Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

See you in Miami ...or Phoenix ....or Barcelona

September has been consumed with planning and preparing for a series of events that I will be presenting at in October. My fall tour schedule unravels as follows:

On Monday October 1st I kick off my tour in Miami at the Advisor Summit. This event will bring together IBM Lotus, Microsoft SharePoint and .NET, and Novell professionals to talk all things communications and collaboration. I will be doing a keynote entitled "Thriving in an E 2.0 World: New Realities in Communication, Collaboration, and Content Management". I'm really looking forward to this talk, I think it's going to be a lot of fun!

On Thursday October 4th I'll be delivering a one day workshop, "SharePoint and Office 2007: New Enterprise Collaboration/Content Opportunities and Risks" at the first Burton Group Institute event in Scottsdale, AZ. I'll be delivering the workshop with Craig Roth, Service Director of Collaboration and Content Strategies services at Burton Group. The day promises to be chock-full of interesting information and discussions on deploying SharePoint in the enterprise.

But wait, there's more...

Catalyst Europe is at the end of October in Barcelona Spain. I'll be repeating my talk on Catalyst North America (June 2007) on IBM Lotus in 2007 and the marketplace. I will also moderate a vendor panel on collaboration and content trends. The panel will include:

Rob Gray, Product Marketing Manager SharePoint Technologies (Microsoft)

• Doug Coombs, ECM Product Marketing (IBM)
• Phil Karren, Product Manager, GroupWise and Collaboration (Novell)
• Peter Henty, Principal Product Manager of the Oracle's User Interaction Suite (Oracle)
• John Robb, VP of Marketing and Product Management (Zimbra)

I am expecting it to be a lively discussion!

So hopefully I'll get a chance to see you at one of these events! I'll be easy to spot in my Burton Group logoed shirt!

Social Computing: Connecting The Enterprise To The Real World

Blogger: Mike Gotta, Principal Analyst

I understand Joe's skepticism with all-things-labeled "2.0". We are suffering from some degree of "irrational exuberance" when it comes to some of the market hype around topics like social networking. However, there are significant transitions happening that will affect virtually all enterprise organizations. A confluence of societal, market, economic, business and technology trends are altering the way an organization perceives itself in relation to "the outside world". There was a time where the a person's computing experience was provided almost exclusively by their employer. That is no longer the case. People are increasingly coming to the workplace with expectations that their digital work environment will be just one aspect of their overall digital life. That implies that similar computing models will be available. In some situations this might mean continued use of consumer-oriented tools (natively or federated to enterprise systems in an acceptable manner). 

Many of the more forward-thinking executive and management teams that I talk to realize that significant transformation is necessary to support innovation programs and other strategies to "grow the business" (e.g., reach new customers, sell more to existing customers, increase market share, move into adjacent markets). From an organizational perspective, becoming much more externalized and inter-connected to the world around them is fundamental to achieving many of these strategic goals. In many cases, organizations also need to be better connected internally as well so they can catalyze and leverage their own resources more effectively.

Almost everywhere I go, management teams are talking about "Facebook for the enterprise". In many cases, the term is used a catch-phrase to describe a variety of areas where social computing solutions can be beneficial. Social networking happens to be just one example. And while there are benefits from applications within the enterprise, there value is even more compelling when social networking platforms connect the enterprise to external audiences (e.g., customers, partners, suppliers, alumni, retirees, hiring prospects, and many other constituencies). Some of the solution areas that I've come across include (in no specific order):

• Strategic talent management (recruitment, retain workers)
• Innovation programs
• Process-specific applications
• Knowledge Management (yes, it's back...)
• Customer / partner / supplier relationships
• Corporate social responsibility programs
• General productivity and collaboration
• Community-building (including brand value)
• Expertise location and "who know's who" contact networks
• Multi-generational workforce

I hope this helps Joe (and other "cranky old Luddites" out there)... if not, give me a call.

Application Platform Strategies Blog: I've been thinking this all along...

Yes, I sound like a cranky old Luddite - and this area is outside my team and responsibilities at Burton Group - but I'm trying to understand the phenomenon, to make sure I'm not missing something. My question is serious. What's the value of social networking tools inside the enterprise firewall?

Application Platform Strategies Blog: I've been thinking this all along...

Communication, Collaboration, and Content for Outsourcing

Blogger: Craig Roth

I had a conversation this morning with a large, information services organization about outsourcing.  That may seem strange since the Collaboration and Content Strategies service does not cover outsourcing.  But along with the standard questions about where in the world outsourcing was taking place, near-shoring vs. off-shoring, and legal questions the company also wanted to know about how best practice organizations are working and collaborating with their offshore workers.  I thought that was a very good question to ask, so I'm posting what I told them up on this blog.

Communication, collaboration, and content management are enabling technologies for outsourcing.  It is hard for me to remember how outsourcing worked twenty years ago without these technologies and now I can't imagine doing outsourcing without them.

Of course, outsourcing was happening twenty years ago anyways.  But the expectations for return were lower, as was the pace of communications and the expectations for collaborative involvement in decision making.  Organizations make a decision to outsource based on competitive pressures.  Accordingly, a certain degree of efficiency is required to get the returns expected from outsourcing.  I don't believe an organization can get the returns expected today without near best practice in joint creation of documents, sharing of information, brainstorming and decision making, and mechanisms that enable a single source of truth (such as web publishing, document libraries, and document management).  And while there are many non-technical factors and other technology domains (networking and security come quickly to mind) involved, those near best practices cannot be accomplished without a strategy for the enabling technologies that support them.

Furthermore, as I mentioned in my telebriefing on preparing a business case for collaboration, the technology needs to be in place today to enable business collaboration that will take place in the future.  And this technology needs to be adopted in a strategic manner, not just tactically for each individual outsourcing project.  In a tactical adoption of communication, collaboration, and content technology the burden of the research time, implementation time, and learning curve is borne by an individual project.  For this reason, tactical adoption of these enabling technologies greatly increases the risk of not achieving the expected return from business collaboration projects such as outsourcing.  And without strategic forethought, there is a significant risk that the technology that was a good fit for its intended project will not be a good fit for future projects. 

All of this adds up to a good case for any organization that is contemplating outsourcing to evangelize a strategic approach to communication, collaboration, and content management so that these technologies will be ready to be leveraged when needed for outsourcing - or any other project requiring information efficiencies that happens to come along.

Yahoo! Acquires Zimbra

Blogger: Karen Hobert

This is big news in the open source e-mail and collaboration market. I've been very impressed by Zimbra over the last couple years. In fact earlier this month I began working on a report that explores next-generation e-mail interfaces and Zimbra. This news doesn't change that plan but it alters some of the commentary.

Admittedly this isn't surprising news. Not that I had inside knowledge of the acquisition but I felt it was only a short matter of time before someone might jump in and snatch up Zimbra. I did not expect it to be Yahoo!. Smart move for Yahoo! since it not only gets a enterprise ready, hostable e-mail platform, it also gets some really savvy technical talent that may help jumpstart its so far unsuccessful attempts with the enterprise market.

One natural fit for Zimbra at Yahoo! is that Zimbra is built for hosting, in fact Zimbra provides white label e-mail software to many large ISPs around the world. According to Zimbra, it currently has 9 million licensed mailboxes and around 50% of them are hosted. Zimbra also brings with it strong presence in the EDU and GOV markets and if you take a look at the roadmap for Zimbra 5.0 (due Q32007) Yahoo! offers a lot more than Google or Hot Mail, including:

• Off-line client
• Push e-mail to most mobile platforms
• Outlook 2007 support
• External directory support
• Integrated archiving and discovery

What's not to like? Now that the belle-of-the-ball is off the dance card there's slim to no pickin's left if you're in the market for an e-mail platform.

Yahoo! Acquires Zimbra

Two Upcoming SharePoint Workshops

Blogger: Craig Roth

I just wanted to give a heads-up that there are two more of our SharePoint Strategy workshops coming up.  The full-day workshop is called "SharePoint and Office 2007: New Enterprise Collaboration/Content Opportunities and Risks".

You've got your choice of two lovely locales: Scottsdale, Arizona on October 4th and Barcelona, Spain on October 22nd (as part of Catalyst Europe).

For those that might be aware of the workshop from the instances we taught in San Francisco (at the Catalyst conference) and in Boston, I'm happy to say that for the next round we've added a 30 minute module on SharePoint Planning and Deployment that gives an overview on SharePoint governance, deployment pre-work (with a handy checklist), deploying SharePoint in the enterprise, and adoption of SharePoint in the enterprise (what we've found organizations that are successful or unsuccessful with SharePoint have in common).

So the agenda now is as follows:

• SharePoint introduction
• Communication/collaboration/content market dynamics
• SharePoint analysis (this is the beefiest part of course, with 142 slides)
• SharePoint and overall market projections
• Planning and deployment
• Conclusions

I hope to see you there! 

Questions from "Preparing a Business Case for Collaboration" Telebriefing

Blogger: Craig Roth, Service Director

In my telebriefing on "Preparing a Business Case for Collaboration" I was pleased with the great questions that were submitted.  I've posted them here along with my answers. 

Q: You mentioned "managing high expectations" [as a risk factor for collaboration projects]. How do you recommend a deployment strategy strike a balance between addressing enterprise-wide expectations with focused hand-holding deployments? In other words, a great solution for a few or a plain-vanilla for everyone? 

A: This is a difficult issue to address since in many cases one benefactor is footing the bill for collaboration technology that can be used by many users.  Naturally that benefactor expects it will be customized to meet their needs over those of the non-paying masses.  If you truly think the solution meets only a narrow niche in the organization, I'd recommend examining the following strategies: 

• Try to find basic infrastructure that can be customized (i.e., templates) to meet the benefactor's needs today and then, when business needs justify rolling it out to more users it is be customized to meet other needs as well. 
• Try to hunt down one or two more areas of the business that can split the cost of the project in return for balancing the requirements to meet everyone's needs. 
• Talk to a CIO that is above the benefactor and see if he/she can exert pressure to generalize the requirements or chip in on the price to give the rest of the organization a say in the capabilities needed. 
• A last resort is to purchase a niche product to meet their very specific needs (hopefully it's not too expensive or maintenance intensive) and put governance in place to make it clear this is not for the entire organization.

Q: How would you overcome cultural roadblocks to Collaboration deployments? 

A: To be clear, there are generally not many cultural roadblocks to the collaboration technology itself other than the difficulty in getting people to learn a new interface.  The roadblocks are all non-technological.  And there's no silver bullet either.  But your question was what have I seen used in practice to overcome them.  Here are a few that I've seen in practice 

• Big splashy rollouts: Meeting in the company cafeteria, catchy names and slogans, balloons, little knick-knacks to put on the desk.  This generally causes a small spike in usage but doesn't go much further.  In theory if awareness was the only roadblock this could work, but it usually isn't. 
• Changing performance reviews to emphasize collaboration: Some organizations have realized their review processes focus exclusively on individual performance and have altered them to take collaboration into account.  This can be in the form of qualitative ratings (obtained by talking to peers, work on team projects) or quantitative measures (social networking ratings).  One always has to be careful when tweaking performance evaluations, but this can be part of a good strategy if individual performance is being exclusively emphasized when teamwork is needed. 
• Internal research: Most organizations don't really know the reasons collaboration is being avoided so imposing solutions is a shot in the dark.  In this case it is a good idea to actually talk to people from the executive office to staff workers in short interviews and determine their views on collaboration and why it does/doesn't occur in their area.  This is often done by external consultants to encourage anonymity.  Formal network mapping can provide a more extensive look at where the informal collaboration networks in organizations lie and where opportunities are being missed. 
• Changing incentives: In cases where specific incentives are often tied to individual behaviors (e.g., salespeople), formulas are sometimes tweaked to provide better compensation for collaborative efforts.  This can be very tricky, but probably needs to be addressed if the behavior being incented doesn't match the collaborative needs of the organization. 
• Removing inferior alternatives: Eliminating shared drives while making information workers aware of team workspaces can tip their behavior in favor of collaborating.  It's no guarantee - they may simply walk files over on a thumb drive or email them too, but it eliminates one avenue.  I've seen the same done with e-mail attachment limits as well, although there are sometimes good reasons to e-mail large files rather than posting them to a workspace. 
• Leading the horse to water: Sometimes collaborative tools aren't used because there is no established pattern of behavior.  They simply haven't used them and are more comfortable with the old ways.  In these cases, a mandatory activity that forces usage of the tools at least once exposes them to the technology.  Just like coupons are, in part, to establish patterns of behavior, these efforts can get information workers used to a technology as well and if they see a need for it soon thereafter, they may use it.  Examples include requiring status reports to be filed on a wiki, requiring time off to be noted in a shared calendar, or requiring presentations for an internal conference to be uploaded to a workspace.

Q: Do I have an example of this methodology being used for a government agency?

A: I don't have completed examples I can give you.  I do have a template that guides you through the sections that I showed briefly in the presentation and in more detail in the Methodology and Best Practice document I published on this topic (Building a Business Case for Collaboration Initiatives).  If you're working on a business case I'm also happy to talk to you and give advice as well as give it a once-over before you send it to your management to see if it can be strengthened.

Q: Can I get a copy of the slides?

A: Yes, they are posted on our website here.  You can also hear a replay of the telebriefing there as well.