Monthly Archives: August 2012

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SOCIAL BUSINESS = THE BATTLE FOR YOUR DESKTOP

I wrote this article a while ago, since then Microsoft have purchased Yammer and also announced how they are replacing Hotmail with Outlook, which has been rewritten for the cloud and made much more social.  Will be interesting to see what they do next.

Original below :

Author Guy R Thackray 10-May-2012

 

The Social Business software companies are competing fiercely to win market share in this still nascent field of collaboration.

Players like Jive Software, Yammer, Tibbr, Socialtext…and the like, are all rushing out new functions, partnering with value add companies and building interfaces to backend applications. E.g. Microsoft Sharepoint.

At the same time we have new market entrants, having recognized the demand, are now leveraging their existing market position and tools to join battle.

In this space we have, for example, Cisco bringing out QUAD and Microsoft has decided to make Sharepoint a fully fledged collaboration platform this year.

This is when the game gets interesting.

Microsoft have a huge installed base of Sharepoint users around the world that it can easily sell to.  Additionally they can make sure that this platform works with Skype, Outlook and other products, from its vast products suite, to deliver a platform that enables users to do all their communications from one place.  Add to this the ability for companies to integrate existing business applications into the collaboration platform, then suddenly you can do everything you want from one place.

Likewise, Cisco and IBM can deliver the same one-stop-business-shop for them to deliver one interface to all of an enterprise users business needs.

This kind of interface would replace your standard desktop interface so that when you turned on your device you would no longer go into your standard desktop (or just one click to load it), you would just go into your MyPage which will deliver to you everything that you need.

e.g. You might see :

– an email stream (from whichever email application you were using)

– RSS feeds for those things you are interested in

– feeds from people and groups you are following

– a list of people you deal with regularly and their ‘presence status’

– a list of the apps you work with daily

– reporting feeds

– your telephone, IM, conferencing, video conferencing

– current documents and videos you are working on

– current discussions

– and so on….

As soon as you are able to have an interface that gives you what you want, when you want it then there is no need to go anywhere else – your MyPage will be where you do everything that you need to do.

@guythackray

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The Enterprise Social Business (Collaboration) hype – Does it add more value than it destroys ?

We are in the early days of this Enterprise, web 2.0, #socialbusiness, #collaboration ‘revolution’ and of course every vendor of these platforms can reel off a long list of ‘real successes’ from their existing customer base.

If one digs a little deeper and asks a few more questions (see below), the thin veil of success begins to waver and diminish :

  • how many ‘real failures’ were there
  • how much extra time does every person in the company have to devote to these new tools just to handle the extra volume of information – until nirvana is reached and people don’t use email anymore
  • what was the overall cost of this extra time
  • was this cost less than the added value of the ‘real successes’
  • would these ‘real successes’ have happened anyway, using their existing tools such as email/telephone/IM/videoconf etc.
  • are the extrapolated savings, being used in the ‘added value’ calculation, really ‘real’ savings. E.g. if each person saves 10 minutes per day and you extrapolate this across the entire organisation annually, it is a large savings, but only if those 10 minutes are used in productive efforts as opposed to a longer coffee break or more time to browse the internet
  • how much does it cost to maintain and run the platform in addition to the licence fee costs

For the record, I am a firm believer in these tools and that they will really add value once they have matured and as we move from #web 2.0 to #web3.0.

But right now there is a massive amount of #groupthink in the industry.  Go to any seminar or conference on the subject and you will see happy customers being rolled out to extol on the virtues of these platforms and how successful they were.  These people become the champions of the vendors and you will see them going from conference to conference.

My experience of these ‘real successes’ is that the person that committed to licence these tools has to prove the value add of these tools to their stakeholders and what a great investment it was.  To do this they troll through the communities, prior to the day-of-reckoning,  to try to find successes  and hold these up as banners of ‘real success’ and then move on to become champions for the vendors.

Everyone wants to believe that these tools add value and so they rush around reinforcing these beliefs amongst themselves and anyone who should question these beliefs is immediately cast as a heretic and promptly burnt at the stake.

In my view, the key reason for these platforms not delivering the anticipated ‘added value’, is that organisations see these tools as #Facebook like tools and thus their people will naturally use them day-to-day and deliver business value.

Well the fact is that people don’t like to change unless the #WIIFM is clear, and of value to each and every person, and that the organisation treats the whole implementation as a Change Programme.  Only then is ‘real success’ achievable.

@guythackray