Quite Simply the Best Customer Experience I’ve ever had (Apple /

I finally joined the ranks of other recently-new-Apple-users (RNAU’s) today and bought a new iPhone 3G S. I’ve never much cared for the hipster company before, but I just couldn’t resist the allure of the new iPhone with video. What struck me today as important though was not the cool new phone but the customer experience. Starting with the first interaction with Apple on their website and ending with a paperless receipt, the process was smooth and stress free.

Throughout the process I was stunned by how at each step of the way the right answer or information was given to me before I had to ask. It was almost as if they were reading my mind. Knowing Apple the corporation as I do (I did some work for them at A.T. Kearney), they probably have customer service experts break down the entire buying experience into detailed actions, then optimize them for maximum customer satisfaction using interactive focus groups. Meanwhile, someone at Apple is managing the entire process to make sure that end-to-end the process is efficient and hassle-free.

Being inquisitive, I asked my one-to-one in-store counselor what training they received as part of their on-boarding process. He told me that they spend a weekend learning about Apple, participate in daily coaching, and have weekly product training courses. I am fairly certain Apple has profiled the ideal retail associate and look for those characteristics in their new hires. Starbucks is another company I know that does this type of profiling.

After this “WOW” experience I began to think about how the encounter with Apple can be translated into developing a similar experience for online technology companies. First of all, every individual brings a series of expectations to each encounter. You may or may not be cognizant of those expectations. Whether they are specific or general, distinct or nebulous our experiences are shaped by our past interactions. Nevertheless, every prospective client approaches every experience with some level of expectation. It’s just the way the human mind works.

Using Apple as an example, how do they exceed expectations and how can an online technology company learn from it. Let’s assume your company’s prospect has already decided to purchase your product or service:

Apple Step	Your Company’s Related Step
Log onto Apple’s home page - 3 quick clicks and you’re at an inviting buy it now page.	Log into your well designed site and in less than 3 clicks have your prospect at a clean, well designed sign up (buy it now, download, etc) page
Since AT&T has integrated their sign up process with Apple, I am asked whether I am an existing customer of AT&T. I select “no”.	You’ve incorporated all third party applications or product add-ons into this page so that your customer can quickly choose what options they want a la carte.
I then am taken to a billing information screen for AT&T which I quickly fill out (I do believe this screen could be made more efficient by using Facebook Connect or some other log-in system).	You’ve incorporated Open ID, Facebook Connect or an easy to fill out form so that all of the necessary personal information is filled out one time.
I am then presented with 4 easy options to select my rate plan. I select “unlimited minutes”.	Your customer is then presented with no more than 5 customization options for your product or service. Make the options clear and concise.
I arrive at the Store at the designated time and a greeter is there to meet me. The sales counselor warmly greets me and somehow realizes I am there to pick up my phone. I wonder, ‘How did he know that?’ He says, “It is so nice to meet you let me tell you about your phone. “	The product/service/solution (P/S/S) is given to the customer at the designated time with a friendly set of instructions about what to do next. The instructions have been so well thought out that they are concise and practically read the customer’s mind. You have anticipated the top 5 questions your customers have at this stage because you’ve conducted focus groups.
He then hands me a small box containing the iPhone unseals it and sets it up in minutes.	The P/S/S has been preconfigured and is ready to be used out of the box.
He asks if I am satisfied with the phone and I reply “yes” and then asks how I want to pay for the phone. I respond “credit card”.	A customer service representative calls, emails or is immediately available for a chat on the day they receive the P/S/S to ensure that they are completely satisfied with their purchase.
No need to see a cashier, he swipes my card there on the spot. Within two minutes, the transaction is complete and he’s emailed the receipt to my email address.	On a pre-designated schedule, your customer is given educational information via email about the P/S/S. You are not selling but informing. Your goal is to get your customer to maximize the value they receive from your P/S/S.
Before I leave, he explains that as an Apple customer I now have free access to the Genius Bar in the back of the store for any technology related questions. He also inquires about the App Store and iTunes to make sure I have an account. I respond that “I do”.	After 60 days, you receive feedback from the customer’s experience with the P/S/S and you enthusiastically incorporate that information into a database. You’ll rigorously use this information to better the P/S/S and overall customer experience.
As I leave the store, he says, “It was good to meet you, Mr. Fidelman I look forward to seeing you later.”	You continue to train and educate anyone or anything involved with touching the customer to maximize the customer experience. Your employee on-boarding process emphasizes this philosophy.

Above is of course a general example. I believe it demonstrates how you can transform the average experience into a “WOW” experience. If you think about it, contemplating every detail of a process for maximum customer satisfaction can really be applied to anything—a romantic date, teaching an arcane school subject, a 4 year-olds birthday party, or even a trip to the DMV. Okay scratch the last one, sorry I got carried away.

Not everything in life needs to be WOW (that’s a lot of planning, research and focus groups), but when your purpose is to impress your spouse, customer, stranger etc. why settle for anything less than WOW? You’ll stand out like Apple and become a company/person that everyone wants to be associated with.

How to Implement a Best in Class Intranet 2.0 Site

The days of static, outdated content on your Intranet are over. There are a myriad of vendors that provide solutions but only a handful that are next generation. While Sharepoint leads the pack, the tool is locked into an outdated platform which limits its Web 2.0 features. Companies like Jive, MindTouch and ThoughtFarmer don’t have legacy software to maintain and thus have been built to incorporate more Web 2.0 features. The trick for these vendors is to build Web 2.0 applications that work within the enterprise.

Today’s corporate intranets are typically an employee directory, some corporate related documents and a few messages from the CEO without any ability to update or refresh the content unless IT got involved. Worse, IT was usually devoted to running mission critical applications with little regard to the Intranet. Fortunately, many CIO’s are looking to bring Web 2.0 tools into the organization because employees have either brought them inside the firewall already or they have been demanding them en masse. There are still governance and security challenges, but these are in theory being addressed.

First Step: Organize the Intranet Team

Executive sponsorship is important and critical to the success of your new Intranet. Select an Executive that is empowered and committed to the success of the program. Ideally you’ll also have one team leader from each department and a project manager in charge of the implementation. Each team lead will define the departmental goals and the timeline in which they need to be implemented. Don’t underestimate this task as it can be daunting. I’ve seen many intranets derailed due to infighting or scope creep. Keep the discussions high level while explaining to the team that they will have many chances to refine and change their team sites.

Second: Conduct an Internal Survey

It’s important to understand how the current intranet is being used. If you don’t have one, conduct a survey that asks employees what they would like to see in their new intranet. Based on the survey results you’ll see where the gaps are and what additional resources, experience and investment you’ll need to complete the implementation. Unless your company employees have been surveyed 50 times in the past 30 days, most will enthusiastically share their input. I have used tools like SurveyMonkey.com, Limeshare.com and Vertical Response to conduct the surveys each have their strengths and weaknesses.

Third: Conduct a Needs Analysis

In order for your Intranet to incorporate some of the latest technologies, you’ll need to talk with your front line younger employees that are plugged into today’s Web 2.0 tools. Your mission because you’ve chosen to accept it, is to translate the social Web 2.0 technologies into business technologies that help create a Collaborative Intranet site. Your team leaders should also have given you a more refined internal “statement of work” that outlines the needs of their department. The statement of work will also include an Intranet philosophy about how the intranet will be seeded, maintained and cultivated. Too often, and because of the unique characteristics of Intranet 2.0, the content becomes unmanageable and unproductive.

Once you’ve worked through each department objectives and somehow managed to create an overall plan (this is a difficult task by any measure) then the search for vendors begins. Don’t think an in-house system can be built and maintained unless you’re an Intranet 2.0 vendor, the industry is moving too fast and it’s not your core competency right?

Fourth: Measure, Monitor and Dashboards

One of the primary characteristics of an Intranet 2.0 solution is the ability to apply metrics to projects, tasks, content, and etcetera and monitor them over time. The best solutions use Dashboards and reporting tools that give you real time updates on the metrics. This allow the entire organization to view the health of their department or if you are an Executive the capability of viewing the metrics across departments. As a result, the enterprise is nimbler and is much more competitive.

Fifth: Governance and Security

According to AIIM, one of the primary complaints about Sharepoint is that their governance and security infrastructure needs a lot of work; “successful users of Sharepoint do not view security and custom development and integration as among the product’s strengths, and say the latter two can also cause delayed implementations and cost overruns”. Not to pick on Sharepoint (but I am due to their industry leading position), this should be a higher level priority for you and Microsoft.

You need to develop crystal clear guidelines for who gets to see what and how they see it. You don’t want Johnny Hacker in IT looking at company sales data then acting on that information in the public markets. You also want to conform to Sarbanes Oxley and ensure you’re following their strict guidelines. Best in class Intranet solutions have easy to map governance tools and have tight security around sensitive data. Johnny should not be able to exploit product holes in order to extract sensitive information.

Sixth: Data Integration and Collaboration

Now that you defined what you are going to measure and have implemented security and governance protocols, it’s time to integrate data from around the enterprise. I often hear executives groan at this step as it’s always been difficult in the past. Yet the new solutions being offered today make it easier to not only integrate data, but allow teams to collaborate around the data in real time.

Sales, Marketing, Operations, and R&D can now collaborate around data coming from each department to define the next generation product or service offering. For example, if my sales are off for the latest widget, lead generation reveals a significant drop off during the past 3 months, and the Operations team is reporting an increased inventory build, the departments can examine the data collaboratively to help R&D design Widget 2.0 In the past, this information was difficult to get in one location and was almost always out of date.

Seventh: Create an Intranet Site Map Draft

This step displays the overall architecture of the site. Mapping the site gives the Intranet team perspective and an overall view of the layout, database connections, and governance. In this step you are confirming the structure is accurate and that nothing has been left out. However, it’s still a draft and will be updated after the next step.

Eighth: Issue an RFP

Take all of the hard work you’ve done above and break it into a set of RFP questions. Also, make sure you’ve captured the high level Intranet goals of the organization and that it’s clearly articulated in the Executive summary. Identify the list of vendors and then issue the RFP. There’s a whole science to the RFP process, but essentially it boils down to how well the vendors match your needs, how viable they are as an organization, the total cost of ownership, and how strong their references are (yes you must check).

Ninth: Select and Implement

Ideally you have selected a vendor that met most of your high priority requirements. Break the implementation into phases and milestones. Best practices dictate that you set up an internal governance committee to monitor the implementation of the Intranet. This can be the same group as in step one or a new group empowered to oversee the project. The key focus areas in this step are to ensure the right people are helping to implement the solution, that they are ready to resolve the inevitable issues that will surface, and that they assign the right resources to accomplish the milestones set out in each phase. This group should also be responsible for selecting the content that will populate the initial intranet solution.

Tenth: Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

Too often this step is forgotten and never performed. Yet it’s a critical component to a successful implementation. In reality, communication should take place at every step in the form of updates via email or on a corporate wiki. Each team member should be responsible for updating their team or division. The point here is that by communicating the goals of the Intranet and preparing the organization for its eventually use, there will be less resistance to using it.

In the past, I had one of my staff send weekly updates with screen shots to show progress. I got the idea from a previous career in real estate development where we sent weekly snap shots of the client’s building being developed. It was well received in both cases. Finally, you must have an Intranet launch plan that is well communicated internally. A process should be laid out with specific internal marketing tasks that encourage employees to sign on and start adding content to the Intranet. After all Intranet 2.0 is about employee empowered intranets.

In Summary: It’s a Journey not an End

Consider an Intranet 2.0 undertaking as an journey and not an one-time implementation – I can assure you that you won’t succeed on your first attempt. You'll need to continue to receive feedback, modify the site based on input, track and measure the adoption rates in order to maintain the site. Having the appropriate metrics in place to gauge success is important.

When you initially create your Intranet 2.0 plan, I recommend that you set aside 2 full days with the team to do so. It’s not the documentation that takes this long. It’s the strategy. In fact, this is the most important aspect of developing an Intranet 2.0 blueprint; thinking long and hard about how the Intranet will be used and where it is going.

If Two Google Waves Collide What Happens?

So I finally watched the Google Wave video and came away quite impressed. The concept is essentially the mash up of email, wiki’s and instant messaging into one real-time application. It should replace consumer email as the de-facto standard in a few years but it will take much more to crack the enterprise. The Google team used enterprise examples throughout the presentation, but it’s not ready for the enterprise and here’s why.

First and most importantly, security and governance was either completely left out or is non-existent. The ability to post a wave (essentially an intelligent page that exists wherever you place it) on any internal or external site will automatically eliminate it from most of the Global 3000. No business minded professional is going to allow a wave outlining the latest company project to be posted on the Huffington Post. It’s a huge security issue (can you say Sarbanes Oxley) and one that needs to be addressed.

Second, similar to an ocean of activity - how will each of the waves be tracked and managed? There don’t appear to be any reporting features on Waves, so a business manager will need to open each Wave to track the results or understand what business issues were addressed. The enterprise can create Waves, but how do we learn from the Waves? How do we share those learnings with the rest of the corporation?

Third, the ability to integrate waves with enterprise data is important. Waves will produce a much higher ROI if they allow users to collaborate around business data that helps business managers make decisions. For example, if I could pull in data from my CRM system that illustrates the sales results of a marketing campaign run in Europe; then get a US team to start a wave with the European team to better understand how they achieved the results. That scenario is much more beneficial to the enterprise and will achieve quick ROI.

Lastly, what are the ramifications of having two Google Waves with similar subjects and content? It wasn’t clear whether I could combine the waves or cut and paste from one wave to the other. I would not want to recreate the content from Wave A to Wave B especially if they had different team members. Why is this important? Ostensibly Enterprise Waves allow collaboration around business issues. Losing part of the content or having disjointed Waves disrupts the collaboration process which leads to sub-optimal results. Seems petty on the surface but when taken at an aggregate level it could have high impact.

Since Google Wave is open source, some enterprising company can and will fill these gaps. For now, Google Wave appears to be a consumer tool with limited enterprise appeal.

Do you agree or disagree with above, have comments, please chime in.

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Government Dashboards as Transparency Strategy

I was surprised to find America’s new CIO Vivek Kundra pushing the concept of dashboards. First, although ostensibly a goal for any politician, the subject of transparency and projects usually is met with good lip service but no follow through. Kundra’s initiative is a big idea and one that should be implemented. He’s a little behind the Collaborative Networking times however as the initiative should combine dashboards with collaboration. In fact a Collaborative Dashboard that allows your average Joe the Plumber to discuss the dashboard indicators and draw conclusions from them.

“For each project, it will show the purpose, schedule and budget. It will show the name and photo of the federal official responsible and the names of which contractors are working on the project, a fact that Mr. Kundra says oddly has not been made public before.” Not oddly as he well knows, who in government wants their bureaucratic, over budget, and year’s late project known to the masses? Can you imagine how bad the dashboards would have been for the Big Dig in Boston?

“Another measure Mr. Kundra wants the public to see on these dashboards is a bit of bureaucratic sleight of hand known as “rebaselining.” That’s when the start data of a project is retroactively moved forward to make it look less late.” There we have it. He’s touched on one of the issues. There are of course many more but that is not the focus of this article.

So why Dashboards for Government? It’s about government accountability, it helps us understand where our tax dollars are wasted and it’s about quickly viewing progress on a project without diving into the minutia. No one outside of special interests groups has time to monitor each and every pork barrel project in existence. Yet if the data was provided in graphical form and better if feeds of project data were available for enterprising entrepreneurs to analyze, we could then see individuals and businesses create tools to help reduce government project inefficiencies, costs and time overruns.

It’s quite early, and we have limited information on this dashboard initiative. But I thought it’d be interesting to consider Government Collaborative Dashboards and the potential positive impact. Collaborating wiki style around dashboards allows the voice of the citizen to be heard.

A few points and predictions:

• Collaborative Dashboards will hold public officials accountable for results which will increase tax dollar ROI. Corporations have been using dashboards for years. If you’re a public official in charge of a $2 billion project, you should be measured publically. Yes the public pressure to succeed is increased, but imagine how innovative that official becomes once his results are public.
• New groups of citizens will demand to control the metrics of these Collaborative Dashboards. Dashboards are important but only if you are measuring the right things. If you allow the public official or his committee to set the metrics, you’ll see wide-scale gaming.
• Collaborative Dashboards will engage more citizens in the development of our country. Currently, it’s too hard to track all of the projects locally much less nationally. Dashboards allow anyone the ability to quickly check status on a portfolio of government projects they have interest in. Moreover, it allows citizens the ability to discuss and share insights about the indicators.

Government projects are a broad area, too broad to analyze well in a post. Which brings me to an important point; Dashboards won’t replace effective selection and funding of these projects. They won’t stop the bridges to nowhere but may help reduce the number of pork projects in the future.

I’ll be watching developments around this initiative. How about you?

Mapping 2.0 – For the Enterprise?

 

I recently read an Economist Article discussing how the latest generations of maps are helping to pinpoint geo-related business and social issues.  They go into some detail around some of the issues the new maps are illustrating, but leave out the details.  In my own experience, law enforcement is using maps to help with identifying hot crime areas and to manage patrol operations.  The maps helped them decide where to place patrols and how they were generally doing over time to diminish crime.  Yet the maps were static and always 6 months behind.  What they needed were maps that updated themselves every day to track mini-trends and to give real time feedback. 

This got me thinking about how the next generation of maps can help the Enterprise and Collaborative teams.  I’ve attempted and failed in the past to develop geo-coded maps about our customers and partners buying habits.  This was 5 years ago, so either the technology was too embryonic or I didn’t provide a clear scope to the IT organization.   I still believe the idea is sound.

Next generation mapping tools can be used in combination with Intranet based information sources to give Executives a clearer picture of key hot spots.  For example, if I were looking to map conversations with internal collaborative teams around topics like top tier suppliers I could begin to plot where in the organization we interact with them the most.  Why is that important?  Well, corporations are constantly trying to cut costs and increase efficiency with their suppliers and mapping the conversations would help identify areas of focus.  This of course is not geo-maps but internal maps of departments and project teams. 

Using mapping tools with time-lapse capabilities like Open Street can help map external policy changes or initiatives and how they are affecting the enterprise or its customers.  For instance, geo-tagging the new marketing initiative on an outbound html campaign can help determine whether the new Unilever soap is going to be purchased in the UK or in India (or both).   When the recipient opens the email it automatically adds a point to our map which begins to identify hot spots.  Once the hot spots are determined, Unilever can focus additional localized advertising in those areas or even test the soap in local stores. 

There appears to be many applications for Enterprise Maps, I am certain we are just starting to navigate into the terrain.     

 

Collaborative Networks and Enterprise Chat

I was having an interesting discussion with Hal Wendel CEO of Fididel when the subject of Collaborative Networks came up. Hal has focused his company on helping Auto Dealers sell more cars by engaging the customer on their own websites. A discussion ensued where we talked about the various problems inherent in larger companies where chat may help. After throwing around some ideas, it became clear the opportunity is with engaging internal and external customers.

Chat is already used with external customers, but I haven’t seen it used internally. The ability to engage your internal customers, categorize the issues and then provide a constantly refreshing FAQ seems powerful to me. Additionally, the ability to mine that data and extract corporate information that can be used in improving internal performance, increasing efficiency, and surfacing new revenue generation ideas are incredibly compelling.

I like specifics however and not fluffy ideas without further thought. So for example - an internal customer service team that is exclusively tasked with helping new employees with the on-boarding process. Countless days and weeks are lost when new employees can’t get up to speed quickly due to the inability to find documents, people and training materials necessary to do their job. If an Enterprise Chat were enabled, these employees would be able to quickly engage with internal staff to compress the on-boarding time which means quicker time to productivity.

Another example related to revenue generation. Picture a chat team whose sole purpose is to help teams and groups of people get projects done faster. As employees are interacting with the chat team ideas emerge that are aggregated and categorized. These ideas are presented to management through Idea dashboards which highlight the top trends and thought analysis for further action. So if Proctor & Gamble found that as teams are completing their current product plans - new product ideas emerge for next year and/or new product launch efficiencies are discovered one can imagine the positive impact on revenue.

Chat makes these discoveries more likely to occur because project team members are not used to constantly updating a project page or sending email updates on a daily basis. However, if proactive chat were enabled ostensibly to help team members with expediting the completion of tasks, the chat team could be pulling additional information from team members to help with idea creation and project efficiencies goals. This information would then be automatically mined, categorized and dashboarded for decision makers to act on.

This is a potent concept in theory. Making it reality is something Fididel will have to figure out.

Sharepoint, Confluence, MindTouch who is best?

Chris Woodill who writes a Diary of an IT Innovator created a comparison matrix that I found enlightening. Since he’s personally implemented both technologies it was interesting to see the differences between the two technologies side by side. Personally and in my experience, at its core Sharepoint is more of a document management system with bolt on applications that make the entire system difficult to use and not seamless. Confluence is very good Wiki that’s easy to use and deploy.

Chris’s pricing model for Sharepoint seems low in my experience, but that depends on many factors we can’t cover here. A good tool I have used in the past is the Bamboo Sharepoint calculator which in my opinion gives a far more accurate picture of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

The Wiki in Sharepoint is terrible and should be replaced with tools like MindTouch 2009, Social Text or even Confluence. I disagree with Chris’s assessment here. The Sharepoint Wiki is weak and does not have a lot of functionality.

Chris writes, “Comparing the two products is a bit of an apples to orange comparison because the markets for each are quite different. Confluence is primarily a collaboration tool for small to medium size enterprises. SharePoint is an enterprise portal that includes collaboration but also dozens of other portal features.” I couldn’t agree more here, but must emphasize that Sharepoint is more analogous to an enterprise platform for a variety of use cases where Confluence is a specific point application for Wiki collaboration.

Bottom line, Sharepoint is extremely difficult to set up and use at the enterprise level. They have traction because they are Microsoft and have a very impressive partner channel. Confluence is a very easy to use tool and is a valuable collaboration tool. Use Confluence for your Wiki, Sharepoint for enterprise document management (if you have a large IT staff) and MindTouch for Collaborative Networking.

The Future of Open Source Companies

I just read a great article on the Economist titled “Born Free” which discusses how Open Source companies are still growing despite the recession. “Budgets are tight and we think that is good for open source,” said Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat’s boss. I have to agree, the low price point of the typical open source solution combined with most if not all of the functionality makes open source compelling. The issue still remains however of the perception of open source as a serious business tool. Most Execs I know will not rely on using open source for mission critical applications (Linux is the exception). Whether the new generation of open source companies is yet to be proven or there is a software prejudice against the open source model, most C-level Execs won’t consider open source applications at the enterprise level.

Yet some have started to test the waters with SugarCRM, Alfresco, Zenoss and other open source companies and have had good success. Better, some of the open source companies are starting to lead the way by creating innovative solutions that outpace their proprietary competitors. The model should produce many more innovative solutions given the very fact that it’s open and available to anyone that wants to build on it. In the future, you’ll see open source Content Operating Platforms where you’ll be able to build rapid applications to fit a single need or an enterprise. Think Lego building blocks.

In the future, open source companies will out-innovate their proprietary cousins because contributors will have access the entire code. The Crowd Sourcing of application development will produce incredibly powerful tools and conversely tools that are buggy and worthless. It’s analogous to YouTube videos – some are compelling and others are a waste of time. The applications that are developed that solve problems will command higher premiums than those that are less compelling. Not everyone agrees with me, Robert Mason of MindTouch believes open source will go away and be replaced by “just open enough” because of all of the potential forking.

How Collaborative Networks will Replace Social Networks in the Enterprise

by Mark Fidelman:

Most of us have delved into the world of social networking. Those that haven't are missing an opportunity to connect with the people you care about from around the world. For me the opportunity started with a company called Zero Degrees (later purchased by IAC) where a dear friend of mine named Jas Dhillon opened my eyes to the world of one on one social and business connections. In those early days I made it my mission to introduce this new concept to my business associates, friends and colleagues. 90% of them refused to participate wondering why they would ever share their Rolodex of contacts with complete strangers. I can recall most of them telling me to stop wasting my time with the company and to do something productive. Hindsight is of course crystal clear, but the naysayers were wrong.

You really can't blame them - the change from complete ownership of your personal connections to allowing anyone to see and contact them (including your competitors) was anathema to the seasoned professionals. Before social networking, you never would have shared your Rolodex with even your closest buddy. Yet a strange thing happened. For the younger generation not versed on the "importance" of keeping your hard earned business contacts secret, they saw a unique opportunity to build their own networks quickly and efficiently without years of cultivating. They saw they could reach Bill Gates because they were two degrees away from him and they got excited. They also saw they could make new friends with similar interests from around the world so they reached out and connected in enormous numbers. In effect, that early group of young visionaries made the first generation of social networking tools viral applications.

Today of course it's social this and social that. We even hear about the Enterprise using social networking tools to connect with those inside and outside of their organization. CIO's and VP's of IT dislike the tools while the younger generation embraces them. I constantly hear complaints from IT executives about the amount of time employees are devoting to social networking activities during work hours. So what should executives do to embrace the opportunity to leverage networking tools but still ensure their employees time is spent on enterprise objectives?

Enter Collaborative Networking – a concept described by Aaron Fulkerson of MindTouch to illustrate the power of networks used to solve enterprise objectives. You can review the differences between social and collaborative networking, but briefly it's about connecting groups of people to enterprise content. Instead of the user at the center of the social graph, enterprise content takes center stage with users contributing information to increase its importance and relevancy.

Do you recall Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media, challenging the technology community to develop real productive networking tools other than time-wasting Facebook applications? He used the "Superpoke" throw a digital sheep (or worse) at your friends application for noteworthy contempt. Mammal tossing aside however, there are a few first generation productivity tools that are beginning to answer O'Reilly's challenge. In particular I like Jigsaw.com, LinkedIn Job search, LinkedIn Answers and Xobni's Outlook Add-in as my most productive tools that help me become more efficient. These tools are about connecting with other people to help provide better information to solve business issues.

Still, there are a large number of enterprise related issues that can't be solved by these first generation attempts at increasing business productivity. We do have Wiki's, blogs and forums, but these tools are not organized and structured to provide collaborative enterprise networks the ability to connect with corporate data silos, measure business objectives, allow groups of people to collaborate effectively and easily, and that help finance cut costs and sales increase revenue. Some companies like Jive, MindTouch, Alfresco and even Sharepoint are making headway in these areas, but a lot more thought and execution need to occur before we get to the dream and promise of Collaborative Enterprise Networks. Ω

Why Seek Omega?

The term Seeking Omega was coined by Jas Dhillon to describe the quest for an investment return on a business or social objective. I wrote an article about it on Seeking Alpha to give Carol Bartz some advice on how Yahoo could regain their former glory. Alas, no response from Carol but it gave me some motivation to continue writing about the concept using this blog as a vehicle. I probably won't always stay on topic, but my goal is to search for Seeking Omega solutions and write about them here. Today, I am focusing on three areas (with liberal allowances for additional off topic areas) Enterprise 2.0, Collaborative Networks, and Open Source Solutions. Personally, I think that these areas are not the beginning of the journey but a search for an end result (hence the term seek omega). It is the end of a process that needs to be pieced together and worked backward from an ideal set of Enterprise goals. There is much to do before we see high value return, and my plan is to document the journey. I do work for an open source company MindTouch, but my views here only represent my own and not of those of my employer.

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