The conversation on the social web about whether “Enterprise 2.0” still has relevance has been ongoing for a long while. Nearly everyone has weighed in on it who follows the space.
Within my role here at the Dachis Group as Executive Director for the Social Business Council, I’ve often wondered whether it was time for us to retire “Enterprise 2.0″ as well. After much deliberation, I’ve concluded that we shouldn’t. The market is still evolving. It’s still early in the grand awakening that is taking place around the world regarding working socially and collaboratively – most especially for the largest organizations in the world. Enterprise 2.0 is changing in its scope and refining its mission, but it hasn’t really evolved much. Of course, when I talk about Enterprise 2.0, I mean the practice of introducing and adopting new ways of working that involve the use of liberating social technologies. Of course, in order to “do” Enterprise 2.0, you need a massive education, and re-learning that leads to organizational change and to some degree, disruption. But the root foundation of Enterprise 2.0 is still sound. It’s a meme that is widely understood and embraced by passionate community of friends and fans who’ve invested career capital in its growth. And that’s not just the Andrew McAfee‘s of the world, but every brave soul who’s stared down glaring faces in a conference room or auditorium using foreign Enterprise 2.0 concepts and ideology.
So. What then about Social Business? Social Business is the macro change that’s taking place worldwide — touching every business and organization worldwide regardless of size, industry, or business model. It flows from the consumer or corporate buyer to behind the firewall, back out to the suppliers and within and without everything that transacts and moves in the global economy. There isn’t a conference big enough that could hold the exploding growth in Social Business and cover all its facets with authority and relevance. Social Business is becoming all business. When the Dachis Group hosts its worldwide Social Business Summits, we strive to bring some of the best leading thinkers to bear on this changing landscape. It’s an ambitious undertaking and ever-changing. Jeff (Dachis) describes our events as the TED of Social. Dachis Group provides these events as a service to our customers and the industry at large.
I’m writing this post on a flight from Minneapolis to Austin where the Council just held its first Social Business Symposium on site at one of our F100 members’ corporate headquarters, 3M. We have an eclectic mix of attendees who signed up for the event. The range of professionals who attended spanned from global digital strategists to knowledge management pros to information architects. When Peter Kim, who gave our opening keynote, asked me if I had any input to his talk, I told him, “This is probably the first time we’ll see such a unique audience of large enterprise customers sitting side by side who hail from every corner of the Social Business spectrum. Try to give them an understanding of why they’re sitting next to each other.”
In essence, Enterprise 2.0 is a subset (albeit a critical one) of the Social Business phenomenon.
At the end of the day, everything social that lives and breathes must turn back inward to the Enterprise to create value. The trouble, as I see it, is there is still a planet of Enterprise 1.0 filled with attached documents, modules, silos, email inboxes, business process, Six Sigma, dogma, and fear. The time to move beyond Enterprise 2.0 is not today. We’ve barely made a dent. The shared core beliefs that the Enterprise 2.0 community espouse and continue to drive into the social consciousness of the growing social business community are essential. Without rich, fertile, open green fields behind the firewall, properly tilled and seeded, the great strides in social media, social CRM, social analytics, social intelligence will never take root and produce the outcomes that will fulfill the promise of social reinvention.
As I often do I’ll fall back on religious parallels to drive home my point. Just like Ruth, I am loyal to E20. I will go where Enterprise 2.0 goes. The heritage of the movement and its ideals are still highly relevant (perhaps even moreso), and I will go where it takes me. This may be to new platforms, new technologies, new organizational change models, new leadership mantras– I welcome it all. Unlike the popular technology, leadership, and organizational models of the last decade, E20 stands to humanize, rather than dehumanize us.
A final thought. There are superficial changes that are taking place as a result of the socialization of society and commerce, and there are substantive ones. Both of these will occur, but within the confines of industry, the work that is going inside the enterprise is 100% substantive. I take great satisfaction being a part of that history-making reincarnation.
I do agree with the post, but have one suggestion. I have been following Dachis and the different summits they have been doing. For the most part you are putting the folks together that normally do not collaborate together which is great. But for the most part these folks all “get it” They all understand for the most part the evolution of their jobs and departments.
Now comes the suggestion and challenge….Have a summit with the folks the have no idea and no idea how to transition from email and silo’d sharepoint sites. Those are the folks you need in the room side by side with the “get it” crowd. You need these folks to actual live, use and breath their daily work in a social business framework. The 100 people that have been picked to go out of the 365,000 participants is not a very good exploration. The 100 get it the 364,900 for the most part do not know how to transition and for the most part think social business is Facebook inside the company. Look at the last E20 conference how many people have gone 3 years in a row? If the percentage is high you are subject to #echochamberistics.
I know it is a lot a work and love the progress the industry and the people have made, because I believe social business is the next evolution of business operating frameworks.
For any new solution to be 2.0 it must recognize and leverage 1.0. In all the market chatter about E2.0 there is very little, if any, discussion about Enterprise 1.0. Until that fundamental issue is resolved E2.0 will continue to flounder.
There are two roots to business: transactions and change.
Business runs on transactions. These transactions span the gamut of an entire company, their vendors and their customers. They include macro level transactions such as Procurement, Finance and Sales/Marketing as well as micro level transactions such as receive, make, store, sell, fulfill, ship, deliver, install and service. Of the latter there are up to 64 distinct transactions that are executed by Employees, Vendors and Customers.
Today, these transactions are held hostage in the E1.0 systems such as ERP, Best of Breed and Homegrown enterprise software. The architecture of these systems is entirely “inwardly” focused. They were built to consolidate the financial elements of a business and are good at Sarbanes-Oxley compliance reporting and HR. Beyond that they are ill-suited to address the second element of business: change.
Change is constant, pervasive and permanent. E1.0 wasn’t made to change and as such the average implementation is 11.5 years old (Constellation Research). Consequently the on-going pressure to meet the demands of regulations, competition, corporate strategies/initiatives, new markets, new products, improved efficiency, increased accuracy/quality and even the most basic elements of Collaboration go unresolved. This causes erosion in revenue, margin and long term viability of any company. Eventually, the pain becomes so great that a corporate wide replacement, modification or integration of E1.0 systems is undertaken. Beyond the cost (up to 6% of revenue with 93% of projects overrunning the budget), delays (58% take longer than 18 months) and diminished value (only 69% of the expected value is achieved) – in the end, you just have a slightly newer version of an E1.0 system.
This brings us to the opportunity for E2.0. Social media has demonstrated the value of communication, collaboration and ‘pop-up’ IT. As consumers we have more computing power than our employee self does when we walk into the office doors. With very little if any effort we can join a social network of like-minded people and establish rich and meaningful conversations around a topic of mutual interest. There is no large scale IT project required…no endless requirements gathering and budget development or defending required. We just do it and our lives are better as a result. If the results are not worth the minimal effort – we quickly move on to other areas that do deliver value.
E2.0 needs to embrace all three aspects of value: communication, collaboration and pop-up IT. Coincidentally there are three elements of an E2.0 solution: E1.0 systems, Next Generation Enterprise Technology and Secure Collaboration platforms. These are the combined in three easy, rapid, innovative and agile steps that support business today and every day:
1) Freeze E1.0 System Investments – regardless of the age or sophistication of your ERP, Best of Breed or Homegrown systems do not touch them. Don’t modify them, replace them or integrate them. They are excellent at what they do but are not equipped to keep pace with the perpetual need to change that is business. They are like an offensive lineman – absolutely critical to the success of the team but not the fast, elusive, great-hands and peripheral vision that you find in the “skilled” positions. No disrespect to lineman or ERP’s. They just aren’t going to score as many touchdowns and business needs to stop running its playbook through them.
2) Enhance the Transactions – Employees, Vendors and Customers all have legacy applications. Each of those systems has a stranglehold on the data, process and technology that workers use to execute the ‘plays’. Asking these monolithic, rigid and complex applications to change has proven to be too risky, expensive and disruptive. Yet the transactions need to improve. More data is required to improve performance, retain compliance and meet opportunities. Revised processes offer improvements in efficiency and accuracy. Visibility to what is actually happening throughout the Supply Chain reduces the uncertainty of how the ‘team’ is operating. Next generation enterprise technology, from companies such as ours (http://babblewareinc.com) is legacy system agnostic. Without changing a line of code in your systems or those of your supply chain partners you can enhance the transactions so that they fit the needs and exploit the opportunity of business.
3) You are the Expert – For just as long as there have been consultants and software vendors they always come in and explain that their way of doing business is better. In reality, no one is more expert in your business than you and your employees. The amount of knowledge and innovation that is latent in your own company is seemingly limitless. Frustrated by legacy applications these people use work arounds. Their knowledge is tucked away in a spreadsheet or clipboard and the company cannot gain the full value. Having taken the first two steps, where technology gets out of their way, you can know leverage the knowledge of the entire Supply Chain. Secure, collaborative networks such as Chatter or Yammer can now be layered on top of the second step to be informed of targeted events. The participants in the collaborative network can not only monitor for certain events that impact performance of the Supply Chain but they can also collaborate on how the transactions can continue to improve to reduce the non-value add elements while creating greater value.
I am a newcomer to the social business world, but I have really enjoyed reading the Dachis Group’s posts including this one on Enterprise 2.0. Do you have any suggestions on a books that would help me wrap my head around the basic framework and principles of this movement?