mardi 31 mars 2009

Please, Forget About Enterprise 2.0

More and more I see questions like "What is E2.0 ROI?", "Why is E2.0 not adopted yet?", "How can I get E2.0 in my company?".

I think that there is no answer to those questions.

If you think about Web 2.0 for instance, it is including a lot of different things: blogs, wikis, social networks, content sharing, questions answering, social bookmarking, document editing... And for each of those functions you have specialists (Typepad, Google, Twitter, Facebook...) and different measures used to assess performance and success. We realized that we can't use the same terms and definitions for all the actors of Web 2.0.

So why are we trying to do this with Enterprise 2.0?

If we were not trying to persuade large companies to adopt new working methodology by using a term that they never heard about (few CEOs of the Fortunes 500 care about it...) and if we were using a language closer to their reality we would be more likely to see success.

Don't sell the trend, sell the benefits relative to the business of the company.


I believe that changing flows of information can lead to huge benefits to Enterprise, I believe that giving the possibility to create worldwide business intelligence communities will create new leaders, I believe that bringing more collaboration into the Enterprise is the future and that it will definitely change the way we are working.

But I don't believe that over-using the word Enterprise 2.0 will lead anywhere.

lundi 30 mars 2009

Power of the mass.

With applications and websites like Myspace, Youtube, Facebook, Yahoo Answers, and the famous Twitter it looks rather obvious that the new trend today is to leverage the power of the masses to produce (more or less) meaning.

Today, I am pretty sure that I can find the goals of Yesterday's European Cup Match on Youtube. I'm also confident in getting an answer to a basic question from Yahoo Answers. And I believe that Twitter will tell me more about my host company's website being down than any newspaper at the very moment it happens.

Power of the mass.

But what about going back to the interest of the sole user? Wouldn't it be great to be able to know what does M. X is interested in? Of course we would have to respect privacy but I believe that this is one step necessary to make applications more intuitive, more intelligent, capable of pushing content (and not only ads) that are relevant considering my current interest.

How can you tell what one is thinking about? Through his action. Searching is showing what you are looking for. Reading is telling what you like. Writing is saying what you think.

Then, we would be able to apply this to groups of people. Does the interest of a group result from the sum of the interest of its members? I don't think so, and that's the challenge.