Enterprise 2.0: at an Inflection Point

Srinivas Kandikonda and Venu Madhav Gooty urge enterprises to evaluate Enterprise 2.0

Srinivas Kandikonda

Venu Madhav Gooty

With the increasing adoption of Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, etc. in everyone’s social lives, Web 2.0 tools have become an extremely critical component of the Web today. Social networking usage has increased tremendously and it is becoming a key part of an individual’s personal life. As this continues, this increasing group of users using social tools has started demanding its use within their organizations. Many organizations have now started to contemplate how Web 2.0 tools can help them increase employee productivity, improve client collaboration and deliver better quality products. While Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, forums, RSS, etc. are more focused on individual lives, leveraging these social tools and concepts for organizational requirement is termed as Enterprise 2.0. The growth rate of Enterprise 2.0 is accelerating with many new start-ups developing some interesting and capable tools that could substantially simplify collaboration and communication, while increasing productivity. Forrester estimates that the global Enterprise 2.0 market will touch $4.6 billion by 2013.

Operating in a virtual environment

Over a period of time, within the corporate world, the means for collaboration has changed substantially. It started with face-to-face meetings but newer ways of collaboration evolved such as phone calls, then e-mails and more recently instant messaging / video conferencing / WebEx, etc. As organizations realize the benefits from these methods of collaboration, the use of social tools such as blogs, wikis, forums, etc. will become an essential part of the newer communication mix.

The rules of the game differ

While tools are one part of Enterprise 2.0, there are many softer aspects such as the need to embrace it with the right set of policies, leadership and cultural change.

Before embarking on Enterprise 2.0 solutions, organizations should fully understand their existing collaboration processes as well as the future state of collaboration. Defining the right policies around public disclosure is a key part of Enterprise 2.0 initiatives. Further, there may be a need for some workflow or approval process when the content is being shared with other individuals or the public. Defining some of the key success criteria, identifying metrics for measurement and reporting of these metrics are a key part of Enterprise 2.0 strategy.

In many organizations, there’s a bottom-up push for adoption of Enterprise 2.0 from individuals within functional areas or departments championing the cause for Enterprise 2.0 adoption. The management has been more wary of and/or uneducated about the benefits of Enterprise 2.0. Leadership should not be scared to adopt it and should look at ways that these tools can improve business processes, help develop new products and services and provide productivity within the firm. While this top-down education and mindset change is essential, organizations should also embrace a substantial cultural change across the firm while implementing these solutions.

Change management becomes a key issue and this should be approached from People, Process and Technology perspective. Individuals need to be appropriately coached and a champion needs to be assigned within each key department while rolling out these initiatives. There may be material change in the role of the person when such initiatives are rolled out. For example, there may be a larger number of expert individuals who may be responding to customer queries on the support site as compared to one dedicated support individual—this may cause people issues or role conflicts. Therefore, appropriate role planning is essential.

Enterprise 2.0 is at an inflection point

The Enterprise 2.0 space is getting crowded with many new vendors entering the field. Many of the firms are looking at niches that targeted customers would be interested in. The Enterprise 2.0 offerings are served by three different types of players:

• Pure-play Enterprise 2.0 vendors: These are vendors such as Yammer, Jive Software, Atlassion Confluence, SocialText, etc. who provide social software on a pay-per-use model as well as in-house installation model. This space, which is highly fragmented, is estimated to have over 350 players in the market. Many of these products are not necessarily mature or enterprise grade yet—we are bound to see rapid consolidation in this area in the next few years.
• Enterprise Product Vendors: These CRM/ERP/ECM/BPM/BI/etc. vendors are not behind. They have started incorporating Enterprise 2.0 capabilities within their products to provide better and more social experiences to their customers. The term ‘social’ is now attached to their products and it’s common to hear them bragging about their ‘Social ECM’, ‘Social Analytics’, ‘Social CRM’, etc. suites.
• Industry and Custom Solutions: Other players such as industry-specific solution providers and service providers are not lagging. Many have started providing plug-ins to their industry-specific modules with base social capabilities.

As these vendors and service providers compete to gain market share, Enterprise 2.0 solutions will start to evolve into targeted solutions solving specific functional and industry problems. For example, social solutions for HR departments like social training portals, employee intranets, solutions for the operations department like idea portals, specific community sites, etc will become mainstream going ahead. Alternately, industry solutions such as ‘Patient community sites’ and ‘Nurse and Physician portals’ for Healthcare industry or ‘Interactive News Portals’ and ‘Online social communities for Journalists and Editors’ for Media industry, etc. will be the next areas of growth drivers. While few products provided by vendors can be extensively customizable based on the client’s needs, targeted solutions that solve specific business challenges for targeted industries will be the next wave. Underpinning this wave is the growing demand for solutions on the cloud. With organizations trying to cut down on capital investments and circumvent their IT departments where possible, cloud based Enterprise 2.0 offerings have been given a boost.

To yield better returns and productivity

Many organizations have already started getting RoI on their Enterprise 2.0 implementations. A popular Media firm in US is using Enterprise 2.0 solutions as a way to gauge customer interest on the newly televised TV episodes by drawing customers to their Internet site as part of their advertisements within TV episodes. This enables them to get quick feedback and incorporate them in subsequent episodes. It also helps them better estimate the valuation of a particular TV series and accordingly adjust its advertising rates. Another Banking and Financial Institution which developed an idea portal in order to improve its customer service had received over 10,000 suggestions across its customer, partner and employee community, which subsequently helped the firm rebuild its brand with these recommendations for a substantially lower cost. These and many other large organizations have started realizing the value of Enterprise 2.0 for their organizations and have started implementing these solutions.

So, if you have not already started evaluating Enterprise 2.0 within your organization, it may be the right time for you to do so. Srinivas Kandikonda is Senior Director and Head of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Practice, Virtusa Corporation Venu Madhav Gooty is Senior Manager - ECM, Virtusa Corporation