
Enterprise 2.0 and improved business performance
There’s been some useful and interesting discussion in the blogosphere recently about collaborative social tools and their potential to improve business performance. Especially good takes have come from Hutch Carpenter, Sameer Patel, Ross Dawson, and ZDNet’s own Dennis Howlett.
At the core of this discussion is this essential question: Can social tools reach the “hard numbers” part of a business enough to make a real difference?

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.”

Webciety and Enterprise 2.0: A snapshot of today’s social computing conversations
Though smaller than in year’s past, Germany’s CeBIT trade show in Hanover this week remains one of the giants of the industry and is a must-attend event for much of Europe’s technology leaders. For the last two years, I have been participating in Webciety, a show within a show that explores the emerging 21st century digital lifestyle.
Here is a breakdown of how Europe is looking at Enterprise 2.0 adoption and how it affects us as well.

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.

Social CRM: Ground zero for Enterprise 2.0 in 2010
There’s been some debate recently on whether Social CRM is part of the broader Enterprise 2.0 story. I try to answer the question and explore some of the latest thinking on social business and how it can help transform the customer relationship for real competitive advantage.

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 […]