Enterprise Social Software is Mainstream

On 2007-03-24 16:53:00, Allan Engelhardt wrote in CYBAEA Journal:

Enterprise Social Software has gone mainstream. I say this based on the fact that the analysts are now releasing stacks of research on this area. Forrester is a good example (and one of the better companies out there):

Efficiency Gains And Competitive Pressures Drive Enterprise Web 2.0 Adoption. The article is clear: Web 2.0 technologies are hitting the mainstream both in consumer and business contexts. [...] Almost all of the CIOs that we surveyed recognized Web 2.0 as more than a passing fad. Any questions?

CIOs Want Suites For Web 2.0. The people responsible for technology in the enterprise have strong desire to purchase Web 2.0 technologies — blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, and content tagging — as a suite, as well as an equally strong desire to purchase these technologies from large, incumbent software vendors. This resonates with what I hear elsewhere: I spent Thursday with Oracle in their Redwood Shores headquarters. They traditionally have a good relationship with the CIO/CTO community and their focus is on integration over innovation That is not to say that they do not innovate, but that where a choice has to be made the focus is squarely on solving the integration challenges. (That this suits their aggressive acquisition strategy well is another, not altogether unrelated, matter.)

The message to startup companies in the Enterprise Social Software / Web 2.0 space is very clear: your exit is a trade sale. VCs and entrepreneurs take note.

Social Computing: How Networks Erode Institutional Power, And What to Do About It, is typical of the crop of Web 2.0 “what does it mean” articles. Individuals increasingly take cues from one another rather than from institutional sources like corporations, media outlets, religions, and political bodies, argues the authors, and companies must react by making social computing a strategic asset and by listening more and talking less.

The ROI Of Blogging: The "Why" And "How" Of External Blogging Accountability, suggests that by following a three-step process, marketers can create a concrete picture of the key benefits, costs, and risks that blogging presents and understand how they are likely to impact business goals. It doesn’t get any more mainstream than this.

And in case you think it is only Forrester that are on to this, have a look at How businesses are using Web 2.0 from McKinsey. Yes, that's right, Web 2.0 is now a strategic management issue. They even provide a handy nine-point reference to what constitutes Web 2.0, though it seems designed to show the confusion at McKinsey rather than to really help anybody:

Blogs
Collective intelligence
Mash-ups
Peer-to-peer networking
Podcasts
RSS
Social networking
Web services
Wikis

You get the picture, I’m sure. Web 2.0 is mainstream; old hat. See you at ETech next week to look at the new stuff?

Bookmark on Delicious

Share on LinkedIn

Subscribe to CYBAEA Journal

Join the discussion

There are no comments yet. Be the first to comment.

Navigation

This site is standards compliant:

Username:
Password:
Remember me:

Recent blog entries

Area Plots with Intensity Coloring

On 2010-07-13 07:47:00, Allan Engelhardt wrote in CYBAEA Data and Analysis:

I am not sure apeescape’s ggplot2 area plot with intensity colouring is really the best way of presenting the information, but it had me intrigued enough to replicate it using base R graphics.

The key technique is to draw a gradient line which R does not support natively so we have to roll our own code for that. Unfortunately, lines(..., type="l") does not recycle the colour col= argument, so we end up with rather more loops than I thought would be necessary.

We also get a nice opportunity to use the under-appreciated read.fwf function.

Employee productivity revisited

On 2010-06-22 11:45:00, Allan Engelhardt wrote in CYBAEA Journal:

We have a mild obsession with employee productivity and how that declines as companies get bigger. We have previously found that when you treble the number of workers, you halve their individual productivity which is scary.

We now re-do the analysis four years later and, just because we can, we are using the leading companies of the London stock exchange instead of the largest American companies.

The results still hold. We called it the 3/2 rule: treble the number of workers and you halve their individual productivity. Large companies with ten times the number of employees are ¼ as productive as their smaller competitors.

Employee productivity is a big issue. If all the FTSE-100 companies achieved their average profits per employee, then the index would generate almost £1 trn of additional net profits for the economy.

Employee productivity as function of number of workers revisited

On 2010-06-22 11:20:00, Allan Engelhardt wrote in CYBAEA Data and Analysis:

We revisit the analysis for the FTSE-100 constituent companies and find that the relation still holds four years later and across a continent.

Comparing standard R with Revoutions for performance

On 2010-06-17 09:05:00, Allan Engelhardt wrote in CYBAEA Data and Analysis:

Following on from my previous post about improving performance of R by linking with optimized linear algebra libraries, I thought it would be useful to try out the five benchmarks Revolutions Analytics have on their Revolutionary Performance pages.

Faster R through better BLAS

On 2010-06-15 10:21:00, Allan Engelhardt wrote in CYBAEA Data and Analysis:

Can we make our analysis using the R statistical computing and analysis platform run faster? Usually the answer is yes, and the best way is to improve your algorithm and variable selection.

But recently David Smith was suggesting that a big benefit of their (commercial) version of R was that it was linked to a to a better linear algebra library. So I decided to investigate.

The quick summary is that it only really makes a difference for fairly artificial benchmark tests. For “normal” work you are unlikely to see a difference most of the time.