Enterprise 2.0 & It's Adoption Within Major Corporations

Central Desktop attended The Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston, MA at the end of July. I spent most of my time attending conference sessions while Krystal Roemer & Sam Patel, our Director of Business Development, did demos of our Enterprise Edition & Community Edition Plans. Isaac Garcia, our CEO, spoke with analysts and did interviews with the press about Central Desktop's new "Status Update" micro-blogging features. Here are my major take-aways:

Large Corporations are Interested In, But Under-utilizing Enterprise 2.0 Technology - Why?

Fear & Internal Power Struggles Prevent Enterprise-Wide Adoption

Anyone who has ever worked at a large corporation understands almost intuitively why this is an issue. Full-service Enterprise 2.0 online collaboration software tools like ours create transparency, accountability, and knowledge sharing. However, many sales departments are incentivized on individual achievement. Making the secrets of the best sales reps available to the whole sales team (leveraging their successful best practices to potentially thousands of reps) could make a tremendous difference. However, it could also make things more competitive, effectively disincentivizing the original high performing sales people from sharing if incentives to compensate them for creating better systems and processes for the entire group are not put in place first. The entire organization will gain more by leveraging knowledge, preserving best practices, and increasing team collaboration. However many people incentivized around their sole performance or the size or performance of their department tend to fear losing control. IT & Legal departments tend to be particularly fearful of losing control across the entire enterprise.

Misinformation

It was hard to reconcile the promised gains of Enterprise 2.0 vs. the very limited implementations many of the enterprise 2.0 vendors were advocating. Done right, it can result in a very high ROI (Return on Investment), but done wrong it can waste a tremendous amount of resources.

Many vendors focused less on ROI and more on buzz-words.  The ways in which some companies pushed "Social Networking" seemed to relegate Enterprise 2.0 technology to a team building exercise rather than utilizing Enterprise 2.0 tools to their full potential to: save time, save money, increase productivity tremendously, streamline workflow, or bring products to market faster. It was hard for me to see the "success" of a 60,000 person, multi-million dollar, Enterprise 2.0 deployment being judged by how much time employees were spending sharing pictures of their kids or their "top 5" book, movie & vacation lists. At the enterprise level, implementing Enterprise 2.0 tools solely for "social networking" seemed diametrically opposed to the ways we encourage our users to deploy them on making their business critical functions more efficient, streamlining their business operations.  

It was very eye-opening to observe the contrast between sessions focused on the practical business applications of the tools vs. sessions advocating dismissing ROI discussions altogether in favor of a feel-good approach. Microsoft called ROI "irrelevant" - saying Enterprise 2.0 technologies were transformative, like email or the telephone, transcending a need to generate a positive ROI. The whole concept of throwing ROI out of the window did not sit well with me. While I agree that Enterprise 2.0 technology is transformative, its value is measurable.  I understand why SharePoint, Microsoft's Enterprise 2.0 product and our largest and most expensive competitor, might want to shift the focus from ROI. SharePoint, bundled with software licenses purchased by 80% of Fortune 500 companies, tends not to get fully deployed because of high implementation, deployment, training & adoption costs. Justifying the ROI on a high six figure to low seven figure deployment can be difficult. Our customers see a huge value and ROI from our software partially due to our modest pricing, mostly only 3-5 figures. Our Fortune 500 customers don't just see a higher ROI on up front costs; implementation, deployment, and on-going IT resource maintenance costs are far less, since our solution offers simpler, easier adoption and the flexibility of a fully SaaS-based solution. 

There was a lot of noise at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference; companies promoting their individual Enterprise 2.0 specialty: a Wiki, a blog, Content Management System (CMS), Social Networking or Search. I'm not sure yet what we will need to do to cut through the noise, to make it clear to those buying at the Enterprise level that there is no need use multiple tools when they can leverage the majority of Enterprise 2.0 technologies with Central Desktop. There is no need to buy one tool just for Project Management, another for Social Networking, & yet another to put up a Wiki or an Intranet. From Wikis, Blogs, Forums, Content Management Systems (CMS), Search, and Intranets & Extranets to Project Management, Online Documents & Discussion Threads, Workflow and Micro-blogging, Central Desktop is like a virtual Enterprise 2.0 Swiss Army Knife designed to deploy quickly and easily without the need for IT infrastructure. Our full-featured approach, bundling all of the Enterprise 2.0 technologies into one platform that is easy- to-use & easy-to-deploy was a big differentiator. Our focus on business productivity & ROI was unique amongst our competitors -- and I believe it sets us apart in a very profound way.

Lack of awareness

Large Fortune 500 corporations are only just beginning to understand the significant value, time savings, or lower IT costs they can attain by implementing a comprehensive solution like ours. They are just starting to feel things out. They are trying to figure out what wikis, blogs, forums, and shared social technologies are & how, if at all, they can be used for business. There was a lot of focus on buzz words: wiki, Twitter, Facebook, and social networking but very few tangible business use cases and results. This surprised me quite a bit. Speaking with Enterprise 2.0 attendees about our more advanced features, the ones that could make the greatest difference to their bottom-line (like our workflow engine or systemizing their business processes), was far beyond anything they expected Enterprise 2.0 technologies to be capable of. They wanted to know if we could help them just put up a wiki. I was floored. Our small business customers take our wikis and use them in ways that could make heads spin: doubling profits, servicing thousands of customers, cutting overhead expenses, and deploying a SharePoint Alternative in under 15 minutes.

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