Jevon Macdonald (8 posts)

I wrote about The Personal Enterprise earlier. It is a term that has been around for a while, but which is coming in to its own with Social Business Design as a foundation that helps answer a lot of the questions that the original concept left open.

The effectiveness of an Organizational Design exercise depends on the fit of process, structure and behaviour that make up the organization and how they are aligned with both existing and desired future capabilities.

In looking at better ways that an organization can operate, we often look at the current service delivery model. How are services shared, delivered and managed? Which functions and resources are centralized and which are distributed? Does centralization mean less flexibility? Does distribution mean less reliability?

Andrew McAfee is known as the father of Enterprise 2.0. In 2006 he wrote the paper “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration,” which for many of us gave a single point of reference for the work being done in enterprise social software and “Office 2.0″ until then. Since then Enterprise 2.0 has started to come of age, and I thought the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco would be a perfect opportunity to sit down and discuss the past and future of collaboration, social software and business strategy.

For the last few years the Enterprise 2.0 conference has had a startup launchpad competition, which is unique for an enterprise focused conference. Part of the reason for that may be that Enterprise 2.0 has relied heavily on innovations from startups to help develop the industry as a whole since 2006. The Launchpad is always my favorite part of the conference.

You are probably aware of how big Sharepoint has become (over 100 million seats), and how fast it has grown (the first business inside Microsoft to grow to $1billion, growing 20+% year over year), but one of the unknowns until now has been: Will Sharepoint become a true Social Business platform?

I have spent the last few days here at SAP TechEd 2009 trying to learn about SAPs vision for the future of social in the enterprise. I have been to both TechED and SAPPHIRE before, and I usually came away with the sense the SAP isn’t thinking about social. All of that has changed now [...]

Today we are announcing a set of alliances that we have developed over the last year.

These Social Business Technology Alliances are designed to bring as much added value as possible to our global customer base. In all our work we evaluate the best possible technology solutions to help solve the customer’s Social Business requirements. We evaluate those requirements against the available options in Enterprise Open Source, Web Based Services and Vendor Software.