The Next Enterprise Web

As we are working to bring web 2.0 and the social web deep into our company using social websites, blogs, wiki’s and other hip stuff, it seems that this trend is indeed sticking and bigger companies (enterprises) are also doing this.

At least, that is what a study by Forrester says (Dutch link, sorry). For us that is kind of a *duh*. But apparently not so for for other small companies. Most are doing nothing. Well ; the companies themselves are not; ofcourse their employees are using Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Hyves and others to communicate with everyone, but the companies are not yet going for it.

SaaS providers are taking steps and getting followers ofcourse; take 37signals; they have web 2.0 and social products that are used by a lot of small (and medium sized?) companies.

When this trend continues, I am wondering what enterprises will use. What software will they employ to make this social revolution a reality.

Apparently IBM Lotus Connections is very popular, but there are more players on the market. For instance BEA has a suite of products called Aqualogic Interaction. And there are more, smaller web 2.0 players, and bigger players like Google who are trying to sell SaaS social nets into the enterprise.

Considering the large success of Lotus in this space and the push BEA is trying to make there, it seems that the big ones see at least a bright future there. For installed systems. Within the company.

With the many profiles users already have outside their company and the many pictures, videos, friends etc they have connected to that, is it not time to integrate instead of getting something new and secluded going? If you have Linkedin and Linkedin has an API and offers ‘private’ groups for companies, is it not more logical to offer Linkedin for your employees and integrate, via the API, parts of Linkedin into your enterprise portal?

Ofcourse it is, but most companies, and worse, most IT systems, are not ready for this kind of change. It means giving your entire company employee file to a SaaS provider.

Although there are disadvantages to this though, the future will make many of them moot. For instance the pain of registering at yet another system, making another profile and so on; most of this can be taken away by using OpenID and it’s sistersystems for profiles. More and more companies are supporting their way of working.

Privacy concerns can be more or less taken away by (obviously) being more open, but as that is not an option for most companies, a mix between an internal portal, an extranet and an external community would be mostly perfect. This issue is the strongest and, as the mixing of internal/external communities becomes an important part of a company strategy, I am curious to see how it evolves. We haven’t figured it out for our company yet, but we should soon imho.

The advantages are, on the other hand, quite obvious; information sharing across companies (and even competitors) might seem strange, but, like a Star Trek utopia, it can be done. Another advantage is attracting new employees and also seeing what they are in fact ‘worth’. Hiring good people becomes a lot easier when this person has ratings in LinkedIn, blogs on Blogspot, projects on Sourceforge etc.

Social networks in the enterprise are here to stay, but in what form is worth a lot of discussion. At least it will involve some kind of portal system and standards around such a system, at least that is our firm believe. I am wondering if anyone besides Forrester gave it some thought yet

Personally I never considered MS software to be of enterprise quality. Actually I wouldn’t think anyone in huge companies would be using it. Now that more enterprises open up, I appear to be sadly mistaken.

But why did I even think that? Well, in an enterprise (in any company actually), you want:

• uniformity in applications and uniformity in the controls
• ease of installation
• controllability (who does what when etc with which data on what application)
• security (access, viruses, phishing, hacking etc)
• maintanability (update apps and systems efficiently without possible problems)

etc

For me, the solution for this is very simple; modded Linux, Firefox full screen with NoScript enforced, a few company custom browser plugins and further internal or external web 2.0 apps.

A few years ago this would be laughable (and, for a lot of huge companies it still is), but with online collaboration and communication (gmail, intranets, extranets etc), ERP moving to web apps (SAP, Oracle, but also custom systems we have seen), office moving to the web (Google, Zoho), the barrier becomes quite small to just do the above.

No more DLL hell, difficult upgrades, installing different apps for different people, uniform interfaces, trivial security enforcing (well; you need to deny your employees certain things like trusting flash everywhere) and central storage and provisioning. Computer broken? Plug in a new one, log on and there all your data is back. Want to work at home? Log on (via SSH and some kind of key generator) to the central nexus and there you go; all your data and so on is there. Working at home becomes a breeze.

Ofcourse this is all possible under Windows, but not so easy, not so trivial and well known.

Is there no place for Windows/MS in the enterprise? Sure there is; some financial guys need Excel; there simply are a lot of things the open and online solutions cannot do (properly). Some people need Word because of templates, however most of the latter can be fixed with some simple transformation software and Google docs. But not all. Simply put; for some jobs you need specialized software, but for most you don’t. Most can simply work with a dumbed down Linux (or another OS, even Windows, as long as you cannot run local apps other than the browser).

MS is very stuck to the Desktop metaphor of doing things. They cannot do anything on the web without using some kind of annoying desktop connection (like Sharepoint being annoying to use without Windows/Office).

It still is quite surprising when I see young cool/hip companies using some really stale old crap like MS Exchange and Outlook while you have so many better choices these days, with open standards so you can switch at any time. For enterprises I find it even more difficult to imagine; large companies actually do spend a lot of money on their infrastructure and are able to actually set up something usable for their employees which will save them so much work in maintaining and using. Even to the point you are not maintaining at all anymore with something running in the cloud like Google will offer with Salesforce.

Enterprises are usually very slow, but this blog is about those enterprises and are more agile or enterprises that are becoming more agile through using online systems.

What is the difference between an enterprise and another company, a non-enterprise? You can characterize this by the size of revenue, profit or the company itself. Very large for any of these three would be an enterprise.

These methods of classification are, however, not what this weblog is about. This weblog is about those companies that are very big and can be called enterprises, but act small and very unlike traditional enterprises. They do this by utilizing technology, especially the internet and it’s new techniques to transform their company into something which can be agile like a midsize operation or even a start-up.

When we think of a company making $16 billion dollars revenue a year, we think of a large company, with thousands of people, a lot of red tape, and, usually, an enterprise that cannot get things done on a smaller scale. Like a huge tanker ship, once the company goes in a certain direction it is not possible for it to turn or even easily go a slighty other way.

Most enterprises are like that and you know when you work at one, when:

• … every decision, no matter how small, needs a meeting
• … the company has more managers than qualified personnel
• … everything seems to take an infinite amount of time to get done
• … the company buys products (like software) which costs more than $100.000 but is completely worthless in your eyes

and so on.

While it might not be possible to remove these kinds of things that make your days feel boring and unproductive, it is at least possible to remove the perception they are going on (for the outside and for the inside) and later on move to remove them completely.

As I am a tech guy, I really hate the above even more than other people usually do. And technically, it becomes clear, that fixing the above points can be done by using online software. Reviewing the examples:

• meetings can be handled with chats, collaboration white boards and, simply, email; no more wasting time if people first collaborate on the meeting topic online
• managers are the people who want to have meetings in the first place; it they can work more efficient by not having them, they have more time to manage and not so many are needed
• as decision-making and collaboration move online, all involved persons can access the entire collaboration process and, by using the workflow used by the software, expedite the processes
• with application service providers and online software you pay for usuage and if you don’t like it, you can cancel it and move to another system; open standards help companies doing this faster and faster

This weblog will focus on all the above and more, especially as these changes move across larger companies and enterprises. At Componence we try to work like this and consult our clients to work like this using our and other software. We eat our own dogfood, making working here quite different from other companies.

On average we are a very highly skilled group of people. Even though we have more than a hundred people working for us, we have happy, hardworking employees and most of them are quick learners.

In the Netherlands we can quite easily establish a name as company you want to work for. In other countries (like India, Ukraine etc) it is much more difficult. Let alone in the many other countries we are not yet established. So how do we get those good people and how do we work together with them?

There are many steps and a lot of time involved in getting these people, but it has nothing to do with putting ads on sites or in papers, as 99,99% of all companies do. As we need programmers and tech personnel, we spend more time in forums, chatboxes (IRC) and so on.

Then nowadays programmers have websites and profiles online which often contain code snippets and  even complete open source projects for you to check the quality of the developer.

Depending on the profile, chatting with the person will quickly give you an idea of his or her profile; via the phone or in direct interviews people (especially techies) will close up or have problems being as open as they should be. This goes not only for techies though; everyone is more open on chat, a bit later in the day or even at night.

Talking open, for a few chat sessions will benefit the upcoming interview a lot, for both sides. When hiring a manager abroad, even a few weeks of online communication is beneficial for the relationship in the short and the long term. Although people (apparently) still need face time, the extra information you  collect when meeting them online is extremely helpful.

Other things to check are profiles and information in social networks about the person. Most people, and especially job seeking people, have enormous amounts of personal information online in a number of networks. Hooking up via the networks and then meeting them online a few times helps break the ice.

Not many companies are seeing it, but their most gifted people have more efficient ways of arranging their lives and eventual they will take a good hard look at the company they currently work at and will demand the same efficiency from them.