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Well, today I spent al lot of time sending out invitations for linked in. I hope some will answer! Today I am having a day off to do some stuff for my new home. We are moving in march so I made a lot af arrangements today. I got a new powersupplier, ordered an oven, ended some aggreements and started some simple services.

Nowadays you can do a lot by phone and internet. I practically did this in two hours. connections are far more easy then they were some years a go. Companies have many channels they use to communicate with their clients. Networks and communication technology combined make live much easier. Your own network gives some adresses that you can trust and do fast business with!

This new research blog replaces our Technology Watch blog (in Dutch).

Well the last few days I ran into the problem of contribution. Enterprise 2.0 is depending upon users at the office editing and creating content to create and share knowledge. People have to make time to do this, or better put their bosses have to give them time. In the knowledge worker community where jobs have a heavy complexity of work and collaborate with others no one will have a boss. They of course have a superior but this person does not tell them what to do. The knowledge workers will do as they think is fit to get their jobs done. The last few days I have been very busy for my customers and not with posting on my blog. Today I have a moment to get going again and see that my last post is 13 days ago…

How do you avoid these situations? Well you don’t! Knowledge workers are very busy people with a lot on their minds. But it is a matter of choice and opportunity. When I think back about the last few days I spend a lot of time behind my tablet-pc editing and creating content. This is the same as I am doing at this moment. The integration of tools could give more opportunity to share content and give time to blogging (as an example of an enterprise 2.0 activity). A lot of tools are integrating with email because it is the tool of choice of bilions of people!

Integration of functionality (in hard- and software) is one of the keys in enterprise 2.0 and it will be a possible sollution to my problem and hopefully to the problem of many other problems.

Well of course this has to be mentioned. For a long time everybody was talking and blogging and writing about an apple phone and nog it is here! Watch this! I cannot wait until it ships and get sent to Europe in Q4 of this year. The specs are great and the easy touchscreen interface is very promissing. The functions displayed on the site are very intuitive as you would expect from apple. The use of this tool as a blackberry will be much better I guess due to the bigger screen (which automatically rotates!), bigger hard drive and more capabilities!

Today a little piece on wehkamp. This is a dutch company that sells just about everything. In the old brick and mortar days they sent thick magazines to every household in Holland. Nowadays they sell 75% through their website. A few days a go they launched a new website. The launch was accompanied with a big discount program, TV and Radio ads and now it is live.

On the site they have a small corner that asks the customers what they feel about the new site. The comments are posted and (after a review) they are shown on the site. The ten best comments get a reward and are published in the Telegraaf (a big dutch newspaper).

I think it is a great thing that Wehkamp is trying this! I have two comments on this feedback loop: it only lasts a month and thus ends. This is a waste because people will allways have comments on the site. This site will be ‘alfa’ in february and not remain a beta site for the rest of its natural life! Second the people from Wehkamp must give feedback on user comments and show what they have done with it to keep the visitors going (and coming and most importantly: buying)

Well I am back from the holidays and returned to work on tuesday. So here are some thoughts on the subject:

two interesting posts about enterprise 2.0. The first is from intel about IT spending, look here for the article. A nice feature of web 2.0 is that the applications you can use online are free. In an enterprise this is an illusion of course but there must be a shift in IT cost because at these cost rates enterprise 2.0 will not happen. Due to the fast cycles a CFO will not allow for big spending on a project or an application that will last for 18 months. The providers of enterprise software must acknowledge that it is to much and start lowering there prices of think of another pricing model. Only then a company can start spending more dollars in new innovative stuff!

The second post is about the forecast of 2007, this one is from dion hinchcliffe. He gives 10 directions of enterprise 2.0. Two directions are the most important (according to me). The first one is about search. The foremost application of enterprise 2.0 will be te start coping with the enormous amout of content and the way users are getting what they need. The installed base of early collaborative tools like email and IM have not given way. During the year smart tools that could replace them arrive and a base is created.

I hope you liked my insights!

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!