Social enterprise tools - keep it simple, stupid

Ahead of a roundtable at Salesforce.com's Cloudforce event that I'm taking part in later this week, I was thinking about some of the enterprise collaboration tools I've used in the past.  My previous employer used Lotus Notes and I remember it as an awful system that was clunky, slow, difficult to navigate around and virtually unusable offsite.  I daresay it has improved since those days (I certainly hope so for the sake of its users).  Other intranets and content management systems I've used at other organisations have been equally bad.  

One of the main problems was their complexity and the usability barriers that made it difficult to upload and then find the information you needed to do your job.  One of the reasons that Google has been so successful, apart from the excellent search results it serves up, is its simple interface.  The user has to do the minimum amount of work while the system does the complicated stuff in the background. 

Euan Semple sums it up nicely in this extract from a recent blog post:

"This is for me the biggest difference between truly social tools and many of the enterprise tools that go under that name. Tools that work are simple to use, but have complex and rich effects and require an investment of thought and effort to make them truly effective. Tools that don't work are complicated, difficult to work out but make it easy to write inconsequential flotsam."

Which quadrant is your boss in?

Although the article is rather short (it is an intro to a paid piece from GigaOm) the graphic sums up rather well the state of awareness/competence of enterprise collaboration tools in the workplace.

Enterprise 2.0 - a reality check

Good post by Bryant Duhon on myths and truths of Enterprise 2.0.  He cuts through some of the nonsense that is spoken about the use of social media and collaborative technologies in the workplace.  I particularly liked:

Myth: If you don't get it, you don't get it.
Back to the arrogance thing and thinking of "doing" E2.0 as a panacea. Just because someone is hesitant or just now dipping a toe into the social media waters, doesn't mean they're going to be left in the dust. True, first mover advantage is large, but this stuff is new too.

Worth a read.

Enterprise 2.0 - a view from the frontline

Last week Ulrike Reinhard, publisher of the WhoIs blog, interviewed Lee Bryant from Headshift about the impact that new social networking tools are having on the enterprise.  Headshift is doing a lot of work in this area, helping organisations with the deployment of these tools and seeing the challenges involved as old ways of collaborating, communicating and sharing information meet some of the new ways.  Lee's comments are worth listening to as he is not prone to hyperbole but puts forward some reasoned and sensible suggestions for where the workplace might be heading.  You can watch the video interview (35 minutes) below but some of the main points I've taken from it are:

• Enterprise 2.0/social networking tools have the power to be disruptive to traditional ways of working as they start to enable natural human networks to emerge within organisations that may conflict with the established demarcations of departments;
• Large companies are not going to disappear overnight but those who already have firmly established social values will make the transition to Enterprise 2.0 more easily.  Lee gives the example of Unilever;
• IT departments cannot be expected to do everything in terms of deploying social networking tools.  They should be responsible for the platforms/plumbing but other parts of the business should be able to layer relevant applications on top as and when they are needed;
• Enterprise apps need to be as intuitive and easy to use as iPhone apps;
• The need for communications/PR people will not go away but their role will change from simply pushing out corporate messages to internal and external networking to help information flow.

Enterprise 2.0 - what's really going on?

Thanks to David Tebbutt's tweet (I'm starting to see some value in Twitter) - http://twitter.com/tebbo - for alerting me to Andrew McAfee's new book, Enterprise 2.0.  You can download a free introductory chapter HERE. From the introduction, it looks like an interesting read and McAfee seems to have adopted an initially sceptical attitude to his preliminary research into how companies are using new Web tools.  I agree with him that there has been a lot of hype surrounding Web 2.0 and its applications within business both from vendors and the analysts studying this market.  However, there is something going on here which deserves further research and McAfee's book looks like it might be a good starting point for managers wanting to know more about the collaborative potential of such technologies and services.  I'll post a proper review once I have read the book.  You can find out more about the author from his blog.