Let me clarify my position: In the future, the “cloud” will emerge to an extent where to the laymen in an organization, it will be challenging if not impossible to understand where the enterprise ends (what is behind the firewall) and the cloud begins (what is beyond the firewall). This does not mean corporate data will be public for all to see, some sort of enterprise information security will remain but it WILL be much more open than it is today. Thus, whether the enterprise information and feature-set is behind the firewall or in front can become a non-issue as the technology permits. Furthermore, I just do not see how IT constituents can stop it short of blocking internet access completely.

What is interesting is those reading this will probably polarize to two camps, “wow, you are out of your mind, IT will never stand for that” OR “wow, you didn’t make much of a leap, that is obvious”. In fact, for the latter camp, I would tend to agree, it is happening already. Jerry Zawodny, of the Yahoo! Developer Network, commented that Term Extraction is the second most popular web service on their network. I’m sure all of the data submitted to the web service by users is readily available consumer information and not protected corporate data of any kind.

Enterprise users are using GMail for email (cloud). Sales people are using Salesforce.com SaaS offering for CRM and it is gaining even more traction with the emergence of AppExchange (cloud). Thousands of enterprise users have their profiles and are collaborating on Facebook (cloud). Amazon S3 is there and start-ups being leveraged by enterprise uses are using it (cloud). And sites like Swivel are offering private environments (cloud). This is a short, non-comprehensive list.

Thus, it doesn’t even take a lot of vision to make the leap that this is going to happen with even more and more frequency. And even if the earliest adoption of 2.0 type tools like Socialtext‘s wiki software, Connectbeam‘s enterprise bookmarking solution and Attensa‘s RSS enterprise software is taking place behind the firewall, my sense is that it is still a factor driven by information security concerns, not anti-cloud sentiment.

Ultimately, information and capabilities will exist in the cloud, and most likely there will be more in the cloud than behind the firewall. My sense the nimble organizations will react to this and learn how to make most effective use of the crowd. Only the most sensitive of information will sit behind the firewall in the long term. And of course, it is paramount that the technology providers continue to assure CIOs that information security and software reliability is in their SaaS offerings.

While Bill discussed Enterprise 2.0 and how CIO’s need to view and deal with movement, I tend to be a believer that the biggest reason for the push and demand for these technologies is the digital native. ExtremeNano has an article entitled ‘Digital Natives’ Will Drive Web 2.0 into Your Business, that echoes the digital native is driving the movement. Good article that claims four years will be the “cliff” for Enterprise 2.0 where we really see it take hold, I’m betting ‘under’ on it.

For those of you who want a quick primer on Enterprise 2.0, I’m still touting Scott Gavin’s depiction of it which I discuss in recent post (with the video!).

BTW, I wasn’t aware of Scott’s blog, Enterprise 2.0 Evangelist, but I just subscribed to his RSS feed so I’ll be following it from this point. There’s that RSS thing again…

“imagining, developing and evangelizing Web 2.0 innovations–social networks, widgets, RSS, blogs, wikis, SMS, virtual worlds, etc.–across various SAP’s various product divisions and 39,300 employees in 50 countries.”

The goal of the team as defined by Larry Barrett of InternetNews.com is:

Incorporate new ways of using emerging Web 2.0 technologies to harness the power of its customer relationship management (CRM) (define) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) (define) software into tools that are easy to use, engaging and eminently attractive to an increasingly younger and tech-savvy mix of employees and customers.

Barrett’s article has some very interesting examples of CRM applications such as widgets that Browne’s group is pioneering. There is a whole other post to write to comment on some of there innovations discussed, I’ll leave that for another time.

Overall, Browne appears to have quite a cool job and leads quite an intriguing team. At Dow Jones, we do these type of tasks a part of our daily jobs in the product organization. Having a group such as this one is very advantageous because it fosters an active pipeline of ideas coming to different areas of the organization with a good degree of market validation directly from internal users and customers. It is always an ongoing challenge of trying to pioneer and run the business day-to-day such as releasing products, doing fiscal budgets, visiting customers and engaging the sales force.

There are a couple of elements that do strike me about the “imagineering” concept:

1. A risk I see (or something to remain conscious of) is that you don’t want your organization to rely on the imagineering team for all new ideas. You want your teams always thinking about how to improve the products and the lives of customers. It is part of everyone’s job, not just an edge organization. That is one of the wonderful elements of Google’s 20% program.
2. The balance between innovation and commercialization is critical. Farber notes that SAP’s philosophy is a conservative one when it comes to taking their new concepts to market. This I question. Yes, you need to be careful about alienating your customer base but not at the expense of waiting too long to bring value to your customers. Jeff Nolan, former SAPer, agrees. Customers will let you know if you are on the right track. And as a large organization, you run the risk of getting disinter-mediated by a more agile start-up that brings that value to YOUR customers first. If you are innovating your next disruption, it probably means someone else is or is thinking about it too. Now Thomas Otter has something to say about this in his rebuttal and he makes some very valid points. You have to be careful releasing new stuff. Just don’t make it black or white, release to customers or don’t.

SAP is definitely doing the right thing with the Imagineering team so they have the hard part nailed… investing in R&D in a big way. The elements I speak of above are much more process and effectiveness related which all goes to execution upon the base fundamentals.

Clearly, mobility and the 2.0 meme will be converging and it isn’t much of a leap to guess that the convergence will happen at an even faster rate the current state of web mobility.  Yes, there will be challenges but if the mobile operators/platforms do not facilitate the 2.0 paradigm, there will be disruption just as other segments have seen to facilitate it.  My sense is that it will work itself out fairly rapidly.  And perhaps even faster with an added push from a couple more Apple iPhone generations.

But whether one is looking at completely transforming a business at a strategic level, or just applying a few Web 2.0 techniques to a corner of a business that can benefit from it, the message is clearer and clearer business leaders: Significant change is afoot and now is the time to start looking hard at how to embrace it.

The post is a very good assessment of the dynamics in the enterprise and some of the undercurrent that takes place behind corporate walls in the adoption of these new behaviors and technology.  Today, Richard MacManus over at Read/WriteWeb discussed how IM (instant messaging) is still king of the hill in technologies that bring business value to the enterprise.  So the good news is the “consumerization of technology” is clearly beginning to win over many, but obviously the budgets and decision processes will be the ongoing governor on how quickly Enterprise 2.0 takes hold (if it does, I for one am a believer).

He also includes a graphic that pretty well outlines all of the different paradigm and technology shifts happening in the enterprise. (not one of those graphics that is instantly self-explanatory but if you want a good snapshot assessment of different elements, it is a good one).

For those of you interested in Enterprise 2.0, Hinchcliffe provides a good synopsis of the graphic with more detailed explanation of each of the representative sections.

The opening sentence of the Wikipedia entry for Knowledge Management is:

Knowledge Management comprises a range of practices used by organisations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge for reuse, awareness and learning.

Reading a couple of posts from the Fast Forward blog, there is some interesting debate regarding knowledge management, its relevancy and whether it is an impediment to fostering enterprise 2.0 value in the workplace.  Paula Thornton wrote Knowledge Doesn’t Want to be Managed, ending with the statement that ‘KM is dead’, later following up with KM Nerves are Raw.

However, my sense is that perhaps we are keying too strongly on the word ‘management’ in the entire equation.  Sure, in the past, organizations tried to manage (aka control) knowledge and information.  Some still do, but many are leveraging the power of their organizations, the new thinking of digital natives and very often the power of 2.0 technologies to strengthen their knowledge strategies.

Knowledge Management doesn’t mean ‘knowledge control’.  In that I do agree with Paula’s early point “The promise of 2.0 is to ‘free’ the knowledge.”  Knowledge does want to be free, free to be disseminated by experts and leveraged by all, particularly the ones that need it.

So perhaps KE should be the term of the new era.  It is about Knowledge Enablement, Knowledge Empowerment, Knowledge Evangelism and Knowledge Everywhere. 

A key point in Dion’s post is that these enterprise 2.0 tools are currently being set-up and utilized whether organizations want them to or not. Often, they are being endorsed by innovative leaders in the largest of organizations. In other cases, they are taking place via grassroots movements (aka corporate renegades with corporate credit cards).

It does really shed light on a couple of key concepts. First, the centralized roll-out of tools and technology isn’t the only way people get tools that help them get their jobs done. Organizations are going to have to decide what their strategies will be to deal with this, enable 2.0 capabilities by providing them to the workforce or try to stop them. I’m not sure the latter is possible. Second, users will use the tools that are the easiest to use and assist them the most with their individual and collective productivity. And ultimately, that should be what organizations find important because that is where the corporate ROI will be.

Reverse mentoring is truly upon us…

John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, is quoted as saying, “It’s about the power of the human network. People working closer together. It will change everything in business, from your innovation models and your supply chain to your bottom line.”

The article discusses at length the school environment and how that too will be positively impacted by the Web 2.0 technologies the are just now starting to power the enterprise revolution. We should consider educational institutions enterprises as well, their output being human capital rather shareholder return. In this context, Chambers states “Future learning will be more collaborative. You learn together in a group, which has a much more lasting impact.” The same is true for the corporation.

The final point of the article discusses how leadership will have to change as well. That the days of decisions going up to the CEO and back to the employee base is going to be dramatically different due to the existence of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities “because everyone can talk to each other” in the new paradigm.

This is just more evidence that Cisco plans on being at the forefront of the Enterprise 2.0 frontier, not that they’ve made any secret about it with their public statements and recent acquisition spree.

Being about four months into our team’s use of wiki software, we clearly have seen both the benefits and challenges of successfully using a wiki in the enterprise environment. At Dow Jones, we have an open wiki environment and when there is time (right, when is there time?), I take the opportunity to see some of the interesting ways in which other groups utilize the wiki environment for collaboration. And I have to be honest, there are some really great examples to see.

But with all the wikipedia success (and hype) and the great examples to mimic, the real challenge is winning over the teams to use the wiki rather than the work flows they’ve created for themselves. And this is where all the multi-angle debate occurs…

Debate #1: Will Enterprise 2.0 technologies such as wikis really take hold? Tom Davenport, President of Information Technology and Management at Babson, has a interesting article on the topic.
Debate #2: Is it any more valuable than what we have today? Are enterprises trying to use wiki technology simply for the technology’s sake? (This is a response I get often). Andrew McAfee has a response to Tom regarding this.
Debate #3: What is the best way to get wikis rolled out into an organization (not from a technology sense) but most importantly into a team environment where it will be used. As a manager, what strategies do you employ? Jerry Bowles, has a great post as to whether you want to become a wiki champion or wiki bully and how wikipatterns is here to help.

There are probably more than three debate lenses to take here and you may have stories of success and failure about trying to gain wiki adoption. It would be great to hear them…