Analysts delve into how businesses might leverage blogs, wikis and other social networking tools. Digital natives - people who grew up using interactive Internet tools - will push the enterprise social software market to grow at a compound annual revenue growth of 41.7 percent through 2011, said Gartner analysts at Web Innovations here Sept. 19.
This year will be when Enterprise 2.0 becomes firmly established. Different countries are at different stages of development and uptake, but the broad trend is clearly visible. This is not to say that at the end of this year all organizations will be using Web 2.0-style tools and approaches, however the momentum this year will become undeniable. We are already at the point where virtually all large organizations have some kind of recognized activities in the space, even if it’s just a department trialling a wiki.
“In today’s environment, innovation absolutely must include the voice of the customer, if not customers themselves. The companies who will truly distinguish themselves this year are not those who lock their engineers in a room, Thomas Edison style, hoping to starve brilliant ideas out of them. They’re going to be the ones that open the doors to the lab and invite customers in.”
Via Community Guy
British Airways announced the forthcoming launch of a new airline and launched a WordPress blog to go along with it: OpenSkies.
When making decisions about investments in information technology (IT), organizations must shift their mindset from Wall Street to Main Street in order to retain and win new customers, according to the findings of a global study of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) released today by Accenture (NYSE: ACN).
The Accenture survey results indicate that executive and technology leadership – under pressure from investment analysts and other Wall Street observers – are undertaking superficial improvements in their IT systems rather than making fundamental changes to meet the growing demands of users.
Via Micro Persuasion.
For over three decades, the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting has provided an unrivalled platform for leaders from all walks of life to shape the global agenda at the start of each year. At the core is its multistakeholder model that leverages the collective wisdom of leaders from business, government, the media, academia, the arts and civil society by building a global platform for collaboration and action to address priorities on the global agenda.
The Power of Collaborative Innovation
Looking to the future, it becomes readily apparent that complexity, competing interests and scarce resources remain the greatest obstacles to progress on the global agenda in the absence of greater leadership and global stewardship. It is in this challenging context that the World Economic Forum will highlight The Power of Collaborative Innovation as the principal theme for the Annual Meeting 2008 in Davos.
Wikis have gone from those initial small scale pilots and scattered uses - with perhaps a dozen users here or there - to broader communities of hundreds or thousands of users.
IBM, SAP, and Sony Ericsson all use wikis as part of their developer networks. Others, like Pixar, Carbon Five, and Red Ant use wikis for collaboration with clients and managing production on major projects.
How about some examples?
Proctor and Gamble had a Research and Development (R&D) team of over 9,000 employees. While they produced some legendary products, the CEO declared that they were not doing enough and with a success rate less than 20%, one could see why. He declared that by the end of 2010, 50% of the R&D efforts would be successful thus increasing productivity by 30%. In order to pull this off, the CEO turned outside the organization for help. That is to say, he turned to Web 2.0 tools for help and gain access to the millions of potential contributors.
“Imagine a business world that embraced the essence of Twitter… a social community for thinking out loud, sharing information, creating connections, building ideas, creating information, helping and reaching out to people not because you had to, but because you wanted to…”
ChangeWave Research says that 24% of companies are using Web 2.0 social software. Another 8% said they’ll begin using it in the next 12 months. Wikis (20%), blogs (18%) and social networking (15%) are attracting the most attention. Future users think blogs (26%) and social networks (21%) will be most beneficial. 39% of respondents reported that their companies are very or somewhat willing to use Web 2.0 social software for business purposes.
Via ZDnet.
There are dozens of reasons and millions of excuses as to why people won’t share knowledge; but they all fall within two areas:
These negatives cannot be eradicated, but they can be minimised.
GM has introduced a new website called GMnext. The site utilizes Wordpress and launching in spring a Wiki allowing General Motors to get better feedback on topics such as energy, design and technology from the community. The interesting part is the executives at GM are participating in the collaborative website.
“We’re starting our second century at a time of fundamental change in the auto industry. We’ll use GMnext to introduce some of our ideas for addressing critical issues concerning energy, the environment and globalization. In the process, we also hope to spark a broader, global discussion on these important topics.” GM Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner
Via Slashdot.
“The Gartner analyst group has released some research on what it calls “Generation V” (Generation Virtual), and says that in 10 years, the largest influence on all purchases will be the virtual experience associated with them. Gartner states that by 2015, more money will be spent on sales and marketing online than off, with this Generation V driving the trend.
Generation V is the recognition that general behavior, attitudes and interests start to blend together in an online environment. The idea of Generation X (and later Generation Y) was conceived as a way to understand new generations that appeared not to have connections to the culture icons of the baby boomers. Marketers use the categories of baby boomers, Generation X and Generation Y to segment the population for targeting products and services with a focus on age.”
How much organisations invest in their KM initiatives - in terms of the senior management attention and support? How much do they invest in building the qualifications and experience of their KM staff? Do they consciously protect the KM experience they are building by providing career paths for their knowledge managers?
The results overall are extremely depressing, and the “new kids” on the block in Asia apparently do far better than the supposedly more mature environments of North America, Europe and even Australasia.
JPMorgan predicts 2008 will be “Nothing But Net”. Internet analyst Imran Khan and his team released a massive 312-page report this morning titled Nothing But Net that paints a bullish picture for the major Internet stocks (Google, Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, Expedia, Salesforce.com, Ominiture, ValueClick, Monster.com, Orbitz, Priceline, CNET, etc.).
“As in the case of Push and Pull versus Pub-Sub, memes matter. I think we risk losing some of the value of Twitter when we use terms like “consumer”. Twitter is part of a different mindset, an altogether different paradigm. A paradigm of creation-participation, not production-consumption, democratised and not elitist. In Twitter everyone’s a participant, everyone follows and is followed. Everyone tweets. No one forces you to tweet, but once you get used to what is going on, you’ll find yourself tweeting away.
[...]
If I’m a participant rather than a consumer or producer of tweets, I still need to answer the question “What’s in it for me?”. If I don’t want to share, then I don’t need to share, and what I will get is precisely nothing. There is nothing in it for me unless I share.”
