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>> Home / Archives for Enterprise

Enterprise 2.0

June 12, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how social media will change the future of work

The title of this book combines two coded terms – Web 2.0 and ‘The Enterprise’ – for which read social media software’ and Big Business. And the purpose is to show how the techniques and concepts behind Web 2.0 applications (blogs, wikis, tagging, RSS, and social bookmarking) can be used to encourage collaboration efforts in what was previously thought of as secretive, competitive businesses.

social mediaIt’s an argument which is fast becoming quite familiar. To succeed in modern business, managers and directors must learn to listen and talk to their customers and staff. They need to be more agile in their thinking, less monolithic in their practices, and they need to catch up to new Internet-based activities which can sweep away unwary traditionalists overnight [look what happened to Encyclopedia Britannica] and create multi-billion pound enterprises almost as quickly [Amazon, Google].

Niall Cook realises that there will be problems and resistance to such suggestions from within orthodox business communities. But he also points to their existing weaknesses.

Companies spend millions of dollars installing information and knowledge management systems, yet still struggle with the most basic challenges of persuading their employees to use them.

Will it be difficult to persuade large organisations to adopt these very democratic tools? He offers case studies from companies such as the BBC, IBM, Microsoft, and BUPA and others to show that it might. He even makes a case for the use of instant messaging and social presence software (MSN and Twitter).

He also has an example of the US Defence Intelligence Agency using mashups to provide simultaneous streams of information through a single interface (because that’s what its users want), and a multinational software company using Facebook as an alternative to its own Intranet (because its employees use it more).

He gives a very convincing example of the creation of a wiki running alongside the company Intranet in a German bank. The IT staff started using the wiki to generate documentation, and within six months use of the Intranet was down 50%, email was down 75%, and meeting times had been cut in half.

In fact he misses the opportunity to point out that one of the biggest incentives for companies to embrace Web 2.0 software is that much of it is completely free. Almost all major programs are now available in Open Source versions – including such fundamentals as operating systems (Linux) content management systems (Joomla) and virtual learning environments (Moodle).

In the UK, government institutions have invested and wasted billions of pounds after being bamboozled by software vendors. In the education sector alone, VLEs such as Blackboard and WebCT have proved costly mistakes for many colleges and universities. They are now locked in to proprietary systems, whilst OSS programs such as Moodle run rings round them – and are free.

Is the embracing of social software solutions likely to take place any time soon? Well, Cook has some interesting answers. His argument is that these developments are already taking place. Smart companies will catch on, and obstructors will fall behind with no competitive edge.

Bear in mind that within just five years, members of the MySpace generation are going to be entering the workforce, bringing their collaborative tools with them. If you don’t have the software that allows them to search, link, author, tag, mashup, and subscribe to business information in the ways they want to, they are going to do one of three things: use third party software that does; leave to join a competitor that does; not want to work for you in the first place.

Even the software solutions in this radical, indeed revolutionary development, must be fast, light, and quick to implement.

Speed and flexibility. Oracle’s IdeaFactory took just a few days to build. Janssen-Cilag’s wiki-based Intranet was purchased, customised, and launched within two weeks.

This is all part of what Peter Merholz in his recent Subject to Change calls agile technology. Cook provides strategies for those who wish to implement these ideas within their own company – and it has to be said that he assumes a certain degree of subversiveness might be necessary.

The book ends with a review of the literature on social software and a comprehensive bibliography – so anyone who wants to pursue these matters at a theoretical level has all the tools to do so. But I suspect that anybody who is taken with these new ideas – if they have any blood in their veins – will immediately want to go away and put them into practice.

This is a truly inspirational book which should be required reading for managers, IT leaders, systems analysts, developers, and business strategists in any enterprise, small, medium, and especially large. I can think of two organisations I am working with right now (one a university, the other a large city college) who ought to be implementing these ideas but who are doing just the contrary – stifling innovation. One, following its culture of ‘no change’ has just been swallowed up by its rival. The other is running onto the financial rocks precisely because it refuses to learn from its users and its own staff – whilst claiming to do just the opposite.

© Roy Johnson 2008

Enterprise 2.0   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Enterprise 2.0   Buy the book at Amazon US


Niall Cook, Enterprise 2.0: how social software will change the future of work, London: Gower, 2008, pp.164, ISBN: 0566088002


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Filed Under: e-Commerce Tagged With: e-Commerce, Enterprise, Media, Social media, Technology

Go It Alone!

May 31, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the streetwise secrets of self-employment

I bought this book on the strength of enthusiastic reader reviews at Amazon – and I was right to do so! It’s written as a guide and confidence-booster for those people who have decided to start their own businesses and embrace self-employment. It’s written in a lively, fast-paced style which makes for entertaining reading and what I liked was that Geoff Burch makes important distinctions between essentials. Being successful doesn’t necessarily mean making lots of money or creating a huge business empire. It might mean working for a couple of days a week, then having the rest of the time off for gardening, family, or golf – whatever takes your fancy. In other words success is not always equal to wealth. There are other ways of defining it.

Go It Alone!And without being naively optimistic, he points out both the advantages of being self-employed and the many opportunities which exist to create your own work. Surrounded as we are by universally bad service, all the new entrepreneur has to do is offer prompt and good quality service with a smile, and he’ll put the old traders under pressure. This is something the eBay and Amazon traders are doing right now. Take the order, send a confirming email within minutes, and get the goods into the next post in a padded bag.

He also explains those small-but-important issues which most business self-help guides would not think to cover. Where do you meet clients for business meetings when your office is in your back-bedroom? What do you say when the bank tries to force you to open a business instead of a personal account? What title do you give yourself and think of yourself as, when your duties run from executive decision-making down to taking letters to the local post office?

He comes up with all sorts of practical, matter-of-fact advice for anybody planning to start up their own business – much of it common sense, but only if you have the benefit of experience. You don’t need an ‘office’; you probably don’t need lots of equipment such as printers and fax machines, and office furniture. You shouldn’t take out bank loans, and you should never mortgage your house. If you want to survive as a self-employed guerilla, the secret is “Travel light, live off the land, and strike from the shadows”

  • Don’t recreate your old working environment. The last thing you will need is a hat stand.
  • Develop the virtual office, the virtual car, and virtually anything else you need.
  • Don’t let your clients know that you are enjoying yourself. It might make them jealous.

This not just for those who want to set up their own businesses. It’s for people who are about to be made redundant; people who face early retirement; people who want a part-time job; and people who are already self-employed but who want to feel more confident and hold their heads up high.

I wish I had read this book ten years ago when I first set up my own company. I might not be any richer today, but I know I would have felt more confident that I was doing the right thing – and more importantly, going about it in the right way.

© Roy Johnson 2000

Go It Alone!   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Go It Alone!   Buy the book at Amazon US


Geoff Burch, Go It Alone!, London: Harper-Collins, 1997, pp.203, ISBN: 0722534604


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Filed Under: e-Commerce, Lifestyle Tagged With: Business, e-Commerce, Enterprise, Home business, Home office, Lifestyle

Web 2.0 – A Strategy Guide

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

successful Web 2.0 implementations

People who read Chris Anderson’s enormously influential The Long Tail will know that Web 2.0 has revolutionised eCommerce. Companies make more money by lowering their prices; they get rich by giving things away free of charge; and they invite their competitors to share information for mutual benefit. What is Web 2.0 exactly? And how does all this work? Well – Web 2.0 is the latest manifestation of web applications which allow its users to upload information and interact with each other, as well as downloading it, which we did with Web 1.0. And it is a technology which builds on economies of scale.

Web 2.0 - A Strategy GuideIf your web site makes 1% profit from 250,000 visitors a week, imagine what happens if you start giving things away and get a million visitors. The chances are your profits will increase by 400%. Amy Shuen’s new book examines this phenomenon from a business point of view. She presents a series of case studies which illustrate the novel forces at work – and you don’t need to know the technical details of modern Internet technology to understand how it all operates.

Flickr, for instance, the photo-sharing service, rapidly generated a user base of two million users who uploaded 100 million photos. The setup costs for this business were very low (no shop, no physical stock) the service was free (Flickr made money from its premium services) and the customers were not only providing the inventory free of charge, but giving it added value by tagging the photos. Flickr was eventually bought by Yahoo! for $40 million, and it continues to prosper.

Shuen also draws on the strategic lessons from these entrepreneurial success stories. It doesn’t matter if you are a big time Web business or just running a one-person site, she asks “Do you allow your visitors to participate in your site? Can they share their own questions and ideas there?”

She has a chapter on Google that provides an interesting example of what’s called a ‘tippy market’. That’s when a company corners a certain percentage of the market which proves fatal for the competition. (The VHS/Betamax rivalry was a case in point). To reach this point Google paid a lot of money to AOL, but it tipped them over in active users to become the dominant search engine – a position which still holds today.

Next she looks at the social networking sites and explains how they establish their phenomenal growth rates. They all have features in common: they’re free; they grow by one subscriber recommending to friends; and as soon as they reach the tipping point they can generate huge incomes from advertising and selling web services. I also noticed that they tend to identify niche markets. Facebook is largely for college graduates keeping in touch; MySpace is for bands and artists publicising their work; and LinkedIn is for business people who want to find useful contacts.

Finally, she offers a five step approach to using Web 2.0 strategic thinking on your own business. This means applying the principles, rather than spending a fortune on complex software. She reminds us that a single extra line at the end of each Hotmail message – “Get your free email at http://www.hotmail.com” – was enough to give them a huge success in viral marketing.

And if all that’s not enough, she also provides two comprehensive bibliographies which list the key texts and resources – including papers from the Harvard Business School, where they practice Web 2.0 strategies by putting all their published research papers online at prices anybody can afford.

© Roy Johnson 2008

Web 2.0   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Web 2.0   Buy the book at Amazon US


Amy Shuen, Web 2.0 – A Strategy Guide, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2008, pp.243, ISBN: 0596529961


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Filed Under: e-Commerce Tagged With: eCommerce, Enterprise, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 - A Strategy Guide, Web design

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