In the consumer world, there are some web sites which can take advantage of the anonymous nature of the web.

One of our clients, Linwood Manor, runs their web pages on their alcohol dependency treatment programme on the premise that the web creates a safe environment for people to speak up and ask for help in a way they might not be comfortable doing face to face or even over the phone.  The fact that the web is anonymous and slightly impersonal actually helps their sign-up rate.

In Enterprise 2.0 the issue is somewhat different.  Social software is all about showing off your profile and what you know.  You want your contributions to discussions to be tracked back to you so that you are identified with the expertise that you demonstrate.  Even so, there may be some areas where anonymity might be worthwhile, a safe place on the intranet to make off the wall suggestions, or even whistle-blowing where you want to encourage a similar environment to the external web.

Any organisation considering Enterprise 2.0 needs to think about how much anonymity they are prepared to allow, and how much will be beneficial or negative.

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Spent some time talking with Eric Sauve of Tomoye last week. Was an interesting conversation around how he positions his product around “Communities of Practice”. Often I find the problem with the way people position Web 2.0 products such as wikis is that they end up saying “you can use it for anything” – which may be true but not very helpful for people who want to buy from you. They need to buy it for a reason – and positioning social software as a “widget” that gives you a community of practice seems like a very good thing.

I’ve also noticed that Socialtext’s re-launched site has four use cases on the right hand side – I can’t really remember their last one but I’m pretty sure it was more of an “all things for all people” site, focus is definitely good when you can get it. I think the problem stems from the fact that people, especially if they’re in start-up mode, don’t want to alienate any sector or use case by defining specific scenarios. Problem is, you don’t attract anyone either!

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One of my favourite quotes about the need for social software was from someone at Lotusphere who was talking about the integration of Bank of New York and Mellon Financial in the States.  He stated that the problem was he had 17,000 people over here and 23,000 people over there who didn’t know each other and were supposed to drive synergies from the merger.  How was this going to happen?

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Really interesting post from Stuart over at the Quickr blog – initially about migrating his blog to a new platform. The interesting sideline is about living inside his email client (which happens to be IBM Lotus Notes). Part of the problem for enterprises adopting Web 2.0 communication/collaboration platforms is that there are new applications to learn, which can create barriers. Social networking, blogging, wiki contribution, instant messaging, not to mention email, are all to often separate self-contained applications. When organisations try to roll them out there is often a negative reactin towads “yet another application”, and users have to manage switching between them, sometimes with different usernames and passwords!

Whilst I often encourage clients to move away from email as a form of communication, this doesn’t necessarily mean moving away from their email applications. Instant messaging can now be plugged into both IBM and Microsoft platforms – so you can reply to an email with an instant message, or a pc-to-pc phone call right from within your email client. This significantly increases the chances of your users to actually try the new communcation features rather than simply reverting to habit and relying on email. Stuart’s post shows that blog and twitter posts can now be managed alongside email and instant messaging from a single application. If Web 2.0 collaboration features can be provided within existing applications, the chances of people actually using them is likely to increase.

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Social software/Web 2.0 tools such as blogs/wikis/instant messaging can be a great way to manage the exceptions to your business processes. Here’s why…

In a previous life, I was an SOA Evangelist for IBM’s WebSphere integration suite. A large amount of IT spend in the early 2000s went on systems like this one to integrate processes, both internally and with suppliers and customers. The idea was one of cost reduction, reduce the cost of doing business by reducing the time it took to add a customer to a vendor list from 3 days to minutes. The ROI cases were strong and compelling, and many customers managed to get ahead of the market through early adoption.

Now, however, such integration capabilities are more commonplace. Most business processes have been automated to the point where there is not a lot of cost left to be squeezed. Further, (and this is something that bugged me at the time) the vast majority of ‘real’ working practices don’t actually follow the process. The process becomes more of a guideline than a set of rules – exceptions to the process are the norm. Once you have an exception (payment terms are 30 days, but they’re a really important client so we won’t send them a nasty letter until 60 days) – the ROI breaks down as humans have to get involved again. Also, because the ROI cost case relies on people following the process barriers are often put in the way of breaking it, making it even more costly to “do the right thing”, be innovative, and follow an exception.

I was trying to find some stats on how much impact exceptions have on business processes. I am convinced somewhere I found something about 80% of processes resulting in an exception at some point. Vitria are so concerned about exceptions in business processes they’ve created a product for it and claim 50% of process related costs are down to exceptions.

Vitria (and others – I’m not picking on Vitria, they just happened to come high up on Google for “Business Process Exceptions!” offer exception management, but it sounds like another process. To quote from their site:

“Vitria’s Exception Manager is a purpose-built application that provides a systematic approach to resolve exceptions across your enterprise. Exception Manager classifies incoming exceptions, automatically resolves problems, guides resolutions with context-sensitive workflow when human involvement is still required, restarts the normal process flow, and provides full visibility and audit trails across the entire exception resolution lifecycle. “

So what happens when there’s an exception during the classification process. Or an exception during automatic problem resolution? The point is that Business Process Management vendors try to solve the exception problem with what they’re good at, a process. Where Web 2.0 can help here is by providing a tool that fits the problem at hand. What you really need when an exception arises is to communicate with the person who can fix the problem or authorise the exception. The problem is, traditionally, it’s hard to get hold of this person or even know who the right person is! That’s where enterprise social networking, blogs, wikis and especially instant messaging can become vital tools in resolving exceptions whereas email is not that helpful at all. This is why instant messaging is fantastic for large organisations during quarter end – the conversations are all around exceptions to the process – the key is to get the order in the books in a legal manner. We work with one of the world’s largest IT vendors who told us that the accepted downtime for instant messaging during quarter end is measured in seconds, whereas email is hours. Tools such as social networking can also help you find the right person in a time constrained situation, especially if your ‘usual suspect’ in finance or HR isn’t around and you need to find someone similar with the same skills quickly.

The aim of a lot of social software tools is they are based around tacit knowledge. Business processes, however, are all about explicit knowledge. Social software is the yin to business process yang. Exception management definitely falls into the ‘tacit’ space, however, which is why the explicit, systematic approaches to exception resolution fail. The exception is an exception precisely because a systematic approach does not work in this instance, and it is down to employee initiative and innovation to find a solution.

Looks like we’ve found another ROI for Web 2.0 – reducing the cost of business process exceptions which can be up to 50% of the cost of a process.

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The intuitive view around the ROI of Web 2.0 tools such as blogs and wikis tends to be that using Web 2.0 on external sites grows revenue, your blog can gain you extra customers and brand loyalty. Using Web 2.0 internally saves cost by making your employees more efficient.

I have always had a slight suspiscion around the cost saving argument. If you look at the logic behind my recent post on Luis Suarez’s effort to stop using email, although you can point to the amount of time saved and translate that into cash savings, it is not that simple. Even if an individual stops using email and moves to more productive methods of communication they will have to spend some of that time communicating with the new tools. So a potential 25% saving isn’t really a 25% saving, let’s say it’s more like 10%. Now let’s say you have 5 people in a team who achieve this 10% improvement. How are you going to save money by getting rid of half a person? These ROI cases were made in the original Knowledge Management and Web Portal sales (fewer clicks to get to the app you need = cost savings) and fundamentally failed.

Let’s look at it a different way. Dell, one of SocialText’s customers uses a Wiki in their call centre, and have managed to reduce the number of clicks from 20 to 4, decreasing the average call time by 10-20%. Does this mean they can therefore save 10-20% of call centre payroll? Potentially, but more likely the call centre can handle 10-20% more calls without increasing cost, allowing Dell to sell more servers without risking customer satisfaction and increase net margin. This is an innovative way to drive revenue growth, not a defensive measure to cut costs.

As another example, one of the largest technology companies in the world uses instant messaging prolifically internally, especially at quarter end where quick conversations are required between a large number of people in a geographically distributed workforce to check whether a deal is in the books. In fact, the acceptable downtime for instant messaging is less than email! This is not done so that they can reduce the number of people manning the process, it is done so they can increase the number of deals successfully booked and revenue isn’t missed by an administrative failure.

If Web 2.0 business justifications were based on innovation and revenue growth they might just have a better chance of being accepted.

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Came across this fascinating article by Richard Dennison talking about BT’s internal adoption of Web 2.0. It is worth reading in its entirety but the points that stood out for me were:

• Presenting the idea is an evolution rather than a revolution was key for business buy-in
• The importance of RSS in tracking and consuming content
• There are risks to Web 2.0 adoption, but the benefits outweigh the risks
• Let the users dictate which tools are useful and which are not
• The importance of Generation Y in helping frame your Web 2.0 strategy

What was also interesting was the phenomenal response this blog post got. It showed people from Lloyds TSB, Reuters, Simply Communicate, a large bank in Ireland (Allied Irish perhaps!?), and a technology consulting group all indicating that their organisations were seriously looking at adopting similar platforms.

It’s fantastic to see an organisation such as BT adopting this technology and the interest shown by large corporates.

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Ok – so here’s why I really really dislike the term “Web 2.0″. As well as the common problems of a phrase used to describe a new paradigm in computing (such as the problems around terms such as SOA), “Web 2.0″ in particular suffers from a specific problem. Using “2.0″, a number that sounds like a version you would apply to a software product, simply encourages people to be the first to claim to have come up with, or understand the next version. Already people are starting to talk about Web 3.0 just to be the first clever person to come up with it because it’s so easy just to add 1 to Web 2.0 and get Web 3.0. Usually, the way things work is that you notice a trend, and then coin a phrase. With Web 3.0+ it’s backwards – we already know what the next development in web technology will be called, we just don’t know what it is yet. It is less easy to know what the successor to SOA will be called(although if it’s SOA 2.0 I will not be happy). After this it will be Web 4.0, then Web 5.0, then we’ll argue about whether the next is Web 6.0 or Web 5.5 or Web 5.0 Service Pack 1.

Other changes in IT thinking, such as SOA, Model Driven Architecture, Object Oriented Programming didn’t have this problem, and I’m sure that much of what is currently written and obsessed about over Web 3.0 would not have been produced if it wasn’t so easy to come up with the name of the next big thing, and then have to think about it’s meaning afterward.

That is not to say that there won’t be a further revolution, and something worthy of the term Web 3.0 won’t come along (think semantic web) – but the use of a version number means we’ll have to put up with a lot of false positives before we find the real thing.

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Whenever a new buzzword comes along in IT there’s usually a prolonged gnashing of teeth around what the term “actually means”. It happened with SOA and it happened/is happening with Web 2.0. These debates tend to follow a pattern – the terms start shrouded in mystery and anyone who can explain it is a Very Clever Person. Then someone comes along and says that it’s nothing new, just merely a new way of marketing technology concepts that have been around for ages. These people are Really Very Clever People as they have managed to expose the Very Clever People and can obviously think outside the box. They will often start sentences with the phrase “let’s turn this on it’s head” or “are we looking at this the wrong way?”

This poses a problem for consultancies working in these industries. When I used to work for organisations that were involved in SOA we had a dilemma. So we adopt and market ourselves using the SOA terminology or try to rise above it and just focus on what solutions we offer, never mind whether the industry terms it SOA or not? The problem with abandoning the term ‘SOA’ was that there were people, often in quite senior positions, even CIOs – who had heard the term ‘SOA’ and desperately needed help in understanding what it meant to their organisation. If we rose above the debate, we would miss this market.

I keep asking myself whether history is repeating itself at Trovus with Web 2.0. If we spend time getting involved in the debate as to what Web 2.0 means that is time not spent thinking about what services and products we should be offering our customers. However, if we don’t embrace the label, we lose out on a segment of the market which is genuinely struggling to come to terms with what this latest label means.

Personally, I think the term Web 2.0 is going to create far more problems than it helps (more so than SOA ever did) – but that will wait for the next post.

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