BizTechTalk

Innovation - There's More to it than Crowds

Having spent 2 years diving into innovation and idea management, I know there is more to innovation than getting together in a room once a year and breaking out the post-it notes.

There's also more to innovation than simply asking the crowd to provide ideas, and assuming that all of those ideas are good to great, and executable within a reasonable timeframe, or monetary investment.

Neither of these are bad, they simply aren't sufficient.

Also, having just spent several months analyzing the data that lead to our Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 which followed on our Market IQ on Content Security - collaboration and sharing of content cannot and should not ALWAYS be out in the open.

Financial Services companies get this - that's why they are prohibited from sharing information across the "chinese firewall" between the research and sales arms - it's called collusion, not collaboration. That's why pharmaceutical companies lock away their R&D - the FDA will tear them apart, as will their competitors, if there are not tight controls on their processes (including collaboration, reporting, etc.). There's a time and place for total transparency, total secrecy, and the gray space in between.

Which is why it's all the more troubling to hear a fellow analyst jump in and declare a decade old market NEW, and a single solution as "the only enterprise class solution" when it hasn't even existed in a production state for 2 years (perhaps not 1, hard to trace from the info I'm finding).

As Dan Farber wrote about the launch of Salesforce's IdeaExchange in 2006:

"Benioff calls it an 'IdeaExchange,' an 'entirely new way to listen to customers on how to build great enterprise software, and satisfy their needs.' What’s entirely new about a blog-like site with comments and voting is somewhat of a mystery..."

That's perhaps a bit harsh, although he has a point. A shiny front-end is only part of the game, which is what troubles me about people who are obsessed with AJAX, widgets, rounded corners and cool company/product names.

In any case, see Jeremiah's "Build your own 'IdeaStorm' with UserVoice" entry, and make your own judgement.

Below is the comment I'd posted on Jeremiah's blog, with live links, and for archive purposes. Presumably the comment will pass moderation and be live on his blog shortly as well. I see that Matt Greeley, CEO of Brightidea is a bit fired up about this as well.

My comments:

The "suggestion box" approach can provide some value, and I'm now trying out UserVoice and IdeaScale as well. Interesting timing in the blogosphere on this one!

A completely open suggestion box, can however have some major downsides - even though I'm a believer in participation, openness and transparency, the stats on innovation show that focus is needed to maximize the value of these efforts.

As @DellDawn suggests, the whole management process itself is significant. Creating the front-end, vote up/down, commentary and status isn't rocket science. Nearly any blog can do that right now with a few widgets to provide ranking, combined with typical commenting and categories/tagging.

Innovation Management and Idea Management imply and end-to-end process, including the idea generation component on through filtering for duplicates, dumb ideas, things that have already been done, as well as genuine useful and relevant ideas that can be taken to market.

And I have to say, Salesforce.com is not nearly the first or the most successful "open innovation" solution.

This entire movement is born out of the Voice of the Customer movement, itself coming from marketing techniques that go back to the earliest days of focus groups. It's just at a different scale - small i innovation (incremental) rather than radical BIG I INNOVATION (brand new, never been seen before).

Some other competitors that have moved beyond the web-enabled open suggestion box: BrightIdea, Imaginatik, and MindMatters. All of which existed well before Salesforce commercialized their solution.

So, I'd say it is patently false to say that "IdeaExchange is the only enterprise class version" of anything. It's a logical extension of the Salesforce platform - pulling data in from the outside (consumers, users), and marrying to their traditional datasource, handled by marketing and sales people and processes feeding in the CRM/SFA engines. Not "the only" by a long shot.

For someone else's thoughts on the open innovation, wisdom of crowds front, see Mark Turrell's recent YouTube video which describes more of the pros/cons of various approaches. He's CEO of Imaginatik, so hardly unbiased, but he's been involved in this type of work for nearly 10 years, and can provide far more detailed anecdotes on the hard results of these systems.

The Forbes article on Suggestion Box 2.0 is a reasonable introduction to this topic as well.

I'll close with the wisdom that venture capitalists know all too well. Ideas are nothing. It's execution that counts. How do you execute on 100, 1,000 or 10,000 submitted ideas? You can't wing it, you need processes and systems in place, or you are toast.

Innovation at the enterprise-level is hard work, even when tapping the crowd. And as Henry Ford said "If I listened to my customers, I would've bred a faster horse." Suggestions frequently (but not always) require interpretation.

Wanted - YOU! Vote on Topics Coming Up in Next 12-18 Months

To those who provided input on the Findability questions recently - thank you for the extra eyes and brains in helping us to round out the focus for the survey. The extra 10-20 vendors added to the list was very  handy. Survey is coming real soon... stay tuned.

Now, looking for more feedback (ala Open Innovation, Wisdom of Crowds, Crowdcasting, etc..) as to what we should be covering, topically, moving forward.

We've already delivered two Market IQs, one on Enterprise 2.0 (>900 downloads in the last month), Content Security (>1300 downloads), and are now embarking on Findability (survey launching within 24 hours).

What else should we be covering in the next 12-18 months?

Infinitely easier for you (and you, over there in the corner) to simply weigh in and vote on what you'd like us to cover. See the "micropoll" below, and feel free to invite others to provide their opinion as well.

Content, Information, Knowledge, Process - what can we provide that would help you and your organization?

Enterprise 2.0 = Knowledge Management 2.0?

Presented a subset of our Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 findings today at the Boston KM Forum hosted at Bentley. Specifically dived into the Knowledge Management-oriented aspects of Enterprise 2.0.

Not claiming by a far stretch that Enterprise 2.0 is exactly Knowledge Management 2.0 (or vice-versa), but there are some great overlaps. The battery of a dozen profiling questions (a modified version of the KM2 Methodology we've used in the past) that we'd used in the survey popped out a subset of respondents who were "KM Inclined" - and that served as the main data used in this presentation.

If you've already seen our webinar, or read the report, this presentation may be redundant, although the front 2/3rds is new material, setting up the discussion of Enterprise 2.0 in general, Knowledge Management 1.0, and where we seem to be heading.

A fellow was recording the audio, we'll see if I was loud enough to make it worth syncing up and posting - in the meantime, you can probably follow along with what I'm trying to get across, but feel free to let me know if it's clear or mud! (BTW - if you aren't seeing the commenting area, hit me on twitter, and let me know you're having issues. Seems something has gone wrong with Internet Explorer 7 viewers [use Firefox and it's fine - hint hint])

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Visualizations: TweetClouds

Sam Lawrence (CMO for Jive Software, blogging at GoBigAlways), and a number of others on the twittersphere, have been producing visualizations (using "tag cloud" styling) around the "tweets" (maximum 140 character messages posted/sent on twitter.com) of themselves and other high-traffic twitter users.

Sam had been favoring the use of IBM's Many Eyes offering, which provides many ways to visualize information, but requires uploading of content to the service, for it to then chew on. The problem of that service was that the "easy" way to get information out of twitter and into Many Eyes involved cutting and pasting page after page of twitter text.

Noticed yesterday that Stowe Boyd gave tweetclouds.com a whirl, and while I had to hit the site multiple times (timed out, must be overloaded) for it to eventually load my twitter feed (pulled automatically, no cut and paste), it popped out the visualization below.

You can see the impact of the aggregation I'm doing by piping in various lifestreams (my listening habits in iTunes for example) and workstreams (posts to my blog) into my twitter account (via twitterfeed.com). There is also of course the bulk of twitter messages, which are manual tweets from me, responding to various people on twitter, posting open questions, etc..

Sadly this visualization doesn't do two word analysis, or it would be more obvious that "enterprise" and "2.0" are nearly always tied together in my tweets around "enterprise 2.0."

Interested in what anyone else thinks believes this visualization reveals about my twitter activities - too self-promoting? Too broad, too narrow?

aiimALERT: InsideView Brings the Outside In

InsideView recently introduced the concept of "Socialprise" as a framework for understanding the way in which the unstructured data of social networks and media are influencing enterprises. A newly announced product, SalesView, is specifically designed to mash-up social data with search and intelligence capabilities to help sales teams automate prospecting, accelerate sales cycles and close more deals. (see http://www.insideview.com/cat-company-press.html for more details)

InsideView are essentially a meta-meta-aggregator of relationship and social data, which can be used to infuse/enrich Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, or be used as a stand-alone tool similar in some respects to ZoomInfo (one of their underlying data sources) or other "relationship/contact databases" such as Hoover's.

What does InsideView bring to the table? It helps to provide salespeople and marketers further informaiton to understand their prey, customers and prospects beyond the bare minimum information (such as name, phone, e-mail, company name, title) they might otherwise have to work with in their CRM or Sales Force Automation (SFA) systems.

They are a meta-meta-aggregator in the sense that they are aggregating (collecting) information from multiple sources, and that their underlying data sources can also be aggregating information from multiple sources (such as ZoomInfo). This extends the reach and richness of the information that they are able to pull back on behalf of users of their system, in a similar fashion to the functionality of federated search or universal search in more traditional enterprise search.

In an ideal world, or at least with the smarter salespeople and marketers, such information will help to weed out who the appropriate people are to engage in more targeted discussions, and to engage in informed conversations of the "2.0 age" rather than in continuing to hammer out cold-calls and blanket, un-personalized (or badly personalized) mass-marketing.

The various sources that they tap for this information are a mix of both typical structured data sources as well as in crawling and pulling in unstructured information that would contain social/relationship information (such as from blogs, Facebook etc.). InsideView has a wide range of paid and free sources that they aggregate and examine to algorithmically determine the relevancy and accuracy of this information. Factors would include such things as: the recency of updated information, determining whether the self-owned and updated sources (such as profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook) are more accurate than automated information collected via subscription service, and so on.

Between the acquisitions of SRD via IBM (in 2005), Interface Software by Lexis Nexis (in 2004), and Contact Networks now part of Thomson West (as of January 2008), this aspect of social networking or social intelligence/relationship intelligence is adding serious firepower for internal enterprise users.

I've been talking about just this sort of "relationship enrichment" or "relationship intelligence" since 2003/2004. When I was with Delphi Group, we began rolling this functionality into the world of "Information Intelligence" as a higher-level topic, with several conferences discussing the mashup of business intelligence, dashboards, search, knowledge management, portals, and more, into a "meta layer" that could unify all of the mess of siloed content/information/data/knowledge underneath. In 2008 we might be more tempted to simply call all of this Enterprise 2.0 (see our Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0).

Further food for thought: See my "Death of a Salesman?" article from 2004 (on Scribd), and March 2008 presentation on "Build Smarter Internal and External Communities" (on slideshare.net) - both of these relate to the enterprise use of social networking.

Social networking is not purely about person-to-person connections, or in providing a virtual watercooler (or virtual voyeur perhaps) view into your "friends" (peers, co-workers, etc.) but also for the ability of participants IN the network to use the data within that network to become smarter in the ways that they interact with the people in that network.

This would provide both the ability to build communities explicitly for the sake of building a community, as well as in using that community as a source of "intelligence" to provide deeper insights into the community as a whole (collective intelligence or "the wisdom of crowds"), as well as the individuals themselves.

All of this latent "social information" is buried in the heap of individual silos both inside and outside of the control of any one corporate, even deeper than "normal" (spreadsheets, reports, PDFs, etc.) electronic information is. Sadly, most organizations have only just recently begun to understand the value of their more explicit "information assets" (even the value of intellectual property in the form of patents are not well understood in many organizations) and the idea of including social/relationship intelligence as a valued asset is well behind that train in the majority of cases I've come across.

There is a giant opportunity here, and for myself, I'm looking forward to the day when we can turn around say "How in the world did we even function without the ability to tap our relationship intelligence?" The early adopters for this type of functionality may easily run away with marketshare, if their competitors stay asleep too long.

Where will you and your organization be on the adoption curve?

Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 - Released! Discuss...

If you have not already downloaded our Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0, hot off the virtual presses this week, I would recommend you grab yourself a free copy. Over 80 pages, over 70 charts/figures, and all in all, quite a bit of information to ponder.

Once you've had a chance to digest the content, pipe up with your comments here, and we can discuss how the >400 person sample population lines up with YOUR reality. Did we find collective intelligence in our survey respondents, or something else?

If you prefer to ask questions "live" then join us tomorrow, Thursday March 27th at 2pm EDT, on the free companion public webinar. Any questions not answered live (in case we run out of time) will be brought back to the blog to be addressed. Over 500 people registered - the more the merrier. Looking forward to it, pipe up one way or another (hither or yon), and let's discuss Enterprise 2.0!

Download it now!

Shh... Secret Webinar on Enterprise 2.0

Ok, so it's not secret, or if it is, we've really blown it, as without our normal week prior push, we have over 300 people pre-registered for the free webinar on Thursday March 27: Enterprise 2.0 - What's the Real Story?

The market is abuzz with commentary on Enterprise 2.0. Emerging from the momentum of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities. Such as? Ah, that would be telling... you can find a sneak peek in our E-DOC magazine, both in the Jan/Feb issue (current as of this post), and the soon to be published Mar/April issue.

Register for this webinar (no charge, so might as well get this on your calendar) - and stay tuned for the Market IQ report on Enterprise 2.0 that will preceed the webinar (and be the subject of our presentation). The webinar will be archived as well, in case you can't make that day, for you Long Tail fans out there.

Underwritten in part by EMC, Open Text, Socialtext and SpringCM.

 

The market is abuzz with commentary on Enterprise 2.0. Emerging from the momentum of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities. Such as? Ah, that would be telling... you can find a sneak peek in our E-DOC magazine, both in the Jan/Feb issue (current as of this post), and the soon to be published Mar/April issue.

Register for this webinar (no charge, so might as well get this on your calendar) - and stay tuned for the Market IQ report on Enterprise 2.0 that will preceed the webinar (and be the subject of our presentation). The webinar will be archived as well, in case you can't make that day, for you Long Tail fans out there.

Underwritten in part by EMC, Open Text, Socialtext and SpringCM.

Presentation: Folksonomies and Facets

A blast from the past, slightly dusted off... relates to the previous entry on tagging and social bookmarking, and an enterprise view.

The embedded version can be a bit hard to read, so feel free to jump over to slideshare and view full screen, or download the presentation. It's not the slickest presentation, but I've found it useful in introducing people to these concepts, in the 3 years I've used it, time and again.

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Thoughts? Who's doing (from a user, not supplier, standpoint) enterprise oriented tagging/bookmarking these days?

Social Bookmarking and Enterprise Value

The value of a random stumble is really underrated. I've known of Thomas Vander Wal for several years, when I first became involved as a member of AifiA (now The Information Architecture Institute), and his very early work in Folksonomies, and helping to bring tagging on a broad basis to light. Great stuff - and I've referenced him in many a presentation.

Haven't had a chance to peek at his blog in, well, ages. Happened to see his commentary on the Yahoo! and Microsoft conundrum recently, and jumped into some of his other, more focused writing on tagging, IA, etc..

Which leads me to his blog entry "Getting More Value in Enterprise with Social Bookmarking" and a few points I'd like to call out.

"The last few weeks I have been running across a few companies postponing or canceling their social computing or Enterprise 2.0 efforts. The reasons vary from the usual budget shifts and staff changes (prior projects were not delivered on time), and leadership roles need filling. But two firms had new concerns of layoffs or budget cuts."

Ok, so since we're just putting the finishing touches on our big research piece on Enterprise 2.0, that first line gave me a bit of a gut-wrenching experience - here I thought (and still do) we were fairly early on in this. But hold on...

"To both firms I pointed out now was the exact time they really needed to focus on some Enterprise 2.0 efforts, particularly social bookmarking as well as wikis and blogs. These solutions help gather information, find value across the organization, capture knowledge, build cohesiveness for members of the organization in time where there there is uncertainty. One of the biggest reasons that these tools make sense is their cost to deploy and receive solid value..." (emphasis mine)

Ah, there we go. While it is certainly possible to break the bank when buying Enterprise 2.0-related technologies, it is much more difficult to overspend in this area, than in most. It's a benefit of SaaS and open source, as well as much more pointed, and easily (relatively) "loosely coupled" solutions. And in the case of social bookmarking specifically, the costs and complexity to deploy are about as inexpensive as anything ever could be. What exactly is the ROI time frame for a solution that literally cost nothing more than the time to install it, which itself, is measured in seconds, minutes, hours, perhaps? I smell a DIVIDE BY ZERO error coming...

Proving the value derived, however, is a much more challenging thing. As anyone who knows me will attest, there are almost no "hard numbers" in my mind, that can ever be completely "trusted" - and whether most organizations actually value their employees (or customers for that matter) wasted time, sorry, that IS something worth addressing, and measuring.

The value of smarter, more informed, more collaborative, and yes, perhaps even "happier" people is certainly worth something. What's the value of information locked away that nobody can ever find? (which happens all too often in ECM deployments) Tell me how you justify spending millions to manage buried content? And how the "high value" yet "work in progress" content can be completely unmanaged and flopping around in e-mail folders? (yet another topic for another day)

And while the benefits of social bookmarking in an Enterprise is definitely for the common good of other users, it's also very self-motivating, as people can (finally) tag the content that they most care about, specifically so they can do their own job. If only all enterprise solutions were actually tailored towards helping the general population, instead of just managers or IT.

The biggest trick of anything even remotely smacking of Knowledge Management, is to stop thinking that magic (technology) can do all of the work for you, or to insist that professional librarians are the only ones that can categorize and organize information.

Every tool or capability has it's place. For tools that are available at no to low cost, it's worth experimenting, and as search vendors such as Vivisimo are showing, integrating tagging within enterprise search, or as Thomas mentions, ConnectBeam and their integration into FAST (and therefore, Microsoft), Google Search Appliance et al, adds even more value than if these capabilities are separated. But that is a topic for another day - and will be part of the discussion in our Q2 Market IQ on Findability.

So for those of you doing "enterprise social bookmarking" whether a specific standalone solution, embedded in a search solution, or perhaps in a wiki or other solution. What say you? Getting value? Significant? What was the cost?

Time To Market and Enterprise Development

A quick (it's all relative, eh?) peek into some of the ideas we're going to be surfacing around our Enterprise 2.0 Market IQ (research paper), and forthcoming Enterprise 2.0 Training course (see announcement from our VP of Education, Atle Skjekkeland), premiering March 3rd in Boston at the AIIM International Expo & Conference. Carl Frappaolo and I are developing the research and training in parallel, as an exercise in juggling our "normal" Market Intelligence work, with the added fun of blazing some new educational ground. (sanity is over-rated as it turns out!)

None of our Enterprise 2.0 work is going to be targeted specifically at software development teams per se, as we are focused (typically) on the "tech-savvy business person" in most cases, but we are most definitely going to be pointing out a trend that has been brewing in software development for at least the last 15 years, and more broadly, to manufacturing processes, for over 50 years.

To start priming the pump and get your mind going, I found a succinct overview of Agile Project Management (based around SCRUM, one of the most popular "agile methods"), via Scribd.com - a self-publishing, mostly book-oriented service, similar to slideshare.net. Ironically, this example is a presentation - whoops!

I'm highlighting page 8 below (in the embedded version - or view it directly on scribd), which discusses tight, 30 day "sprints" (development cycles), and the quick (typically daily) 15 minute reviews that agile teams typically do. It is not uncommon for SaaS-oriented commercial outfits (such as salesforce.com, springcm.com, etc.) to release new software/functionality on a 1-3 month basis, non-stop, forever.

Flip through the presentation, and see what you think of the concepts and promises regarding SCRUM.

Can your team do that? (whether an internally-facing shop, or commercial development shop)

If yes, fantastic! Would love to hear your success stories. Please comment/trackback.

If no, why not? Have you tried this approach? Tried and died? Lacked management buy-in? Feel it's a fad? Please comment/trackback.

Regular readers will know I periodically ask specifically for feedback for internally facing development teams. My anecdotal evidence is that "corporate development/IT" is far behind the curve in adopting any agile practices (SCRUM or otherwise). I would love to be proven wrong however, so blow your horns folks!

Also, I'm starting a secret army (shh) of "BizTech" types, via the LinkedIn group I started this week. Current rallying point for discussions, for the moment at least, will remain this blog, but I have some ideas I want to bounce around as well, so join the BizTech Army! (I'm happy to network with just about anyone as well - the more connections, the more potential. Who knows, you could be the 3rd person in recent months that I've helped connect to their next job.)