Maand: december 2006

the most important thing in web 2.0 that will pass to enterprise 2.0 will be the perpetual beta concept. This concept has not seen the light of day in most enterprises. Traditional an IT project will work a limited amout of time and then deliver a piece of software. Thereafter it is finished and a change will take six months to complete. The perpetual beta concept in practice will mean that a product will be delivered to the users in de enterprise. The team stays on board to deliver the second release in close collaboration with the users.  And these cylces will continue over a great span of time.

This concept is not only applicable to small webbased stuff but also on big enterprise class applications. Only then an enterprise will be able to deal with her faster moving environment!

The challange is to make this work inside an organisation. The concept that is closely related to this is the direct feedback cycles. Feedback is the only way that the perpetual beta can deliver the best results.

Last year was named year of web 2.0. This came all together when we were named person of the year. “Individuals are changeing the nature of the information age, that the creators and consumers of user generated content are transforming art and ploitics and commerce, they are the engaged citizens of a new digital democracy” to quote Richard Stengel, managing editor of TIME on the choice of the person of the year.

The thing is these people are working somewhere! so what they are doing at home will come to work. It is inconceivable that this will stay at home. Those people blog about work they gather knowledge aat work to spread on wiki’s. The enterprise 2.0 community will have to convince IT managers to start using these tools as well. Not because we want to, but there is something for the enterprise in it as well. A good opportunity to turn the collective knowledge of people into something you can read. It is a good opportunity to get to know all your collegues.

If this is not brought to the enterprise those people will revolt just like they did on web 1.0. Whole new companies have been started just by web 2.0 and a lot of companies have been tared down by web 2.0! In Holland at the moment it is very hard for companies to hire good and smart people. So when you have got them, stick on to them and give them the same they have at home!

A month a go we had a conversation at work about enterprise 2.0 and we stumbled upon email. We alll agreed that email was getting overwhelming. I guess that we received 100 emails during that duscussion alone! The problem of email is that it lacks context. Most people have a hard time putting email in context. GMail is trying to cope with that by using threads and it is succeeding partially. Outlook lets you define rules to manage email automatically. But this is just peanuts. Email is part of all sorts of other stuff like documents, presentations, websites, meetings (on- and offline). Some search engines combine this stuff a litte bit, like the search in mac OS X.

It is very easy to send and receive email (and thus has set the standard for usability), but it stays confined to outlook of gmail. To archive one email is a hell of a job, let alone 50 per day.

Here are some thoughts on email and enterprise 2.0

Maybe you want to have a tagging application across all other applications in the enterprise. Maybee enterprises must irritating people with storage limits and let them leave everything online so email stays a part of the enterpise!A service that lets people store email in context in one step.

More on this later!

Hello,

this is my first post on the journey of understanding enterprise 2.0 and what it will do to the way we do business around the world and in The Netherlands!

This year I started reading about Enterprise 2.0 and I think 2007 will be a leap in development of enterprise 2.0 in the world.

I will discuss this topic in relation to:

• concepts forming enterprise 2.0
• technologies used
• challenges to overcome
• larger trends surrounding this topic
• my work as a consultant in The Netherlands

and of corse some other stuff in busy on right now (storytelling, csr, …)

And I will post numerous links and other stuff to keep you up on the subject!