I’m really excited to see what Oracle’s experimenting with in bringing social software into the enterprise. I see them starting to answer the question of how you do ad hoc problem-solving across informal social networks when there’s a formal hierarchy involved. This, to me, is a key issue in the Web 2.0 version of enterprise software.
Hierarchies have gotten a bad reputation — but they work very well in dealing with massive and relatively slow-moving problems like producing accounting software for multinational corporations. Most companies can’t survive on solving those problems alone, though. They need to innovate too. Besides, even well understood problems have complexities to them that require more communication than a formal hierarchy encourages.
Tim Dexter at Oracle nails it:
Knowing who people are and what they do is the toughest thing in Oracle, with circa 60,000 folks with their heads down all beavering away - who is the person that knows ADI inside out, who might be able to point me in the right direction for an Oracle Forms problem. Sure, mailing lists are a help but people are swamped with mail - they may not like to be contacted by a relative stranger but I for one would rather spend 2 minutes on the phone talking to someone rather than exchanging umpteen emails until we had finally worked out what the question really was about and given an answer.
Theres a tangent coming here but we’ll get back on track - interacting with you folks out there in customer land is challenging, Im a great advocate of having more interaction with you, hence the blog and a lot of activity on the forum on my part - but for me its not enough. I would love to host a bi-weekly phone conference with customers to work through some issues, convey new features, walk throughs, etc. We do it internally why not outside - in fact I’ll look into that if there is interest?
So not only is there the question of finding the right person and the right information across 60,000+ employees, there’s also a need to collaborate across organizational boundaries while maintaining privacy and security.
What do you think Enterprise 2.0 is about… if you’ve thought about it at all?
6 Comments
Anne,
Thanks. We’re excited too. I’m glad to see Tim get some airtime. I’ve enjoyed your work on WWD for a while. Stay tuned for more from AppsLab.
Jake
Anne, don’t know if I’m stating the bleeding obvious here, but as with all of the 2.0 stuff, and as Tim says in your quote, E2.0 is about connectedness. Yes, it’s in a business context and so the subject matter differs to that generally on the public social networks. But in essence it’s about letting people understand who does what, who’s best at it, where they are and when and how to connect with them.
Hi Anne
Thanks for the ’shout’, Jake et al ought to get any ‘airtime’ - they are bringing better ‘connectedness’ to Oracle, Im just complaining that its not quite here yet and ought to have been here a long time ago ;0)
If the PC was all about individual productivity, Enterprise 2.0 is all about group productivity.
Ultimately, these technologies and tools will reshape the modern corporation as much as the telephone did, by changing the relative costs of collaboration within and outside of a firms boundaries (per Coase’s ‘The Nature of the Firm’). We saw glimmers of this during the late 90’s in the form of extranet mania.
Also, as uncertainty and the pace of change in the market increase, the efficiencies of the command-and-control hierarchical model may give way to the resilience of less centralized forms (perhaps more democratic, perhaps modeled on the market economy itself). Enterprise 2.0 tools will be key enablers of this scenario, because they can increase the efficiency of decentralized solutions.
I agree with Michael: E2.0 is about groups.
New technologies are “only” accelerators, enablers. Not goals.
The goal is to produce faster, via discussing, creating, testing, etc., faster.
In our company we are starting with these kind of discussions, in a private wiki, the blog I run (and several others just popping up), and even YouTube (we decided to upload as much as we can, be it training materials, parties, interviews, etc.)
Andrew McAfee was the person who really made sense of this though there is an ongoing shenanigans over at Wikipedia around the topic:
Defined
Enterprise 2.0 is the use of freeform social software within companies.
‘Freeform’ in this case means that the software is most or all of the following:
* Optional
* Free of up-front workflow
* Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities
* Accepting of many types of data
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[…] Anne Zelenka is excited by what she sees and is less concerned about the organizational potholes: I’m really excited to see what Oracle’s experimenting with in bringing social software into the enterprise. I see them starting to answer the question of how you do ad hoc problem-solving across informal social networks when there’s a formal hierarchy involved. This, to me, is a key issue in the Web 2.0 version of enterprise software. […]