Am off to the Enterprise 2.0 Forum in Varese tomorrow – and taking the opportunity to spend some time out in Italy – so may not be posting for a week or so. I should stay active on Twitter though.

Am really looking forward to the conference, there’s quite a lot of buzz around it and am especially looking forward to meeting a lot of people I’ve got to know over the last year through blogging and twitter.

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Have just finished reading Inside Steve’s Brain which talks about Apple’s obsession with packaging and the ‘unboxing’ experience.  Jobs is apparently obsessive about people’s first interaction with his product, and it should be as seamless and as in keeping with Apple’s overall philosophy as possible (such as the handle of the original iMac being the first thing you see when you open the box).

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I mentioned in a previous post that Jive were talking about Comcast paying people to monitor Twitter and engage with people having issues. Have just seen VMWare doing the same thing with Stuart McIntyre. Seems like a fantastic way to engage customers.

Update – read more about Comcast on Twitter.

Stuart: Busy morning already. Fighting to import VMWare ESX image onto VMWare Fusion on the Mac… 07:54 AM June 19, 2008 from twhirl

VMWare: @stuartmcintyre Fighting? ESX image should just run on Fusion. Fusion VMs to run on ESX though, you have to run through VMware Converter about 3 hours ago from twhirl in reply to stuartmcintyre

Stuart: Mentioned issues with VMware ESX/Fusion yesterday and got a reply overnight from @vmwarefusion. Vendors really are starting to get this… about 2 hours ago from twhirl

Stuart: @vmwarefusion Thanks. The issue was that the disk image files came from ESX2 and were in flat format. Have converted on ESX3. Now works. Ta!

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IBM has released Lotus Connections 2.0. The install process for pilots is greatly improved but there’s still some tricky steps if you’re doing an install for test, staging, proof of concept or production so I’ve updated my install guide for Lotus Connections 2.0.

Please let me know if you have any ideas for improvements or corrections!

Update: IBM have asked me to join a group of us helping to improve the Lotus Connections Infocenter.  Let me know if you have any feedback you want me to pass on.

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Attended the Jive Seminar on Building Communities to Grow Your Business yesterday. Was a great event and very well attended. Sam Lawrence from Jive stole the show with a very engaging presentation/discussion on the how’s and why’s of community building (both internal and external) without pushing his product.

Here is a brain dump of some of the points made (probably how I would have live blogged it…)

• On a non-scientific poll of the audience Sam thought there were definitely more people participating in on-line communities that he sees elsewhere in the world (close to 90% as opposed to an average of 50%). I think everyone in the room put their hand up when he asked if they read blogs.
• Nike’s community is really important to them. They fly the ’stars’ of their community around the world to talk to other community members, and one is even the star of their new commercial. The community is about running not about shoes.
• Gen Y will be 50% of the workforce in 6 years
• Social software is happening now because it’s cheap and easy to get going
• Comcast pay people to sit on Twitter and engage with people who have issues with them

Here are some things I’m really glad they said as it fits in very neatly with what I’ve been talking about here:

• It’s not about the technology, it’s the culture that will make or break “Enterprise 2.0″
• The most important question to ask yourself is “what is my community for?” and tie metrics and your focus to that objective
• The metrics and success criteria will depend on your strategy. The ROI or business value will come down to a business problem you are trying to solve – access information more quickly, product research with your customers, generate leads – and will be tied into the ROI of that initiative, rather than the technology having an innate ROI itself.

All in all a great seminar, also good to see Jive with a permanent presence in the UK! Hope to be able to work with some Clearspace projects in the future…

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Came across a presentation by Mike Kavis on how to sell SOA. It’s a great presentation and worth registering to listen to.

I was struck by the parallels between how we try to position Enterprise 2.0 or Web 2.0 and his story around implementing SOA. His view on how they had been successful was:

• They engaged the business in their language – profit and loss rather than technology. This key getting sponsorship for Enterprise 2.0 which is vital for successful projects. Even if we evangelists don’t like ROI, the people who sign the cheques do.
• The business doesn’t care about governance. When implementing SOA the business wanted functionality implemented as soon as possible. Wikis and blogs are so easy to start up if an organisation is not careful they may end up relying on multiple unsupported technologies for business critical applications. IT has to get involved at some point to consolodate and standardise.
• They now spend more time on cultural change rather than technology. Cultural change has always been the X-factor in any Enterprise 2.0 engagement.
• My favourite quote from the presentation “it’s not about the technology, it’s about the people” would be at home in any Enterprise 2.0 presentation.

So SOA faces similar challenges around cultural adoption as does Enterprise 2.0. The irony was that they used Enterprise 2.0 tools, blogs and wikis, to overcome their cultural challenges around SOA. These tools were seen as a way to spread knowledge around how to use a new business process management system to automate what had previous been paper based workflow.

Wikis and blogs were not part of the cultural problem, they were part of the solution. It seems more and more likely that a compelling reason to use Enterprise 2.0 software, such as familiarity with a new system as in this case, or information that can help you sell more as discussed previously, is the silver bullet for adoption.

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Was at the Web 2.0 Strategies forum today and took part in a social software ROI discussion. The discussion wandered quite easily onto the ROI of blogging or the ROI of wikis, and the features and functions of the tools. This has never really helped develop the ROI case for Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 and didn’t in this case. It got more interesting when we turned our attention to a problem that Web 2.0 could solve (maybe using blogs or wikis).

For example, if a software company has a problem where support calls cost too much, a wiki may be a good tool to lower the cost of fielding support calls. Jive Software recently quoted an organisation where phone support cost the organisation $12 per incident, whereas wiki support cost $0.25. A wiki therefore supports the ROI case for the reducing the cost of providing support – there’s no ROI for the wiki in it’s own right. It’s just that organisations that adopt Enterprise 2.0 can improve the ROI’s on many different projects.

The conclusion I took away was that ROI only makes sense when applied to a specific business problem – then you piggy-back on the ROI of that business problem, rather than trying to make a generic ROI case for widespread wiki, blog, or social software adoption.

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I attended a webinar last night hosted by PBwiki titled “Growing in a down market with PBwiki“. All in all it was very interesting. Here are the main points:

The webinar went very smoothly. This is not to be underestimated, I’ve lost count of the number of webinars where there are problems with sound/video but this was great. Slides/screenshare and question submission was handled by GoToMeeting - and I was very happy to find out I could stream the audio via Ustream rather than have to pay for a 60 minute international call to the States. Video was snappy, and audio was crystal clear, made the experience much more enjoyable.

The case study was RMC Vanguard, a mortgage company in the States which is experiencing the slowdown of the US mortgage market. The benefits they obtained from the wiki were as follows:

• Time saving – wiki pages with frequently asked questions, links to important websites (with usernames and passwords where appropriate) were all included on the wiki
• Productivity – with four underwriters serving fifty loan officers, and a habit of loan officers to keep asking a question until they got the answer they wanted, having a place where underwriters could post information rather than having it asked of them constantly made both the loan officers and the underwriters vastly more productive, which resulted in more time spent with clients which ended up with increased sales
• Retention – there is a strong attrition rate in the loan officer role. Many role officers worked from home and struggled to remember the details to access internal systems once they returned to their home office, and felt isolated. How-to’s on the wiki increased their productivity when they first joined, which meant they earned more, which meant they were happier, which meant they didn’t leave
• Improved customer experience – in a down market you need to retain customers. By providing loan officers with a single point of reference where they could obtain information in a fast changing market meant that they could answer clients’ and potential clients’ questions on the phone there and then. This led to a significantly improved customer experience and increased customer retention, which is essential in a down market.

What was really interesting is that this successful wiki implementation hit nearly all of our principles of wiki adoption:

• Targeted – there were clear reasons for the wiki – internet passwords, How-To’s for working from home and market information. There were also clear audiences who would use it slightly differently, underwriters (generally content contributors) and loan officers (generally content seekers). The motivations of each were addressed differently – for the underwriters posting wiki content stopped them being asked the same questions several times a day. For the Loan Officers using the wiki as a first point of call allowed them to provide an improved customer experience and therefore sell more.
• Sponsorship – the wiki manager worked for the President of the company. Interestingly, he commented that during a ‘down’ period was actually a good time to introduce new technology, as people actually had some time to get used to it!
• Marketing/communcations – a lot of company communications were pushed out on the wiki. A catchphrase developed in the office when people asked “where is…?” with the response “it’s on the wiki!”
• Champions – there was a clear champion for the wiki who spent a great deal of time educating and working with users to ensure that the adoption was successful
• Support – a lot of support was provided. Effort went into ensuring that templates were available so that people were not presented with a blank page when creating new content. Effort was put into ensuring the wiki was searchable so that people could find what they needed quickly. The wiki champion spent time one-on-one with staff to ensure they knew how to use it
• Accessible – the wiki could be accessed by those who worked from home, which was key to driving adoption with the loan officers
• Enforcement – people started to say “it’s on the wiki” when asked a question rather than providing the answer
• Get rid of the old – the wiki champion slowly started to take away the old sources of information. After one week of information being posted into the wiki and one on one training showing the users how to find it, it was removed from its original source
• Measure – this is the one principle not followed. Any measurement was word of mouth and anecdotal. Given adoption was so high, however, I can see why this was not a priority.

When asked what the number one benefit that provided growth in a down market, the strong response was that it was the improved customer experience. RMC Vanguard won best customer experience award for mortgage providers in the US – and the wiki is seen to be key to this, and allowing them to cope with the downturn in the US mortgage market.

Many thanks to both PBwiki and RMC Vanguard - it was a great webinar!

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There’s a great conversation going on at the Enterprise 2.0 forum community site around barriers to Enterprise 2.0 adoption. It’s probably one of the most common questions we come across so I thought I’d share our principles for successful wiki/Enterprise 2.0 adoption.

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