Innovation, Technology & Enterprise 2.0 - Perceptions and Observations by Sam Bose

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Innovation and Enterprise 2.0

I saw some interesting post about Corante setting up a new innovation hub recently, where all individuals with an interest in how enterprises foster innovation can contribute? This is very interesting as there is a lot of interest across some of the leading innovation thinkers about the impact of web 2.0 technologies on the innovation process.  Based on experience innovation typically have been looked as a "soft" issue with mostly people trying to change culture , process etc. But i think the problem has always been the unavailability of mass collaboration tools that can support innovation development both across the organisation as well as outside of the organisation. In the past we have used central repositories, idea managemen tools etc....to be honest all of them have been miserable failures.

With this context, i wanted to throw an open question.....has the innovation process at last got some "killer application / tools" in the form of the web 2.0 tools? Web 2.0 works on the basic premise of collaboration and transforms the internet from being publishing platform to a two way interaction / collaboration platform. If you apply these principles to the new models of innovation that is coming up "open innovation", "democratisation of innovation" etc....you can see the possibilities !!

I will eagerly watch out for Dion Hinchcliffe blog on web 2.0 applications for enterprises to see his views ?

Enterprise 2.0; Easy transition steps

The ramification of Andrew Mcafee's article and subsequent post by Nicholas Carr has been far and wide. The other day i got asked by one of my clients who work for a global telecom company on this topic. His question was "Hey, what is this enterprise 2.0 ? I have heard about this wonderful tools that will allow me to publish content, but why should i waste my time writing stuff for others to read....i have more pressing things to do." This i think is a typical question which wil get asked by more people working in enterprises, when we ask them to use a wiki, blog, RSS feeds, tags etc

Then I found Rich Ziade interesting post which resonated with the questions that i was asked, which got me to think that is there something which we must have learnt from our previous efforts of implementing knowledge management systems that can be applied here.

So, this is my effort to identify some user scenarios that hopefully will resonate with every professional across a range of enterprises as to the barrier to adoption;

• Usage of emails come naturally to professionals, and majority of instant knowledge sharing happens vial emails. If we have to transition them to use IM, the killer feature is "presence management i,e i know who's online and can communicate, while the real time nature of IM does the trick.
• Usage of KM systems or other collaboration systems are cumbersome, requires time & effort. So the end result has been enterprises employing people whose job is to structure content and upload them to these systems. The reality is everytime you want to reuse content which has been developed by others, u end up emailing the original owner asking for the original structure, and then spend time and effort to align the content to suit ur needs. So, the idea is if you use wikis or blogs, u can publish ur requirements, correspond with people who respond to it and effectively execute your requirement with less time and effort.
• News about the industry or product or company gets published on the intranet and the feed comes from specific sites which the enterprise subscribes to. What this means is every enterprise user has a content overload, the trick will be the usage of RSS feeds in a way that the individual can tailor it so that you get the information that you require with less effort that before.
• Training people on new content management systems is an absolute no no....after going through several ERP, CRM package training over the past decade, professionals are suffering from a "training fatigue". Personal experience says, if compulsory training is offered as a part of deployment, there is a negative perception created even before u can sell the product to new users. The ideal mix will be a mixture of online or classroom training to hand hold some people, but let the majority to use systems and create an online forum to share issues with other users.
• Trying to sell it as a productivity tool might be tricky as corporate IT departments and their internal customers have heard this story so many time before that it might seem like "scratching a broken record".

But there are two powerful forces driving professionals across a range of industries to explore new ways to work;

• Globalisation
• Creating and Maintaining competitive advantage across new products, business models, business processes.

I would be keen to know from of other user scenarios that are potential adoption hurdles to the "mass adoption" of web 2.0 tools.

Enterprise 2.0; Is this the start of another "hype cycle"?

A new buzz word has arrived "enterprise 2.0" to support the reasons for existence of the emerging "web 2.0" technology companies. I found the web buzzing with this new article from Andrew MaAfee, Associate professor at Harvard Business School and subsequently very pertinent comments from Nicholas Carr, author of Does IT matter? To be honest, both these posts do suggest a middle ground, but Nicholas definitely puts in a dose of reality. After working in consulting and other industries over the last hype curve, i have seen this first hand....how some of these ideas will end up on a power point and will be a fertile ground for concept selling sessions?

From my experience, the reality of the impact of web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise will be driven by their ability to answer some basic questions. If there are logical answers to these questions, none of the business users will question their acceptance inside Enterprises

• How can business users use these tools in their daily job and do things efficiently, effectively and add to the bottom line of the company?
• How can a business user and an IT manager speak about the tools in a language both of them undertsand and relate to each other's jobs and utlimately the company's bottom line?
• Can the user experience of these tools be related to some of the hugely popular consumer applications..which would lower the barriers to adoption and reduce the need for costly training sessions?

So, in summary there is defintely a relevance of these "web2.0" technologies inside enterprise, but the trick will be their ability to move from a "conceptual" model to a more "realistic" implementation model causing least disruption across the enterprise environment and demonstrate ROI's in weeks and months....and NOT year's. Companies who have products that support the basic 3 questions through real life demonstrations will drive adoption across enterprises.

Hello everyone

Welcome to the world of Zogix ! Let me give you a quick background, i am currently involved in launching an exciting start up which is in a stealth mode and will address some of the "problems" faced across specific functions within industries and will meet the aspirations of individuals.  Prior to this i spent over 11 years working within industry at GE, Motorola and then in consulting with Deloitte across various roles.

Today is quite an important day for me personally and all of us here at Zogix as we are now close to launching our alpha site. Those of you curious to know of the start up - let me get the cat out.....it goes by the name "Zogix" and stands for "Zones of Global Innovation eXchange".

We are based out of london and 3 of us (charles and jon) have toiled hard over the past 6 months to bring an exciting new service to the market. Besides the core team, there are around a dozen friends and family spread across the world who have supported us in this journey and we are keen to expand that community.

Zogix is our effort to give back to you - our customers a tool that can help to support your day job and also help bring your latent aspirations and make money from your knowledge and skills. From our personal experiences, we realised the need for a service like Zogix is imminent as there are lot of "pain points" which we adrress, for which there are simpley no current solutions.

So, please join me in welcoming the latest addition to the web 2.0 family - Zogix

sam