're a really good idea. And after working for the company for a while, having TiVo becomes part of your endowment; you think of things in comparison to TiVo, instead of in comparison to a VCR. Both of these factors make it harder for developers to see things as their target customers do.

Because of all of the above, Gourville talks about the '9X problem' -- "a mismatch of 9 to 1 between what innovators think consumers want and what consumers actually want."¹ The 9X problem goes a long way to explaining the tech industry folk wisdom that to spread like wildfire a new product has to offer a tenfold improvement over what's currently out there.²

Are these tools new products 9 times better than the status quo?

Solution:
There are, it seems, two broad strategies.

Increase the perceived benefits of their technologies -

lower their perceived loss and drawbacks

Demos and training are part of the former strategy, but they feel like weak measures.

Stronger ones are a clear explanation of what the technology does, network effects, peer pressure, word of mouth, incentives and an extremely effective user interface and layout.

The Power of a 'Sexy' UI:
The perceived benefits of the technology features drives them there.

But it is the UI that is going to determine what they do once they get there -- whether they'll spend time exploring and learning, or leave quickly.

A great UI not only heightens the perceived benefits of a proposed collaboration technology, it also lowers the perceived costs.

An intuitive interface lets users quickly say to themselves "Oh, I understand. This isn't hard at all. In fact, it's about as easy as email."

The greatest challenge here is making technologists sufficiently user-like -- getting them to stop thinking in terms of bells and whistles and elaborate functionality, and to start thinking instead about busy users with short attention spans who need to get something done quicker and easier.

Single search box empowers all

Single search box.

Can all employees currently extract information reports from the current CMS systems and BI tools?

What happens if they need this information?

Does this create a bottle neck?

Would it be beneficial to empower these users to extract this information themselves in real time?

Rather than, Unlike:

Complex query language interface that require SQL knowledge or programming knowledge. This creates an information asymmetry, where only those with the limited skill set can access the data.

Business objectives, Business Challenges:

Expedite adoption by all business units.

Maximize use of information assets.

Minimize learning curve and training required is zero.

I CAN GIVE YOU AN EXAMPLE:

Users resist change. It is difficult to encourage a change in behaviour. Not many people enjoy investing time to learn a new process. However, search is intuitive. We simply type in key words and are returned relevant results. You don’t see many training courses for Google?

Search fosters quick and easy adoption. It reduces the training investments. It facilitates “knowledge pull” by empowering all grass roots employees.

Auto-Generated drill-down faceted navigation.

Auto-Generated drill-down faceted navigation.

How do you ensure employees are leveraging all information assets not just relying on what is found on found on the first or second pages?

How are users encouraged to discover new information?

Can users quickly perform a deep dive and narrow the result set down from several thousand documents to a handful of the most relevant ones with a couple of clicks?

Rather than, Unlike:

Not just millions of text links, a la Google. If answer is not found on page 1 or page 2 the user is required to craft a new query. No insights or intelligence is provided onlt the recovery of text links where answers may be found. There is no discover information they may not have know existed. How can I have knowledge of what I don’t know exists?

Business Objectives, Business Challenges:

Educating employees beyond information they already know exists.

More knowledgeable employees can make better decisions.

We can fully activate all knowledge – long tail – not just popular articles.

I CAN GIVE YOU AN EXAMPLE:

Factiva, a premier information services provider powers their search on the FAST platform. About 3 years ago now, they came to the realization that, hey, information is free. We are part of the google genearation. So users do not want to pay for information they can get for free. They need to shift their unique value proposition. They realized they needed to create a richer user-experience that would bring time savings and added intelligence to clients over a free web search. After conducting due diligence, they finalised on search powered by FAST.

FAST’s search platform enables users to have a ‘conversation with the data’.

If I type in Yahoo, I can then drill down by source. I can see different key concepts emerging. Comapny names such as Microsoft bubble to the surface. Certain dates spike. This intelligence is telling me that something involving Yahoo and Microsoft has happened on this particular date. Low and behold, this was the day of the Microsoft attempted acquisition announcement.

So we engage users in a dialogue. If you were new to an area, and you wanted to find a restaurant. Upon asking your concierge for a nice place to eat you would not expect a directory listing all restaurant names to be dumped in front of you, would you? No. You would expect to engage in dialogue with the concierge. What type of cusine? How far do you wish to travel? What price are you willing to pay? These questions would help you narrow the decision to the best fit for you. Without those questions this is not easy to do. This is essentially what FAST’s technology does versus your favourite online search engine.

You may be sitting on a vast storehouse of knowledge, but much of it is underused. As a former HP CEO said. If HP knew, what HP knows, HP would be 3 times more profitable.

We need an effective means to enable deep dives on information. To slice open the content corpus to get reachthe nuggets of information.

Synonym Studio

Synonym Studio

Do employees find it difficult to generate the right keywords to use?

Are employees often presented with 0-results after dispatching a query?

Rather than, Unlike:

FAST understand that users can be subjective - you may say largest and I may say biggest, you may say broker and I may say agent. The use of colloquialisms an acronyms can further complicate things.

Business Objectives, Business Challenges:

Increase the findability of information.

Less time spent gathering. More time on high-value tasks.

I CAN GIVE YOU AN EXAMPLE:

At Dell.com, which is powered by FAST. They utilised our Search Business Centre to analyze their logs and found a high number of searches for Ipod. However, Dell do not stock ipods so users were being retuned 0 results. previously 0 results – missed opportunities – mapped ipod to mp3 player :: Serving relevant results> increase in profits

Document Preview & HTML Hit highlighter

Document Preview & HTML Hit highlighter

What is the impact on bandwidth for this organisation by having so many users downloading – some times non-pertinent documents? Is there ample bandwidth or is this a problem?

Rather than, Unlike:

In large organisations where bandwidth resources are limited FAST can provide document previews so that users can pre-qualify document before actioning a download.

Business Objectives, Business Challenges:

Reduce bandwidth costs and constraints.

Reduced bandwidth cost.

Increase speed to access intelligence.

I CAN GIVE YOU AN EXAMPLE:

Norton Rose, one of the magic circle UK Law Firm had a challenge in that lawyers were forced to research a corpus of several hundred thousand documents. Each document was several hundred pages long. Finding a hit in a document becomes a less powerful means of determining relevancy in this case. FAST has now allowed lawyers to identify word matches down to a particular paragraph and sentence. In order to expedite the time to find relevant intelligence FAST provides a heat map over a cached HTML version.

The benefits are two fold. Lawyers can quickly identify areas of interest through an overview of the relevant sections. So less time locating more time making decisions based on relevant information.

Also, the HTML version precludes the need for downloading the original image heavy document which may be several megabytes in size. We can quickly download the several kilobyte HTML replicate in seconds.