Category Archives: Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0

The Enterprise 2.0 Features for Enterprise 3.0 Benefits Driving Social Business

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Strategies for Social Business

Supporting Social Business Enterprises

Something different happened at the 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.  Something that goes beyond the Enterprise 2.0 Community.  A paradigm shift that affects all people.

Employers will no longer be hiring employees, they will be hiring a Workforce of Networked Workers.  Employers will embrace the “Innovation Age” with employees leveraging their networks to tap the exponential value in co-creation.  These new Social Business Models will generate the business intelligence required to succeed  in competitive markets.  Its hard to believe Enterprise 2.0 is only a few years old, but eventually there will be no Enterprise 2.0.

The term “Enterprise 2.0″ is relatively young, Andrew McAfee used this label in his “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” article written for “MITSloan Management Review” in 2006.  This article explored the possibilities of using “Social Web” technologies in the Enterprise.  I met Andy shortly after this article was published and discovered he had many more ideas on this topic.  We talked about the challenges ahead, mostly workforce cultures and business leaders’ perception of “Social” technologies.  It is amazing how much has been accomplished in so little time!

Sociocultural Evolution in Social Business

The sociocultural evolution in Social Business supporting the transformation of collaboration with the process of co-creation for reducing the complexity of innovation.  A quick timeline that starts with Mainframes and Dumb Terminals shows an accelerated growth pattern.

Mainframes and Dumb Terminals

A few years ago, a time most young people consider the “Stone Age”, Mainframes and Dumb Terminals (green screens of text) were all the rage in the Enterprise. These huge Mainframe computers were too expensive for most businesses at the time and had the computing power comparable to the iPhone of today.

Enterprise 1.o

August 6, 1991 marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.  Business owners saw the value in web-based applications and invested in this technology.  Businesses eventually moved past creating static brochure web sites about their business and started creating web-based business applications.

Enterprise 2.0

  • 2006: Andrew McAfee publishes “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration”.
  • 2006 – 2009: Business teams implement blogs, wikis, & copy features from social networking sites.  The phrase, “Enterprise 2.0 is like Facebook behind the firewall” was the non-helpful marketing buzz.  The misguided had the mentality of,  “build it and they will collaborate”.  Thought leaders were busy collaborating with others and building platforms.  Everyone was focused on tearing down, destroying, and blowing up “silos”.
  • 2010: “Enterprise 2.0″ transforms to “Social Business”
  • 2009 – 2011: Focus starts to shift from “user generated content” to “Collective Intelligence“
  • 2011: More Enterprise 2.0 conversations about Open Social, Social Graph, XFN. FOAF, and APIs (see “Top 10 Reasons NOT to Use WOA & APIs in the Enterprise“).

Enterprise 3.0

Cultivating Network Effects: If Enterprise 2.0 is a play on Web 2.0, then Enterprise 3.0 is Semantic Social Business (Semantic Web).  This is where things really get interesting.  The future of searching for things in the Enterprise will be more about things finding you.  Collective Business Intelligence takes center stage.  More time is invested into social graph engines and algorithms. This is where some business IT money shifts to social science investments.

Andrew McAfee at Enterprise 2.0 Conf Boston 2011

Anyone involved with Enterprise 2.0 or Business Innovation should watch Andy’s video E 2.0 Boston 2011 presentation. You can also find it after logging into the E 2.0 Conference web site here. His topics include Wisdom of Crowds, Collective Intelligence, Prediction Markets, and more. He covers a lot of valuable information in a short period of time, so you may need to watch it a few times and take notes.  Here are 3 quick notes:

  • Give Community Members a voice
  • Let Computers do what they are designed to do
  • Let People do what they are designed to do

If you liked Andy’s presentation at the E 2.0 Conference Boston 2011, then you may like this video of him talking about most of the same topics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAMCy9SnNM4

Gamification in the Enterprise?

About 4 minutes into Andy’s presentation at Boston’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference, he mentions “Gamification“.  Social Business Gamification is a very interesting topic.  Examples of how this works are everywhere, we can see how this looks in the employee review process in Rypple’s  video.  We can also learn more from Spigit, Bunchball, and Badgeville.  The AppFusions Team can integrate custom Gamification solutions for your business needs.

People at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston 2011 seemed to appreciate Michael Wu’s session about Big Data Analytics for Social Media, but he has also put a lot of thought into how the Future of Enterprise Software will be Fun and Productive.  I wrote about his work in this article, “The Secret Social Science Sauce of Gamification“.

I believe many members of the Enterprise 2.o Community can benefit from his work.  I hope people encourage him ( @mich8elwu ) to give a keynote at The Enterprise 2.0 2011 Santa Clara Conference scheduled for November 14 – 17.

Resources:

There are so many great people willing to help others with Social Business and Enterprise 2.0 all over the web and in your neighborhood.  It is almost impossible to mention all of them here.  I recommend reviewing all the shared resources at http://www.e2conf.com and attending one of their events.  You will meet great people and learn fascinating things.

Jim Worth @jimworth did an Outstanding job of putting a huge collection of Enterprise 2.o resources here.

I wrote this article because I like what the Enterprise 2.0 Community is doing.  If you like this article or if you believe education for children is important, then please leave a comment on this blog about our brothers and sisters from the Washington DC area helping the children, teachers, and staff at Humble School Uganda Africa. http://humble-school.blogspot.com They will appreciate knowing somebody is thinking about them and wishing them well.

 

 

 

Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise Gamification for Leveling Up to Prediction Markets by Powering Up with Collective Intelligence

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Enterprise Gamification Strategy

Enterprise Gamification is the use of game mechanics within organizations to support a collaborative culture that aligns with business objectives to create an agile social business model that can increase chances of success in current competitive markets and future markets.  Applying the principals of game theory and implementing game mechanics in enterprise 2.0 platforms plays a very important role in it’s event-driven architecture for capturing the REAL value of enterprise 2.o solutions.  This REAL value is realized by lowering barriers of participation and showing the relationships of people, ideas, and things.  Implementing enterprise gamification strategy should be a part of the complete social business strategy.  Additional information is available in this article, “The Gamification of Innovation in the Enterprise“.

The Exponential Value of Social Business

What is the difference between Social Business and Enterprise 2.0?

The term “Social Business” gained wide-spread popularity at the 2010 Enterprise 2.0 Conference.  Andrew McAfee ( @amcafee ) shares his valid thoughts on this trend in “‘Social Business’ is Past Retirement Age“.  Stowe Boyd ( @stoweboyd ), another well-respected player in the Enterprise 2.0 Industry, shares his thoughts on this trend in “Andrew McAfee on ‘Social Business’ versus ‘Enterprise 2.0′, One More Time“.  Using a label / hashtag ( #e2conf or #e20 ) makes discovering related information easy.  Using “labels/terms” also helps focus context of conversation.  “Enterprise 2.0″ has revived SOA, SaaS, PaaS, …., but I believe the specific term still depends on the context of the conversation.

This controversy over terms also applies to “#Gamification“.  The terms “Gamification” or “Gamify” may seem “buzz busy” and out of place in the context of business, but these terms actually help business leaders connect to new ideas for accomplishing business goals.  You can learn more about how to use game mechanics to accomplish your goals at this Gamification Workshop by Gabe Zichermann ( @gzicherm ) scheduled for June 23 in Washington, DC (check the schedule for a location near you).

The foundation of harnessing the power of the web for Social Business leads us back to “Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide” By Amy Shuen.  Videos on this guide by Amy Shuen are available at “‘Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide'” By Amy Shuen“.

Unlocking the Deeper Levels of Value in Enterprise 2.0 Platforms

Combining Enterprise Architecture (EA) with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) provides methods for capturing and surfacing the power of collective intelligence.  This architecture strategy for Business Intelligence (BI) leverages previously unknown causal relationships to form a new event pattern.  This new business intelligence pattern triggers further autonomous human or automated processing that adds exponential value to the enterprise by injecting value-added information into the recognized pattern which could not have been achieved previously.  I have shared ideas on this topic before at “Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Patterns: Collective Intelligence“.

Collective Intelligence

The main concept to grasp about collective intelligence in the enterprise is this:

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”  ~Aristotle

Prediction Markets

Harnessing the power of collective intelligence to unlock the hidden levels of prediction markets can be accomplished by surfacing data through interactive widgets, gadgets, and apps.  Data analysis can be difficult and time consuming, but crowdsourcing these tasks out to the players of your business community can lighten the burden and achieve better results.  These interactive apps can be created by mashing up data with chart/graph APIs and game components into web-based widgets.  Using standard methods for creating these widgets will support sharing the experience across the enterprise in a platform independent manner.

How Do We Get There From Here?

The challenge of successfully unlocking these hidden secret levels of value will require a collaborative effort.  Here are a few resources for helping your team on this quest.

BUNCHBaLL Gamification Whitepaper

“Gamification uses proven techniques from game design to satisfy your customers and engage them with your content, community or brand, while simultaneously driving meaningful value for your business.” ~ BUNCHBaLL – Gamification Whitepaper

Badgeville – Gamification Report

“Badgeville is a white label Social Rewards & Analytics Platform for web and mobile publishers. Our customers come from a wide variety of verticals including retail, entertainment, publishing, education, enterprise and more.” ~Badgeville – Gamification Report

APIs, Apps, Widgets, & Gadgets

Wisdom of the (developer) crowd: Key lessons on using APIs

“… We’re talking specifically about “open” (or public) APIs, those that are intended to be picked up and used by outside developers. This is common practice in the tech industry, where Facebook, Twitter, Google, and more offer APIs that let developers build applications around their data… ”

PhD Thesis on Mashups

Michele Stecca (@steccami ), Convergent Composition of Telecom and Internet Services in Telco/IT Mashups, PhD Thesis, University of Genoa, 2011

Pro Web Gadgets

“Pro Web Gadgets” by Sterling Udell was published before its time.  This book about “Cross-platform Development Strategies” goes far beyond how to use clever Web 2.0 technologies for creating apps, widgets, and gadgets for the “Distributed Web”.  The author carefully guides the reader through the techniques and strategy of extending existing IT investments to make data more interesting and sharable across environments and devices.  The purchase of this book is a priceless investment for anyone thinking about developing for the future of the web.

Developing Web Widgets with HTML, CSS, JSON and AJAX by Rajesh Lal is also a good book, but I like it for different reasons and plan share some thoughts on it soon too.


Enterprise Gamification is a huge topic with many areas to explore.  You can discover more here “Enterprise Gamification”  I have also discovered a lot of very smart helpful people about this topic on Twitter.  You can follow this #Gamification Twitter List to connect with people that can help you on this adventure.  You can discover intelligent people sharing ideas about Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business on this “Enterprise 2.0 Twitter List #e20“.

Enterprise 2.0

The Gamification of Innovation in the Enterprise

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“Gamify”, The Future of the Innovation Process

Gartner Says By 2015, More Than 50 Percent of Organizations That Manage Innovation Processes Will Gamify Those Processes.

“Gamification describes the broad trend of employing game mechanics to non-game environments such as innovation, marketing, training, employee performance, health and social change,” said Brian Burke, an analyst at Gartner. “Enterprise architects, CIOs and IT planners must be aware of, and lead, the business trend of gamification, educate their business counterparts and collaborate in the evaluation of opportunities within the organization.” Learn more here.

Enterprise Gamification Trends

Dean Takahashi wrote about this idea on “GamesBeat”, his article and the interesting comments can be reviewed here. Libe Goad and Peter Cohen share their thoughts about Innovation Gamification on ZDNet in this article (see comments too). Eric Caoili and his friends take a deeper look at this topic in, “Analyst: Over Half Of ‘Innovation’ Companies To Adopt Gamification By 2015“. Fans of Government 2.0 and Government Agencies can leverage the concepts of Game Mechanics in their Gamification Strategy, as Jeff Lopez covers in “Click to Participate – Games in Government“.

Beyond Gamification: 7 Core Concepts to Create Compelling Products

Amy Jo Kim (@AmyJoKim) shared 7 core concepts to create compelling products at the Web 2.0 Expo SF 2011. Understanding these 7 core concepts when implementing Game Mechanics within the Enterprise Innovation process is critical. Designers and Developers should already be aware of the core concepts when creating Enterprise 2.0 Platforms. These core concepts with very slight modifications can be reviewed here:

  1. Know who plays a part in your business objectives – design for their social style
  2. Build a system that’s easy to learn and hard to master
  3. Build fun/pleasure/satisfaction into your core workflows
  4. Use Progress Mechanics to “light the way” towards learning and mastery of business goals
  5. Design for Onboarding, Habit-Building, and Elder Game
  6. As employees and partners progress, unlock greater challenges, customization and privileges
  7. Give employees and partners real power via stats, voting, earned roles, & crowd-sourcing

Gamification at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2011 with Amy Jo Kim (ShuffleBrain) Video

Amy explains the core concepts of Gamification in the Web 2.0 Expo video.

Enterprise Innovation Gamification

The Enterprise Strategy of Innovation Gamification in business should be taken seriously by CIOs, IT Managers, and Enterprise Architects. Helping their colleagues, partners, and business associates understand how to leverage the concepts of game mechanics should be a defined goal in their Enterprise 2.0 Strategy Plan. Learn more at “What You Need to Know Before Boarding the Enterprise Gamification Trend Train“.

Enterprise 2.0

E 2.0: Enterprise Gamification & the Behavior Engine

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Successful Enterprise Gamification

Successful Enterprise Gamification implementation requires today’s leaders to understand and apply the knowledge of behavioral psychology and the lessons from brain science to manage organizational change successfully. “The Psychology of Change in Organizations“, Psychology Today.

Did you see this recent post by Andrew McAfee, “Enterprise 2.0 the Indian Way“? Andy shares this advice, “The more I learn about Enterprise 2.0, the more inclined I am to encourage companies to throw caution to the wind: buy (or build) some well-designed lightweight tools that take advantage of emergence and game mechanics, find a few leaders willing to lead by example, and go live”.

Jim Worth explains how simple features can lead to sophisticated results in “The Upside Down Enterprise Portal“.

The Game of Organizational Change

Way back in the 1990’s I worked with a team that was tasked with helping our organization reach the next level of Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI). The goal of this task was to improve each team’s performance and give our organization a competitive edge over similar businesses. My task was to create a “Process Management” Platform. This platform included what I called a “Behavior Engine”. The Behavior Engine included logging identified behaviors and awarding users points for performing tasks within the platform. User points were accumulated by doing things like: logging in, creating new process categories, adding new processes, … Reports were generated for stakeholders from the Behavior Engine to identify key players and their behaviors that were driving the success of our goal. We would interview these key players to discover how we could make things even easier. We would also help all players learn from each other by connecting the key players with the weaker players. Then we had the bright idea to surface the Behavior Engine data through individual and team leader boards, process collections, process improvement ideas, … We quickly discovered that the community could easily accomplish the objectives when they had the right guidance and understood the goal.

Our team got tasked with a new project that involved creating a platform for “Human Resources”. There was a lot of buzz about including the Behavior Engine from the Process Management Platform. We explained that this is not something that you just copy-n-paste, but we did reuse the core code and aligned it with the desired behavior and objectives of this new platform.

I moved on to other organizations and have worked with various teams to create/reface/integrate multiple types of platforms that include virtual meetings, customer relationship management, and Enterprise 2.0 platforms. All of these have elements of game mechanics in the architecture to support gamificaition (These elements can be found by searching your code, database, and logs for the word “points”). Speaking of “points”, the point of this quick story is that there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution for game mechanics in the Enterprise. Each implementation of Enterprise 2.0 Gamificaction is unique according to the business objectives and desired behaviors.

Happy Fav Five Friday!

Fav Five Places

What You Need to Know Before Boarding the Enterprise Gamification Trend Train

Work Better. Play Together? On Enterprise Gamification
Enterprise gamification is a hot concept trending in Enterprise 2.0. It has great potential for benefit (and misuse). Misconceptions create the risk of getting it wrong. Rypple’s Daniel Debow shares very important lessons learned for making it work in this presentation.

Work Better. Play Together? On Enterprise Gamification.
View more presentations from Rypple

Gamification and Its Discontents
This great presentation on gamification by Sebastian Deterding covers: The Idea of gamification, side effects, common confusions and misunderstanings, what can go wrong when adding game mechanics to an interaction, and what gamified applications are missing about games.

Pawned. Gamification and Its Discontents

Seth Priebatsch: Building the game layer on top of the world
By now, we’re used to letting Facebook and Twitter capture our social lives on the web — building a “social layer” on top of the real world. At TEDxBoston, Seth Priebatsch looks at the next layer in progress: the “game layer,” a pervasive net of behavior-steering game dynamics that will reshape education and commerce.

Print Your Own SCVNGR’s Secret Game Mechanics Playdeck
Print Your Own Version of SCVNGR’s Game Mechanics Flash Cards

Cultures and Organizations: Software for the Mind, Third Edition

Based on research conducted in more than seventy countries over a forty-year span, Cultures and Organizations examines what drives people apart—when cooperation is so clearly in everyone’s interest. With major new contributions from Michael Minkov’s analysis of data from the World Values Survey, as well as an account of the evolution of cultures by Gert Jan Hofstede, this revised and expanded edition:

  • Reveals the “moral circles” from which national societies are built and the unexamined rules by which people think, feel, and act
  • Explores how national cultures differ in the areas of inequality, assertiveness versus modesty, and tolerance for ambiguity
  • Explains how organizational cultures differ from national cultures—and how they can be managed
  • Analyzes stereotyping, differences in language, cultural roots of the 2008 economic crisis, and other intercultural dynamics

Fav Five Faces

Who is on your “Fantasy Innovation Team” this week?

Here are amazing people that have connected me to new friends and new ideas this week. You might be familiar with “Fantasy Football Teams” , well this is my “Fantasy Innovation Team” this week. I recommend following these smart, creative people on Twitter.

Dad, entrepreneur (co-CEO of Rypple), music fan, and curious person. http://twitter.com/ddebow
Aspiring architect in the cathedral of human understanding. Researcher & designer working on UX, games, gamification & persuasive design. Tweets cc:by-nc/3.0. http://twitter.com/dingstweets
Chief Ninja of SCVNGR! (www.scvngr.com) http://twitter.com/sethpriebatsch
Game Designer, Bass Player, Mom http://twitter.com/amyjokim
Author, Speaker and Expert on Gamification and Game Mechanics. My Book: http://bit.ly/3YITLb & my Blog: http://gamification.co http://twitter.com/gzicherm

Enterprise Gamification Strategy

Enterprise Gamification is the use of game mechanics within Enterprise 2.0 Platforms that improves adoption and strives to encourage users to engage in desired behaviors in connection with business objectives. This technique should be a part of the complete Enterprise 2.0 Strategy. Discover more about game mechanics within Enterprise 2.0 Gamification here “The Enterprise 2.0 Strategy of Gamification“.

Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0: Top 10 Reasons NOT to Use WOA & APIs

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Enterprise 2.0 Strategy for Platform Architecture

Intranet vs Internet

The main goal of a winning Enterprise 2.0 Strategy is to facilitate communication and innovation through collaboration.  The Art of Enterprise Architecture in E 2.0 is to unite people and process.  Thoughts on Enterprise 2.0 Architecture include leveraging the principles of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to support Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA).  This type of Internet architecture for the Intranet makes is possible to support Web 2.0 Apps, Gadgets, & Widgets in the Enterprise.  This strategy reduces the number of resources required for the technical part of Enterprise 2.0 Architecture and provides time to focus on Improving Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Through Gamification.

Many organizations today are supporting employee collaboration through Enterprise 2.0 Platforms.  Vendors are also providing Enterprise 2.0 Solutions that include Social Networking features very similar to Facebook and Twitter.  Some organizations and vendors are missing the biggest success factor behind these popular Social Networking Platforms.  The Application Programming Interface (API) of these platforms contributed heavily to their success.  Using APIs to easily link data is the foundation of how the internet works today.  Enterprise 2.0 platforms should provide a great user experience, enable third-party developers and empowers employees to accomplish their business objectives. This can be accomplished with an Enterprise 2.0 solution that leverages Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) with open, standards-based, non-proprietary API implementations built on web-based RESTful architecture.

Enterprise 2.0: Top 10 Reasons NOT to Use WOA & APIs

  1. We have endless resources and enjoy spending extra money on integration.
  2. We like to spend our bonus money on infrastructure to support bloated code.
  3. We have no desire to support multiple devices.
  4. We have no plans to share information across multiple environments.
  5. We don’t want a platform that can be extended.
  6. We want to pay top dollar for things most get for free.
  7. We don’t support Standards because we enjoy watching our bug list grow.
  8. We believe code should be rigid and not reusable.
  9. We understand the benefits of WOA & APIs, but that’s not the way we do things here.
  10. We feel trendy when talking about OSGI bundles for the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

Data.Gov Demonstrates the Power of WOA and APIs

The next-generation Data.gov platform delivers a fantastic citizen experience, enables developers and empowers agencies to accomplish their mission.  See how this is accomplished in this video.

What Does It Mean to API-Enable Data.Gov?

The Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) of Data.Gov offers an open, standards-based, non-proprietary API implementation built on web-based RESTful architecture. Learn more here [pdf].

Happy Fav Five Friday!

Favorite 5 Places

Forrester: SOA thriving; but interest in ESBs slips A new survey of 2,165 companies, compiled by a team led by Forrester Research’s Randy Heffner, finds that interest in service oriented architecture remains strong, despite today’s emphasis on cloud computing, mobile applications, and social networking …more

Enterprise 2.0 Roll-up: Welcoming Service Cloud 3 and iPad Remember when Chatter first came out? Salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff couldn’t stop talking about how it was just like Facebook. This week that level of social functionality has been extended to Service Cloud 3, the newest iteration of the company’s social …more

5 recommendations for successfully implementing distributed innovation and shared value The real reason for distributed innovation is simply that you can no longer be self-sufficient. You must bring together more and better resources than you can hope to have inside a single organization. This means that distributed innovation models must address how … more

Becoming an Open Leader Two years ago I posted a short post that picked up from an HBR article on leadership flaws.  I posed the question if Enterprise 2.0 initiatives can thrive in environments where toxic leadership reigns.  My first reaction was no, and then I thought about ways to get to yes.  One of the flaws of flawed leadership is the lack of feedback — to gain self-awareness there is a problem in the first place.  Perhaps the feedback loop E2.0 cultures …more

#E2sday: How to Calculate the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 With enterprise social software platforms starting to gain widespread traction, ROI measurements are now becoming possible with early adopter communities. Many companies are looking for a detailed guide on how to measure the benefits of E2.0 …more [infographic]