When online communities go to work
While the debate continues on about whether consumer social networking is an effective model for how we should run our organizations in the future, one under-appreciated online phenomenon is quietly and steadily remaking the very notion of business itself.
The world of online communities has evolved with social computing to become one of the most powerful new models for getting work done. Read my exploration of “When online communities go to work.”
The Facebook imperative for enterprise software
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, the well-known CRM and cloud computing company (and now soon-to-be social software vendor) wrote a guest post on TechCrunch late last week making the case for “why enterprise software should take its cues from Facebook and become more social.”
What then does this mean for the future of IT and what impacts will social computing ultimately have on the enterprise.
Making government more open and social
Can social tools and community-based approaches truly help our government function better and operate more efficiently? Will open access to government data create important new opportunities for citizens and increase transparency? As we’ll see, these two questions are currently top-of-mind in many public sector policy discussions this year. The questions also herald underlying forces at work in the government landscape in many countries around the world, including the United states.
Here are some of the initiatives that are taking place this year and what’s happening with Government 2.0 as 2010 begins to heat up.
Ten emerging Enterprise 2.0 technologies to watch
Two significant and closely related trends in enterprise computing this year are the growth of Software-as-a-service (SaaS) and social computing. By most accounts, both are gaining ground fairly rapidly while still not being used for core business functions or mission critical applications in most large firms, at least not yet.
Here’s a breakdown of what Enterprise 2.0 technologies and products to watch this year.
SAP’s 12Sprints joins the social enterprise bandwagon
I spent some time this morning working with SAP’s new 12Sprints collaboration service, which was announced earlier this week. Available free in open beta immediately, it’s a cloud-based service that’s a cross between Basecamp and Google Wave and is ostensibly designed for team collaboration. Not incidentally, 12Sprints is also clearly a social application and it includes viral invitation, extensive commenting and discussion capabilities, and interesting new twists on measuring community opinion such as real time consensus tracking. Here’s my analysis and breakdown.
The app store: The new “must-have” digital business model
Amazon announced today that it was opening up its Kindle reader device to 3rd party applications to be distributed later this year in the Kindle Store.
This news was just one more in a string of announcements from platform vendors large and small that they’re getting the message: The app store model that Apple has proved so successfully with the iPhone is becoming the next frontier when it comes to next-generation software distribution that creates clear value for both customers and companies alike.
What will then mean for software distribution models of the future? You can bet they will look a lot like the Apple App Store…
The social Web in 2010: The emerging standards and technologies to watch
The emergence of Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the social Web as a global force in the last several years has done a great deal to highlight their potential to fundamentally alter the way we communicate and collaborate both at home and in business. However, despite the movement of social computing into our daily lives we’re all clearly on a long journey together as the technologies themselves emerge from infancy.
The state-of-the-art today when it comes to the social computing environments that surround us now — in our browsers, mobile devices, and elsewhere — underscore how much more we have left to do to make these new modes of digital conversation and discourse become mature, efficient, safe, and truly useful.
Fortunately the Web doesn’t stand still and there continues continues to be rapid research and development when it comes to the mechanics of today’s online social universe. There are many new efforts under way to refine and improve the world of social media, some of which we’ll explore here and many which are just beginning…
Fixing IT in the cloud computing era
The reality of cloud computing as it exists today already offers significant potential to IT departments that want to cut costs, lighten their infrastructure footprint, and adopt agile new technologies. Whether it’s private clouds or public ones, all signs point towards it being one of the top new approaches for enterprise IT for 2010. It’s [...]
ZDNet’s Enterprise Web 2.0: The top 10 posts of 2009
As we get ready to enter the final year of the decade, here’s a round-up of what you found interesting here on Enterprise Web 2.0 based on actual readership. We’ll see what the new year brings us but 2009 was full of notable developments that will have a lasting impact to way we using technology [...]
What will power next-generation businesses?
The ongoing and seemingly inexorable decline of traditional media continues to be the canonical example of what happens when the ground rules get changed in an industry that is fundamentally unable to adapt to new market conditions. A great analysis recently posted by Umair Haque at Harvard Business underscores the point: The so-called new normal is starting to seem more and more foreign the deeper we go into the 21st century than most organizations may yet be willing to believe.
Here’s an exploration of what will likely drive forward next-generation businesses in the 21st century.
