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IIT KHARAGPUR
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Abstract:
Web 2.0 gave us a totally new vision of internet. One that is not static and one way, but a network
which is ever evolving, dynamic, creative, more free, collaborative and interactive. If the terms like
Facebook, YouTube, Digg, LinkedIn etc. resemble the icons that made it possible for the internet of
2000 to take the gigantic leap and become what it is today, the concept of Enterprise 2.0 is going to
take the organizational structures and organizational hierarchy to another such gigantic leap. The
enterprise of future will be more flexible, more collaborative, more non-hierarchical, more efficient and
more productive. Like the internet of 2000, the existing stable of enterprise software will be going for a
transformation very soon. And the software companies will be at the fore-front of that change. This
paper, takes the liberty in collaborating on ideas that are available in public domain to project a picture
of what Enterprise 2.0 is going to be like. Along with that it takes a special case analysis of how Indian
IT software service companies are going to benefit from this emerging new paradigm.
Introduction:
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Not so much long ago, 2006 to be precise, Harvard Business School Professor, Andrew McAfee ,
coined a new term ―Enterprise 2.0‖, which he predicted will revolutionize the way enterprise do
business, or in general, how they behave. If I take the liberty of using the exact words and I quote
―There is a new wave of business communication tools, including blogs, wikis, and group messaging
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http://cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cb/product/SMR200-PDF-ENG
software (which the author collectively calls "Enterprise 2.0") that allow for more spontaneous,
knowledge-based collaboration. These new tools, the author contends, may well supplant other
communication and knowledge management systems with their superior ability to capture tacit
knowledge, best practices, and relevant experiences from throughout a company and make them
readily available to more users.‖ This paradigm shift in how business interacts from within and to
outside, forms a major part of this paper. At the same time this paper will explore the impact of this
emerging world of Enterprise 2.0 specifically in the Indian IT services industry‘s context.
The paradigm offered by this new term Enterprise 2.0 highlights the salient characteristics of
a new technological wave defined by social media and user generated content itself abbreviated as
web 2.0. The Wikipedia (itself a web 2.0 stalwart) says that "Enterprise 2.0 is the use of ‗Web 2.0‘
technologies within an organization to enable or streamline business processes while enhancing
collaboration - connecting people through the use of social-media tools. Enterprise 2.0 aims to help
employees, customers and suppliers collaborate, share, and organize information the use of
emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or
customers".
Post Enterprise 2.0 the resulting organizational communication patterns can lead to highly productive
and highly collaborative environments by making both the practices of knowledge work and its outputs
more visible. Even when implanted and implemented well, these new technologies will certainly bring
with them a totally new set of challenges. Eventually, as is the very definition of Web 2.0, these new
tools may well reduce management's ability to exert unilateral control over the enterprise. It is for the
time to tell whether a company's leaders really want this to happen and will be able to resist the
temptation to silence the impending collaboration and organized chaos is an open question. Leaders
will have to play a delicate role if they want Enterprise 2.0 technologies to succeed.
Graphic Source: Dion Hinchliffe, ZDNet
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=143
a.) Need for simple, free platforms for self-expression and collaboration in an organization:
Rather than being bound to the confines of rules, human creativity and productivity blooms
only when allowed to flourish in complete freedom. Enterprises often come out to be big
silos/compartments of information with the sharing of that information for a more productive
outcome a very difficult proposition.
b.) Emergent Structures, Rather than Imposed Ones: Any Enterprise 2.0 based system will be
inherently self-propagating. Thus giving organization a scope of continuously and quite
automatically moving towards their goals. This is being understood by most business leaders
today.
c.) Web 2.0 based organizations are will win the war against over-information –tools that will help
them filter, sort, prioritize, and generally stay on top of the flood of new information generated
every second.
An Insight into Enterprise 2.0:
There can be no doubt that one of the hottest spaces in enterprise software today is collaboration. It‘s
no surprise collaboration is getting a lot of interest. The old metaphors for capturing, authoring and
sharing information are stale and inefficient. As such, there is a lot of room for achieving productivity
improvements through improved user experience. This has been true for all software, but especially
so in the enterprise software space where collaboration is essential to daily operation and where
every ounce of productivity translates into big dollars.
While most pundits think ―Web 2.0‖ has been about making the Web participatory, enabling social
connectedness and conversations these are but side effects of the improved ease of use and
increased stickiness (fun of use) software has experienced.
As mentioned, the innovation in the consumer space is now seeping into business and
enterprise software. To date, this has largely translated into a repurposing of consumer applications
for the enterprise in an almost direct mapping. That is to say, not a lot of innovation is happening
there. Enterprise social networking start-ups are trying their damndest to convince companies they
need Facebook in the enterprise. Social bookmarking, video sharing, blogging, microblogging, mind-
mapping, etc. are all attempting to re-imagine how people work. Alas, individually these applications
don‘t deliver for the enterprise in a meaningful way without the network effect of their consumer
counterparts.
Here enters the Enterprise 2.0 suites. Just think about this a moment. Any modern company
has a multiplicity of disconnected data and application silos. Email, databases, files, file servers,
Intranet, CRM, ERP and a growing cloud of useful web-services. It‘s clear the enterprise desperately
needs a new kind of tool to connect all these systems and services and enable easy collaboration
across all of them. Now consider some of the classic scenarios that happen almost everyday in
today‘s so called IT savvy industries: The business requires a report to compile various parameters of
sales, revenues, costs, consumer behaviour etc. This is a typical requirement of every business. Now,
even though a business has the most sophisticated IT tools installed to dig into companies data and
generate an actionable report, when, and if, you get access to requisite data from CRM, databases,
web services, etc…massaging these pieces into actionable information is again painful and time
consuming.
When successful, what fruits do your labors yield? A static (dead) document or file
that is likely trapped in email, a network file server, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server or your local
computer. In short, this is yet another disconnected silo/ compartmentalized block of information that
we are so fearful about. Never to be seen again or reused.
The next time you need similar actionable information you repeat the process anew and it is
just as time consuming and painful. This is fundamentally broken and it‘s killing the productivity of
every company.
Now let‘s look at how Enterprise 2.0 is solving this problem for the future enterprises. The
interface of any Web 2.0 based application is so user friendly, that even a less technical person (not
necessarily programmers) can connect disconnected enterprise systems, databases, Web 2.0 apps,
web-services with pre-built Enterprise 2.0 based adapters. This can be done securely and with IT
governance, but it‘s even easy for business units to do this on their own. Then anyone (of any
technical aptitude) can access information from these disconnected silos, mash it up, make it
actionable, create dynamic documents that are updated (effectively) real-time from multiple data
source and web-services.
In other words or should I say in lay man‘s terms just imagine a Microsoft-Word-like document
in your web browser that allows you real-time access to information in CRM, your legacy intranet,
Microsoft Access (and other databases), LinkedIn, Twitter, Google or other APIs and more. All in an
easy to edit Word Processor like experience that is easily shared with others, versioned and
searchable with a powerful enterprise search engine. This will be the power and simplicity of an
Enterprise 2.0 based organization.
"Enterprise software" is software that has to be sold to an "enterprise", where someone who
doesn't use the software (typically a manager) must be persuaded to use his purchasing authority to
buy the software. It's different in a variety of ways from other software, but none of these ways are
strictly technical.
First, "enterprise software" costs more. If software doesn't cost a lot, individuals can generally
buy it themselves without managerial buy-in, although other factors may interfere; for example,
everyone has to use the same bug-tracking system for it to work.
Second, "enterprise software" doesn't necessarily work, although sufficient effort can usually
make it work. An up-front $50,000 price-tag makes it seem more reasonable to spend $1000 or
$10000 to customize it to your needs before you can use it. In extreme cases, keeping the software
operational requires a team of expensive, specialized full-time employees.
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Third, "enterprise software" is surrounded by consultants who will sell you the service of
making it work, as explained above. In some cases, these ecosystems of consultants are competent
and highly skilled. In other cases, many of them are spectacularly incompetent; This results directly
from the sales process for "enterprise software," in which expert persuaders gull technically
incompetent managers into adopting the software. Managers who aren't technically well-informed
enough to select the software in the first place will also not be well-informed enough to distinguish
between competent consultants and incompetent consultants.
It‘s a fair question. Your company has data to protect, and it has specific procedures in place for
sharing and distributing that data. Your systems may even be silo-based – not due to inefficiency but
out of security concerns. Implementing any new technology built around sharing, networking, and
collaborating is going to fundamentally change the way these things work. For instance, a
business networking tool like LinkedIn is fine, but it doesn't need to be accessible from inside the
enterprise. An inside-the-firewall version of LinkedIn's people-finding capability, however, makes more
sense. Imagine a search finder that would help an employee in one office find someone in another
office that has exactly the right skill set to give advice on a project. This is
exactly the sort of function that an enterprise wiki, or better yet a tool like Jive Software or Teligent,
can offer from safely within the firewall. It makes collaboration easy, supports project groups, and
allows IT to maintain a greater amount of control.
Second, determine how much control you actually need. The more control, the more time and money
it is going to take to install and implement an Enterprise 2.0 solution. It‘s a delicate balancing act – too
little control, and you might as well accept the benefits and risks of an open-by-design service like
Facebook. Impose too much control, however, and you'll send out the message that Big Brother is
watching.
Third, if you are going to implement Enterprise 2.0 tools for collaboration, messaging and so on, look
at the training costs for a particular tool. Ideally there shouldn‘t be any. Finally, don‘t lose sight of
the ultimate goal. You want an Enterprise 2.0 solution that will give users the benefits they need –
collaboration, fast access to information, and flexibility – with the security and management
capabilities your IT team needs. There are solutions that make it possible to strike this balance, and
it‘s probably a good idea for your company to start looking into them. Nothing will wreak havoc on
your business faster than unhappy employees who go looking elsewhere for the tools you should be
providing them.
Indian IT services firms are mostly doing the following bouquet of jobs in the enterprise solutions
market:
1.) Advisory services for business process and requirements analysis and the recommendation,
implementation and maintenance of an enterprise software solution.
2.) IT eco-system is often fraught with legacy system environments mixed together with
enterprise software in a patched framework resulting into significantly degraded customer
experience, the result of a non-integrated, siloed approach to various enterprise activities.
Consulting and implementation of technology to streamline the above, is a major part of the
services offered to enterprises.
3.) Focused Master Data Management consulting and solutions across an enterprise, supported
by dedicated Centres of Excellence with a multidisciplinary resource pool.
4.) The key dimensions of people, process, and technology, helping enterprises succeed in their
CRM initiative with the best technology.
Drawing from the 3 year experience the author had with one of India‘s fastest growing Tier-1 software
service company having a sizable enterprise software business; one can realistically assume that the
broad category of work that any Indian software services company is doing in the enterprise software
space, can be classified under 3 heading:
The service delivery map of Indian Software service companies readily makes it understandable that
how an ever-evolving collaborative platform as provided by Enterprise 2.0 will greatly supplement the
service delivery capabilities of Indian vendors; Here are some chief considerations:
1.) A large proportion of new projects to implement enterprise level solutions to a new client,
follow a similar model already successfully implemented by the same vendor to some other
client. Web 2.0 collaborative tools can be really be helpful in bringing two different teams
separated by time or distance in sharing knowledge more efficiently.
2.) One tool developed by some team for a particular project can out of the way, help another
totally different requirement. Enterprise 2.0 can really smoothen such a collaborative work.
3.) Support to production systems of clients generally have a very tight service level agreement
(SLA requirements), so that the work, goes on, period. A fully fledged interactive platform
based on social media/Enterprise 2.0 setup between the client and vendor can effectively
fasten up the information sharing and percolation process and subsequent timely action,
across geographies and time zones.
2) Developing Creative Services: A lot of Indian companies are trying to be creative service
providers. An example would be Tutor Vista, which uses web 2.0 like services in Skype, Google talk
etc. to provide tutoring over the web. In today‘s flat world, Indian Companies can use their tech savvy
to its advantage by creating interesting new services that can be delivered via low cost web 2.0
technologies over the web. Web 2.0‘s very low to free cost models for services offered will bring in
new businesses out in the open – business that were not given access to delivering and selling
because of high infrastructure costs in the past.
3) Leveraging Community in Solution Building: A lot of the web 2.0 participants are techies who love
solving other people‘s technical problems online especially if they are challenging. Using blogs, wikis
and other web 2.0 sources, engineers working in India can leverage global tech talents in solving
critical technical issues for the client.
4) Create Consumer Driven Cult Following: If you look at the most popular TV shows in America
today, you will get a glimpse of how consumers are true bosses. Most popular shows like American
Idol, So You Think You Can Dance etc. are literally driven by consumer votes. This power harnessed
by the people and not by some buttoned down judge helps create a cult following. For the first
time ever, an un released movie called ―Snakes On a Plane‖ has received mass publicity through
blogs, podcasts etc. all of which were driven by fans (read consumers). Heck they even made
demands through web 2.0 forums on what some dialogues would be in the movie. The production unit
went back and shot scenes as demanded in blogs showing true power in the hands of consumers.
Drawing parallel to it in the tech world, active open communication and mind sharing through blogs, or
managing requirements real time without putting a structural workflow around it can provide you a
pathway to make a true connection with your customers and create a sense of stakeholder
ownership.
5) Being Early Adopters: A lot of the Indian tech Companies have been in business for less
than 10 years. They maintain a dynamic culture, which is willing to try out things. This highly contrasts
some traditional IT shops in American where change is resisted in all possible ways. Industry trends
suggest that web 2.0 s the way of the future. Time will tell if this analysis will hold true. However, if
web 2.0 reigns supreme in the years to come, Indian companies will leap to the forefront of that
movement by being early adopters of web 2.0 technology and fine tuning it to fit their existing
business model. This may be an opportunity for Indian tech companies to be leaders in web 2.0
movement by not only being power users but being lead developers of new tools and content.
Putting It All Together Faster, cheaper and better is the web 2.0 mantra that gets people excited.
However, just like any new trend, there is a lot of buzz around web 2.0, when the reality is that a lot of
the players will get strike out very soon. Besides, the web 2.0 architecture needs some work.
Developers still struggle from switching between API‘s. RSS have competing formats and so on.
Beyond all the hype, the emerging web 2.0 standard, combined with cheap tools, AJAX programming
and open source platform may truly reshape the tech industry of the future. One suggestion for the
Indian tech companies who would want to understand how web 2.0 can benefit their model is to put a
small pilot team in place to start studying what web 2.0 is all about.
Enterprise will have avenues for internal collaboration for faster turn around and higher productivity:
With enterprise 2.0 technology companies can use their intranet to increase confidence level of
employees as it offers a platform for interaction with each other within organisation. It enhances
productivity and helps maximising employee participation and cross team collaboration. Top tech
firms are realising that keeping the new generation glued, they need changes beyond pure salaries,
which is already considered hygiene by new recruits. Let us take one such successful initiative.
Launched around two years ago by Cognizant, the C2 already has around 60,000 active users and
the site records over six million page views every month. (The author was himself an active part of
such an initiative)
From the time a new customer project is kicked off, to when it‘s actually delivered, Cognizant 2.0
glues the entire workflow together, across varied skills, geographies and business units.For Cognizant
as an organisation, the system helps it not only knit the project groups together, but also reduce the
entire time taken to identify who can do a particular project better than the rest.
The system works much like a Google search—Project managers put the skill set required, and the
system throws up different project teams and individuals with prior experience in dealing with such
situations. Some 7,000 projects are already registered in the system, and employees have shared
around 200,000 posts about these projects.
At TCS, the country‘s biggest software exporter, nearly one third of its over 1,50,000-strong workforce
is actively participating in the company‘s social media platforms already. TCS uses wikis, or
personalised, websites that bring together specialised communities, apart from other tools to help its
employees collaborate better. While Justask enables employees to ask questions openly, Ideamax
encourages employees to share their ideas about a particular technology or a process.
Employee Development:
This system will give the senior workforce more chance to network with their younger employees.
Leaders who connect to mentees in an enterprise 2.0 network can stay in touch with them more
easily, understand their strengths and offer them more opportunities. They can mentor on an ambient
level, openly broadcasting their ideas, knowledge and help for mentees or anyone to consider, by
sharing their thoughts on micro-blog systems, and they can receive feedback the same way.
There is no free lunch. Mentees may take to Facebook easily but still find social
networking at workplace awkward. In surveys and interviews of interns and new hires, it is frequently
heard that they don't see the value of that kind of connection in the workplace. But the reasons why lie
less with them than with organizational culture. When you're new to an organization, your relationship
networks are usually limited and have little built-in trust. Millennials who converse freely with their
friends socially are often told at work to stay strictly work-focused. This can limit the depth of their
conversations and keep them from developing trust and extensive networks. Enterprise 2.0 will give
them that one chance to liberation.
Effective Enterprise external communication:
In the era of social networks implementing Enterprise 2.0 will make the organizations much more
transparent and more press or media savvy. The time is going to come when the media as we know it
will be present only on the virtual or web 2.0 based interactive world. Until and unless organizations
fundamentally inculcate a 2.0 based culture, they will be left behind in the times to come.
More collaborative and social networking based Enterprises, will certainly be more open source in
their software requirements. Software which is conceived, written, tested and implemented all at a
community level will form the backbone of a new generation of tools. Enterprise 2.0 will effectively be
a win for the open source movement as well.
Corporate blogging
Like personal blogs, corporate blogs use blogging technology - in this case for leadership messages,
online journals and knowledge-management forums. Google Inc. and Facebook, Inc. pioneered this
practice within their own corporations. Instead of a flashy launch even or a press conference,
corporations have started to use internal and external corporate blogs. Corporate blogs are becoming
a part of the standard set of corporate communication tools and the emerging portfolio of social-media
tools. Features like tags and rating help corporate employees find content and make judgements
about policies or procedures.
Corporate wikis
Corporate wikis provide an easy-to-use environment for subject-matter experts to publish their
interpretation on any subject. A corporate wiki can capture corporate acronyms. Large corporations
create a roll-up wiki so that individual divisions have the flexibility to add items to their wiki and make
a decision on which items should roll up to the corporate level. Wikis, like blogs, provide platforms for
collaborating and communication.
Internal community platforms provide an environment for corporate employees to create a virtual
forum to share their opinions, knowledge and subject-matter expertise on topics of interest. Usually
community platforms centre around a particular topic of interest. Generally [quantify] the community
participates in an unstructured exchange of ideas which could mature given significant interest from
the community.
Idea generation:
Also known as ideation - can involve a structured business methodology for collecting and incubating
innovative ideas that could mature with community participation. Large corporations use idea
management systems to solicit ideas from their customers and employees. Idea generation in some
cases fuels the product pipeline. Enterprise 2.0 will make it much more streamlined.
Government 2.0:
When the concept of Enterprise 2.0 is super-imposed on the functioning of the government we may
dream of getting a collaborative government in which people have their say in its day to day
functioning. This would then be the real decentralization of power and the real democratization of the
masses.
Summary:
Enterprise 2.0 is the use of ‗Web 2.0‘ technologies within an organization to enable or streamline
business processes while enhancing collaboration - connecting people through the use of social-
media tools. Enterprise 2.0 aims to help employees, customers and suppliers collaborate, share, and
organize information the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between
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companies and their partners or customers . The potential usability of an Enterprise 2.0 enabled
system can be simply stated as a knowledge repository which is not a static, dead-end silo, but a
Microsoft-Word-like document in your web browser that allows you real-time access to information in
CRM, your legacy intranet, Microsoft Access (and other databases), LinkedIn, Twitter, Google or
other APIs and more. Its a foregone conclusion that the current enterprise software are bulky,
expensive, insensitive to customer needs and are really hard to maintain. But incorporating Enterprise
2.0 will not only revolutionize their usage, but also make the organizations as a whole, much more
futuristic. Indian IT services companies can greatly benefit from Enterprise 2.0. The immense benefits
in general that will come forth once organizations (and not only software companies) start adapting to
this new concept. The more important of the potential benefits will be: more effective communication
inside and outside the enterprise to various stakeholders, development and mentoring of employees,
Idea generation, Idea collaboration, more effective staffing ,and a farfetched yet realistic idea of more
effective governance and democracy.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_2.0
References:
1.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_2.0
2.) http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-April/000772.html
3.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
4.) http://www.aiim.org/Research/Industry-Watch/Enterprise-20-Agile-Emergent-Integrated
5.) http://cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cb/product/SMR200-PDF-ENG
6.) http://content.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/d/large-business/enterprise-2-0-walks.aspx
7.) http://steveradick.com/2008/10/13/what-makes-government-20-different-from-enterprise-20/
8.) http://andrewmcafee.org/2006/03/the_three_trends_underlying_enterprise_20/
9.) http://www.mindtouch.com/blog/2009/01/30/an-evolution-social-media-web-20-enterprise-20-
enterprise-collaboration-mindtouch/
10.) http://www.instigatorblog.com/enterprise-20-startups-know-your-market/2008/08/21/
11.) http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/11_things_to_know_about_enterprise_20.php
12.) http://www.instigatorblog.com/lessons-learned-running-a-saas-business/2008/03/10/
13.) http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/enterprise20_wave.php
14.) http://www.tcs.com/offerings/enterprise_solutions/rfid/Pages/default.aspx