BizTwoZero

Old media, new media and presentation skills changing the face of British Politics

David Terrar — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 09:52:46 GMT

A complex equation of old media influence, new media influence, and plain old fashioned presentation skills are in the process of changing British Politics forever. I don't usually get in to political issues here (and please note my disclosure at the end), but there are some important lessons to learn from the UK's first General Election that has been fought in the glare of Twitter, blogs, instant communication and TV Leader Debates. For those outside the UK, you need to understand that we have a "first past the post" electoral system that always favours the two main parties, Labour and Conservative, which have been swapping the power of government for the last 65 years. The closest we have come to their duopoly being broken was when, in the long run up to the 1983 election, the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party formed the Alliance and at one point started to achieve over 50% of the popular vote. People tend to forget that the Conservative Government of the time under Margaret Thatcher was deeply unpopular, didn't look like they would make a second term in office, and it seemed that the mould of British Politics would be broken for good, but the Falklands War intervened. Margaret Thatcher reversed her course and become the popular War leader who torpedoed the possibility of change and won. The Liberals and the SDP eventually merged to form the Liberal Democrat Party in 1988, and are currently the 3rd largest party getting 1 in 4 of the vote at the last election, but holding only 63 seats in Parliament.

Up until a week ago most pundits would have predicted a Conservative win on 6 May, but the key turning point happened some time earlier in the year when the 3 main parties agreed to 3 television debates where each party leader would have equal billing. Up to that point, it was too easy for the 2 main parties to dismiss the 3rd as irrelevant, and their press coverage was generally very limited in any case. In particular, Rupert Murdoch's newspapers like The Sun or The Times wouldn't give them any air time at all or even bother to send reporters to a LibDem annual conference. That all changed when 10 million TV viewers tuned in to watch. The viewing public is used to programmes like X Factor and Britain's Got Talent, and so the style of delivery and personality of the 3 contenders suddenly becomes much more important than particular policies. In the week before the debate Nick Clegg subjected himself to being grilled by Jeremy Paxman, our most aggressive political TV interviewer, and survived. The other 2 leaders didn't. In that previous week Nick Clegg did a press conference every morning to hone his arguments through yet more journalists' questioning. The other 2 leaders didn't do that every day. That public scrutiny meant that Clegg went in to the debates better prepared with his answers to tough questions, and must have contributed to him looking more relaxed and confident on the night than either Gordon Brown or David Cameron. When it comes to presentation skills I've always been schooled to look as many of the audience in the eye as you can. Nick Clegg focused straight in to the camera lens and the 10 million TV viewers rather than the few hundred audience in the room. That combined with his natural, slightly faltering style of delivery compounded to make him come across with more authenticity. It was in contrast to Cameron's slick delivery, and Brown's staid and studied delivery. By the morning it was very clear who had won the first debate, resulting in a 10 point jump for the LibDems in the polls, but the more significant effect is that a lot of that huge TV audience were really seeing the third party and Nick Clegg for the first time. LibDem press conferences following the debate were suddenly packed with journalists, including the Rupert Murdoch papers and foreign correspondents for the first time. The extra attention has caused a significant shift. The genie is out of the bottle, and the 3rd party will never be dismissed or ignored by the Press in the same way again.

The polls in the last few days have shown either the Conservatives or LibDems in the lead with around 32%, and Labour in third place with around 28%. However, with our strange voting system, the pundits project that means that Labour would get 270 seats, Conservatives 244 seats and the LibDems 97 seats. This means no party will have overall control in what we call a "hung Parliament". Even the jargon presents a negative picture - what's so bad about consensus and coalition government? In times of war we call that a National Government and consider it a good thing. Would it be such a bad way of tackling the current crisis?

Over the last few days the press have been highlighting that the party with the lowest vote will actually get the most seats, and so we could end up with Gordon Brown remaining as Prime Minister even if he loses. Actually that kind of unfair result has been happening for decades, but the facts of our unfair voting system have finally been brought in to sharp focus for the general public. It is now accepted by the average person in a way it never has been before. Is "first past the post" on its last legs? The price for the LibDems to be included in a coalition with either main party would certainly include some sort of electoral reform and change British Politics forever.

Social Media has had an effect too, and not just with Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC monitoring Twitter sentiment during the first debate, or charting the online surge for the LibDems afterwards. The Electoral Commission have been working with Facebook to promote more voter registration. By the deadline of Tuesday this week, over 450,000 new voters had downloaded the form and registered to vote. Many of those will be students and young people who have never been engaged in the political process before, and that's got to be good for democracy. Another factor is The Digital Economy Bill - a major piece of legislation that was forced through on the last day of this parliament without enough debate and scrutiny. Measures in the legislation to restrict filesharing requested by vested interests in the music business have been implemented in a ludicrous way. JP Rangaswami writes:

"The industry lobby did their work well. Now we have to get used to a world where filesharing and downloading are both wrongly equated with theft, where damaging action can be taken on mere suspicion, and where dictatorial powers may be assumed almost at will. All to try and hold on to a dying business model."

Most technology savvy people I know oppose the Bill, and Nick Clegg has garnered favour with that "geek" vote by coming out and saying :

"It badly needs to be repealed, and the issues revisited."

His party has followed this with a #geekthevote campaign and a Facebook Group.

So tonight, the second Prime Ministerial debate, chaired by Adam Boulton of Sky News, and also broadcast on the BBC News Channel, will major on foreign policy. As before Nick Clegg has prepared by taking a press conference every morning this week. The other 2 leaders haven't. Nick has had a lot more scrutiny of his policies, tougher questioning, as well as having to contend with some interesting press stories today. My own prediction for tonight is that he is gaining in confidence and so will keep his cool and continue with another good performance. David Cameron and Gordon Brown have to, and probably will, do better, but I expect a lot more negative and personal attacks which won't be well received by the general public. I don't think there will be any clear winner this time, but that will be enough to consolidate the third party's new position in the spotlight, and ahead of Labour in the polls. The TV debates have changed the game of British Politics forever. Nick Clegg had everything to lose in that first debate, but he prepared better than his opponents. Some good, old fashioned presentation skills and an authentic voice made sure his message was taken seriously. When you add the social media dimension, and the fact that it feels like more young voters will actually get to the polling booth and make a choice, then we are definitely in new territory. A coalition seems likely, and that means some form of proportional representation will be the result, and British Politics will be changed for good.

Update: I spotted Doug Saunders of Canada's Globe and Mail live blogging last night's debate. His infographics team produced this chart which summarizes the situation well (with slightly different poll data and seat projections).

Disclosure: Outside of the enterprise 2.0 and Cloud Computing world, I'm a member of the Liberal Democrat Party, an elected Parish Councillor, and Chairman of Sandridge Parish Council in St. Albans.

SOMESSO/Headshift Social Business Summit - a meeting of minds

David Terrar — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 18:43:25 GMT

I've been a regular at every SOMESSO event so far, and Lee Bryant kindly invited me to the latest incarnation last Thursday - a joint SOMESSO and Headshift one day Social Business Summit.   Sorting out a very embarrassing attack of the ave.exe virus delayed me enough that morning to miss the two keynotes from Jeff Dachis and JP Rangaswami (my Mac friends tell me I should make the switch, but I'm stubbornly staying on Windows along with 90% of my customers). I was particularly disappointed missing JP, as everyone told me his session was excellent, breaking the way ahead with the social business topic down to transaction cost. As soon as the video of his session is available, I'll update this post to include it.

The social business theme is dear to my heart. The word social and the social media term can be counter productive when talking to some business leaders about the way businesses needs to change in the 21st century. This summit meeting was all about applying what I would call enterprise 2.0 and some would call social tools (blogs, wikis, micro-blogging, tagging and other collaboration tools) to help businesses be more effective. As an example JP had talked about opening up his email inbox so that all of his team had access. Doing something like that changes the working dynamic completely. A commitment made in a private email is one thing, but it has a different social contract when it is made in the open with the whole team monitoring it. The new tools provide a completely different, open and more transparent way of working compared to the old style email driven culture of so many organizations. One of the summit moderators, my good mate Luis Saurez, is a well known example of the change, having lived without email (except for HR issues) for several years inside the IBM company.   The change in approach needs a culture change in many organizations where hoarding knowledge is the route to power in a command and control structure. The "social business" of the title highlights a shift that is currently happening where these social tools need to be more integrated in to the day to day business processes of the organization. Products like Salesforce Chatter are leading the way to bringing collaboration solutions and conventional business systems together, but we still have a long way to go to provide an integrated approach.

The Summit brought together a very high quality audience to workshop the topic. Take a look at George Nimeh's Twitter list of attendees to give you a flavour. There were some great stories shared - I was very interested to hear from Mark Masterson on how CSC had managed to implement a company wide "pilot" of enterprise 2.0 functionality to all 92,000 employees, before they rolled out a more complete solution once that first step was deemed successful. As always at this kind of conference, the networking and chats around the formal sessions were some of the most valuable aspects. I particularly liked the group walking discussion in Green Park after lunch. However, one of the flaws of the day was breaking us in to three groups to discuss social business in terms of internal collaboration, external connections, and the hybrid eco-system. Social business needs a fully integrated approach. The Cluetrain premise of "all markets are conversations" still holds true, and we should be considering an overall collaboration strategy that connects together the business with customers and partners, as well as individual use cases of enterprise social media tools.

I was in Luis's internal group, where we were considering what a large, old style telco should be doing to change when confronted with a smaller, more agile new entrant to the market who is stealing their market share. The discussion covered topics like education, collaboration processes and solutions, business analytics, the changing work place, a mission to humanize the enterprise, internal communication, innovation management and stakeholder management. However, I couldn't help feeling the discussion was all too theoretical. I wanted a pragmatic action plan of the "things" we should be doing. Maybe the start would be an IBM Jam style activity over a 72 hour period to get everyone brainstorming on the transformation needed. I wanted to know what they would put in place for better idea management. What processes would they put in place to help employees be more creative? What should they be doing in practice to become more customer focused. What community activities should they be setting up with their stakeholders?

When the other two groups came back to report, they both commented on how separating external and the eco-system didn't feel right. Then Anne McCrossan synthesized the day, commenting that there was an element of frustration at the start, but that the social business concept has huge potential. She confirmed that most businesses realize there is much more value they could be tapping in to in their internal and external relationships, but that there are associated risks too. She talked about making the transition to this new way of working, but that strategic intent doesn't ever go away. The framework for social business needs to incorporate governance, guidelines, and culture in the transition to a user centric business model with empowered employees. She asked "what is the unifying thought of this business?" She went back to JP's idea that the transaction cost is going down, but that there are opportunities for innovation in marketing, and customer service and other business processes.

Lee Bryant closed the summit highlighting that apart from the keynotes there had been no shiny presentations. He suggested the day had been messy and imperfect. He thanked us for contributing, and told us Headshift are committed to an ambitious, long term goal to change the way organizations work (and not to play with technology). He talked about it being a 5 year project, but that they would keep their feet on the ground. He told us we should watch for output and material from the Summit, and I'll publish links here as soon as they become available.

I saw Ton Zylstra's thoughts. He said:

"Considering the invited participants and the qualities and experience they brought we could have done and should have done way more than we did. I for one am sorry I could not see my way into the discussion to put this forward at the event itself"

Like Ton, I think we made a start, but the Summit is a long way off. This was a great meeting of minds, but I can't help feeling it was a missed opportunity. We should have made more of a start on the social business manifesto that we need to focus attention on the practicalities of how we connect internal and external collaboration with existing/traditional business solutions.

Flickr photos from the event
Anne McCrossan's take on the day

Twitter is 4 today

David Terrar — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 09:42:59 GMT

A few months back on the 19th of November 2009 NESTA, as part of their Silicon Valley comes to the UK sequence of events, televised a discussion called "Social Media: A Force for Good?". The panel was our very own national treasure, actor, QI master and twitterphile Stephen Fry, Biz Stone the Founder and Chief Executive of Twitter, and Reid Hoffman the Founder and Chief Executive of LinkedIn (you can see what they said below). The proceedings were moderated by NESTA's own Chief Executive Jonathan Kestenbaum, and in his introduction he said:

"It feels like there was never a world before Twitter"

Well 4 years ago today, this was the first ever tweet from Jack Dorsey (via Mashable):

As Biz Stone alludes to in the NESTA session, the idea of using some form of SMS messaging between groups came out of a brainstorming session while they were all working on something else that wasn't going so well for ODEO. At first they dropped the vowels from the name in common with a trend for web 2.0 services started by Flickr. Today four years ago was when they started testing, and then they launched the service publicly in July 2006. Wikipedia tells us that:

"In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey, and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo and all of its assets - including Odeo.com and Twitter.com - from the investors and other shareholders. Twitter later spun off into its own company in April 2007."

I joined the Twitter party relatively early myself on Valentine's Day, 14 February 2007, when it was only loved by a few. The real break came just a short while later at 2007's South by South West conference. Twitter set up two 60 inch plasma screens in the hallways and conference goers started using Twitter as the unofficial conference back channel. The SXSW buzz tripled usage from 20,000 tweets a day to 60,000 so that things really started to gain ground, and the community started to evolve new uses for the service.

So where are we at today?:

Twitter just passed 50 million tweets per day
Every TV News service mentions it regularly and has several Twitter identities
Most radio programmes have a Twitter identity, along with most of the presenters
There are many well documented uses of Twitter in emergencies, for protests, or in politics
Twitter the company still hasn't sorted out and made public their business model, although moves are afoot
Even if Twitter makes a miss step with their business model and alienates the user community somehow (maybe with unwanted advertising or something), the concept of group micro-blogging is firmly accepted. Most social media and enterprise 2.0 products have either developed or incorporated it already, or it is in their product roadmap.
Twitter is regularly used or being discussed for use as a business communication channel as part of a company's marketing and/or service strategy - it's now a standard ingredient of any social media strategy.

Have a listen to that NESTA discussion - as well as some great discussion on whether social media can be a force for good, you'll get some insight in to the thinking of Biz Stone, the founder: Social Media: A Force for Good?

So much has happened in the 4 years since that first Tweet, and Twitter only became a company in its own right 3 years ago next month. Another example of how fast this world and the Information Age is moving.

Social Media in the Enterprise in London on March 15

David Terrar — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:02:24 GMT

Next week is going to be very busy for anyone interested in the future of business. You know that Social Media in the Enterprise is one of my key topics. Last June I spoke at the Corporate Social Networking Conference on the business case. The next incarnation of that conference comes back to London next week, although it's one of 4 conference streams of a 2 day event with associated exhibitions and workshops at Olympia on Monday and Tuesday, March 15 & 16. The other three streams are the Social Media World Forum, the Social TV Forum, and Mobile Social Media.

The Enterprise Stream has some great speakers who I also count as friends like Euan Semple, Alan Patrick, Joanne Jacobs, Andy McLoughlin, Simon Revell and Dion Hinchliffe. Check out the full speaker list which includes others I see regularly like Thomas Power, Jemima Gibbons and Robin Hamman. I'm sure they'll be quite a spread of thought leadership around community, social business, and the way these tools can change the organization's structure. CIO's can get in free, but the line up looks well worth the investment in any case.

More on that pesky "Cloud" term

David Terrar — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:23:19 GMT

I posted the other day on the multiplicity of Cloud definitions, and whether I thought the term itself is useful, or all hype. Up in the North East, Adrian Pearson picked up on it and related to a story of being sold some telecoms technology with a cloud diagram and so concluded:

"David’s article reminded me that there is real practical benefit in being able to use a term like “Cloud”; to allow everyone in the discussion to make a mental note to accept that bit of the explanation as a “no need to go there” and concentrate on the more important stuff."

Dennis seemed to like the post too, and admired my honesty over admitting falling in to the jargon trap. He followed that up this week with "Struggling with understanding the cloud?" picking up on some great satire and sarcasm on the definition thing. Well, that reminded me of Larry Ellison's rant on the topic from last September. He was at the Churchill Club, a kind of Silicon Valley insiders thing, talking to Ed Zander, when he went off the deep end, around exactly the same issues, saying:

"Cloud Computing is not only the future of computing, it is the present and the entire past of computing, is all cloud."

and:

"All it is is a computer connected to a network."

Watch the rant yourself, it's both illuminating and amusing:

It's all the more ironic that Larry personally owns over 60% of NetSuite, and was one of the early investors in Salesforce, where he still owns a big stake. Both companies use Oracle technology, and of course, Cloud is a big deal for Oracle's business in general - Larry's got a lot riding on the Cloud. At the end of the day, I still believe you have to move beyond the definiions, the arguments and the hype, and recognize the term makes practical sense. We'll be making use of the catch all term for a new initiative we will be announcing shortly, but like Adrian says, it will help us accept the technical stuff and move on to what's important.

The Social Business Summit - special offer for BTZ readers

David Terrar — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:08:38 GMT

Here's news of a special offer for readers of Business Two Zero. I've always supported SOMESSO events since speaking at their first one in Zurich back in 2008. SOMESSO stands for social media espresso - it's a strong, fast hit of social media for the corporate world. Every event so far has had top notch speakers and impressive companies and practitioners in the audience, resulting in some great discussions and conversations. Their next event is in London next week on Thursday, March 18, organized in conjunction with my friends at Headshift (now part of the Dachis Group). This one is positioned as a one day Social Business Summit, and even the title will spark some discussion. Jeff Dachis will speak on how far we've come, and the impact of social tools in business to date. My friend JP Rangaswami will then talk about where we are going, and how the socially-calibrated business of the future might operate. The rest of the day will involve more discussion on where we might be headed, along with case studies on use of social media for collaboration internally, externally for marketing, support and connecting to the ecosystem. As usual there will be time set aside to discuss and workshop some of the key ideas.

Usually this event Is by invitation only, but readers of this blog can apply directly and get a 25% discount off the standard fee. Follow this link, or email me if you want out find out more.

My guest post on their blog introducing the last SOMESSO in Zurich in November was all about bridging the gap between corporate culture and the web 2.0 society. We've already moved on - we're talking about Social CRM and social business and the way the new tools need to connect with business processes inside our organizations. The approach reminds me of the maxim that we've often verbalized at Amplified sessions - "what works?, what doesn't?, what next?".

Here's a flavour of the last conference, which was biased towards banking and finance, and you can look back through the presentations and posts from that conference:

Somesso Zurich 09 Trailer from somesso on Vimeo.

Next week's conference is at the central London campus of the Limkokwing University at 106 Piccadilly. I hope I might see you there.

London Wiki Wednesdays rebooted!

David Terrar — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 01:24:35 GMT

Last Wednesday evening, 3rd March, London Wiki Wednesdays got rebooted for 2010 and beyond, with a varied selection of great 5 minute presentations and me doing MC duty as usual. We were hosted by Alek Lotoczko and our friends at NYK. Actually, it felt like the old days.   As you can see from our wiki, there was a bit of a hiatus between November 2008 and October 2009 and then to this month, excluding several informal meetings down the pub. The key issue has been the time and energy it takes to get venues and sponsors (anyone interested, please see me afterwards). However, we've decided to get things moving with a full meeting every two months (on the first Wednesday of the month) with informal meetings in between.

During my intro the group agreed to broaden the topic out from just wiki related projects, to wiki plus all things enterprise 2.0 - social media tools applied to business. We will, however, retain our London Wiki Wednesday branding, rather than changing to 2.0 Tuesdays or some such. Somewhere in the handovers I also mentioned the 2.0 Adoption Council and 2.0 Adoption Community.   On the night I suggested that they currently have a US and large company bias, but Susan Scrupski set me straight - about a third of the registered members are from Europe (and the UK), but in terms of active conversations and contribution she suggests it's closer to half the activity. In any case I hope we can encourage more European companies to join and share their adoption experiences.

Harry Wood discussed Crisis Commons - a wiki community for citizen volunteers, crisis response organizations, international humanitarian relief agencies, non-profits and the private sector to help them mobilize for disasters like Haiti or Chile. Apparently it's a bit of a mess with out of date information, and a case study in how wikis can evolve badly. Harry explained some of the gardening and rationalization he has been doing to organize the project lists and move to a page per project.

Alek Lotoczko spoke briefly to welcome us, and mention that he is trying to get a Confluence users community going.

Ben Gardner of Pfizer showed us a project they have put together with Semantic MediaWiki to handle drug patents for the company. The conventional approach would be for IT to build some sort Oracle DB, develop a UI, and do all the normal development, probably spending of the order of $50k. Instead they used the wiki interface the company is familiar with, and semantic extensions to create a table driven approach that only took a week of a developer's time. The solutions covers many therapeutic areas, with a page per patent. Each patent has a series or properties, allowing you to create "ask queries", and RDF and XML feeds. The data comes from a commercial database, which somebody edits and curates to produce an Excel file, which is then loaded to create the tables and pages. Their users can subscribe to pages via RSS with Newsgator. There are legal issues over some of the data, but they've disabled edit for those pages, whilst still allowing comments in a discussion page. Lars Ploughman commented that this hybrid approach of structured and unstructured data is becoming more common.

Andrew Berridge, also of Pfizer, then showed some of the technical details and the level of scripting code in the "ask queries". He explained how they use pipeline pilot to parse the data and transform it to Excel, then run a macro and something called Pywikipediabot to scan and replace and clean up the data.

Simon Revell continued the Pfizer LWW takeover, but this time discussed making SharePoint more social. He highlighted how the product has been presented by some as a category killer which will do it all, when the reality is far from that. He likened what can happen using it unchecked, to the way Tokyo city has sprawled out of control. He suggested it has OK document management, a terrible wiki, the blog isn't very good, and it can tend towards a wall of lists. However, Pfizer have created successful global communities of practice with the forums. They've put in a web part list to make it more friendly, but the biggest success has been using OneNote for collaborative authoring and information sharing. There was a general discussion about how excellent OneNote is, and how Pfizer got great access to the Microsoft developers - 9 of their top 10 requests were fixed in OneNote 2007 SP2 - very impressive.   One of Simon's key messages was from "Field of Dreams" - don't assume that "if you build it they will come". One of the ways they fostered adoption was to get the community to build their blogging policy in the wiki.

Mike Thompson of Headshift explained how they are working on a study for the EU on the impact of enterprise 2.0. The report will look at the market, available software and services, and how companies are using them. From a longer survey of projects, they will select 8 companies for in depth research and a 1-2000 word case study each. They are collecting information in a Mindtouch wiki at eu.headshift.com and there is a blog at enterprise20eu.wordpress.com.

Lars Ploughman of Headshift showed how a Law firm called Matthew Arnold & Baldwin LLP has embraced blogging and moved away from the standard, boring website . This is a 200 person firm with 90 lawyers of whom 45 are now blogging. They've been live for 2 months with a Wordpress based site, which has a prominent tag cloud of content on the home page, and 250 blog posts so far.

Paul Driscoll talked about Google's Sidewiki. If you use the Google toolbar, anyone can leave a comment, discussion, or annotate pages of any site. There is also an Apache standard but that hasn't got much support. There was quite some heated discussion about how useful this facility was, although some likened it to enabling graffiti on any website. The key issue here is control of your own site pages. The web already has review sites, or allows for anyone to start a blog or a forum on a topic or a product they have issues with. Do we need to allow people to annotate pages directly? Some good CMS products allow commenting on any page already, and then the content can be properly moderated to avoid abuse or bad language.

Benjamin Ellis explained all about his wiki approach the SocialOptic Milestone Planner. He went back to his first wiki experiences in 2001 and the value they can bring in capturing conversational data. People are crazy busy. Most project systems focus on tasks and dependencies. His product shifts the emphasis from activities to outcomes, from task to milestones - a set of things or aspirations you can achieve. The product is structured like a wiki page, but turned sideways with a timeline across the top. You can add and assign a milestone, invite in new users by email, or use colour codes to track progress or status. Anyone can go and edit or change it, but full history of the changes and conversations is kept, like a wiki, and you can easily see the community around each project.   Benjamin's product aims to make it easier to manage Barely Repeatable Processes - I need to get him talking with Sig. Sig's approach is the opposite. They have in common that "no business plan survives contact with the market". Instead of the outcomes, Sig has a product that starts at the beginning, and focuses on the process one decision or activity at a time, with the emphasis on value creation. If I do get them talking it could be quite explosive.

Clive Darr (who works for moo.com) showed his Java page and website, which uses WikkaWiki, a project from Surrey University, which also links in with the Freemind mind mapping software. He touched on using ImageJ product, a US government project which he said is simpler than Gimp, and referenced his blog at OSDE.info.

As a last item I asked what topics we might set up for a discussion at the next meeting, maybe with a guest speaker. The suggestions were:

The relationship between enterprise 2.0 and narrative story telling
Wikis and task list
And someone volunteered to talk about Google Wave and wikis

It was a great crowd with some great questions and discussions. You can see who attended, and more of what happened. London Wiki Wednesdays are back on track.

Update: Extra photos courtesy Benjamin Ellis - see set on Flickr

Social CRM - the new rules

David Terrar — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:05:25 GMT

There are changes underway across the worlds of social media marketing, social media applied inside business (what some people would call enterprise 2.0) and where these tools connect (or not) to the business processes in (Cloud based) CRM and ERP systems. Products like Salesforce are adding Chatter, and Twitter connectivity. Enterprise 2.0 tools that started as wikis or forums are adding micro-blogging along with more and more social functionality. Content Management Systems are adding or acquiring a social dimension. Marketing departments are struggling with, or looking for tools to help with, brand reputation monitoring and management. One significant segment of this change just got much clearer with Altimeter Group's R “Ray” Wang and Jeremiah Owyang producing Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management.

R told the Enterprise Irregulars earlier this morning that this report is the culmination of 6 months of research, collaboration, hours of white boarding, phone calls, and skype calls in the early morning and on weekends working with an ecosystem of 42 partners. The document identifies 18 use cases for Social CRM, capturing the best practices of 100 customers. They are providing this as open research free to all to use, and plan to build on it over time. Supporting the report, there will be a series of 4 webinars, the first of which they plan for March 18th at 10:00 PT. Check out their blog for details.

The executive summary says:

"Social CRM does not replace existing CRM efforts – instead it adds more value. In fact, Social CRM augments social networking to serve as a new channel within existing end-to-end CRM processes and investments. Social CRM enhances the relationship aspect of CRM and builds on improving the relationships with more meaningful interactions."

The report highlights that old style CRM is organized around the organization not the customer. With social media, the customers have moved on and started talking amongst themselves. Cluetrain tells us that "all markets are conversations", and so Social CRM is all about reconnecting organizations back to customers. The report suggests you should avoid the hype and that:

"Social CRM programs must deliver real value, not buzz."

This diagram highlights the entry points to business value:

Then each of the 18 use cases are explained, assessed in terms of market demand and technical maturity, and then vendors to watch are highlighted. I recommend you download and read it:

Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management
View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

The report concludes with a straightforward six step plan, including suggesting you act now, breathe social, encourage the right mindset and find other pioneers to talk to. It lays out a good roadmap and checklist of how to apply these social tools, backed up by real world evidence.

Is the Cloud term an asset, or just marketing hype?

David Terrar — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 04:35:57 GMT

A few things came together for me this week around the Cloud term. I spent time with one of my best customers discussing online accounting, what we should do to improve the product we represent in the UK, and how we should position to beat the incumbent in the small business market, Sage. But the first thing that Philip Woodgate told us was how useful the Cloud term is for the clients and business people he deals with. These are business from small, to medium to International where he struggled explaining SaaS 3 or 4 years ago when he started promoting the concept. He thinks the Cloud term makes it much easier to "get" for the average business.

The next thing was this post on ReadWriteCloud with Wordpress.com founder Matt Mullenweg suggesting the Cloud is marketing speak. Matt was explaining how a recent outage in their service occurred. Alex William's wrote in the article:

"The cloud gets blamed for almost any online outage these days. It used to be that we'd just say the service went down and there was a failure at the host or the data center. Sure enough, the Wordpress.com outage is not a cloud disaster. Instead, it's what happens when failover does not work in a data center."

He went on to ask Matt if Wordpress.com is hosted through a traditional data centre or if it is on a grid, and so would that qualify it as a cloud computing environment? Mat's response was:

"That's a silly question, like asking whether Facebook is a cloud computing environment. Most 'clouds' besides Amazon's are just marketing BS. WordPress.com is a collection of many physical servers across multiple datacenters to create a scalable, resilient environment for our customers. You could call it a grid, or cloud, we just call it service."

Alex's question is the problem. It reminded me of the debate on terminology we had between vendors at the very first EuroCloud UK meeting. It reminded me of last year's Cloud Computing World Forum, where almost every vendor pitch on the day started with a definition of the Cloud to make sure their particular solution was in "the cloud club". It reminded me of the January 2009 research paper by Luis M. Vaquero, Luis Rodero-Merino , Juan Caceres, and Maik Lindner called "A Break in the Clouds: Towards a Cloud Definition" which listed 22 different definitions, that was picked up by the likes of McKinsey last year. By the way, this year's Cloud Computing World Forum will make sure it avoids this definition debate by making sure no one prefaces their pitch with explanation number 23 or 24.

Of course the Cloud term gets caught up in marketing BS. The industry and the average CIO needs to spend less time worrying about definitions and terminology and more about business benefits and use cases. Sadly, we technology vendors and advisors have been prone to that problem for every evolution I've lived through over the last 30 years (and before). I've fallen in to the trap many times too - 4 or 5 years back I was arguing about, 1 to many, "pureplay" Software as a Service solutions compared to webified client/server apps that were being hosted somewhere and accessed through a browser (and completely forgetting that my company motto is think Business, not Technology). I better hang my head in shame.

However, I go back to the experience Philip is seeing with his clients, and what I see with the business people I talk to, and what Matt means when he says "we just call it service" - the Cloud term simplifies things and collects together a comprehensive set of technologies in to a sensible package, so we can move on and focus on the value it delivers.

Should you put "guru" or "thought leader" in your Twitter bio?

David Terrar — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 13:02:18 GMT

I'm a Twitter fan from the early days (which is only about 3 years - streuth!). For me it's a key source of trusted information, a communication mechanism, and an important way for me to extend my various, overlapping networks of interest (amongst several other things). In recent weeks I've seen tweets from people worrying about those that have "social media guru" in their Twitter bio (there are a lot of them about). The other morning I was followed by someone new. A great tool called Topify sends me an email with their profile, details of how many people they follow and the number who follow them, their bio, links and their last few tweets so that you can make a quick decision on who they are and whether you want to follow back. This guy had "thought leader" in his bio. I immediately wondered to the twitterverse whether this was as bad or worse than having the guru thing in your bio. Here's a selection of some of the responses from the wonderful people who follow me:

I describe myself as an evangelist, a specialist, and I might go so far as to say I'm an expert in some things. Maybe it's a British cultural thing with me, or maybe it's more than that. Rather than a bio written by someone else, this is a bio about yourself, and I don't think it's up to you/these people to pronounce themselves gurus and thought leaders. As Shefaly Yogendra quite rightly points out, you know who's a leader by the followers they have. I learned that very powerfully many years ago when I was working with and understanding the way W. L. Gore works. That's a company that has a team-based, flat lattice organization, and no conventional management hierarchy. They organize in to teams, and from the team a leader emerges. We definitely need more thought leadership, but I know it when I see it - I don't need you to tell me you've got it. On the subject of social media gurus, we've got too many of those too. I see a lot of people who've been using blogs, and wikis, and Twitter and Facebook for a while, and suddenly they can write your social media strategy document. It's a bit like the a gold rush in the Wild West. So I suggest you take care in how you present yourself and let your content and the company you keep speak for itself. As Joanne suggested, take a good look at who is following whom.

Update: A google search of these terms reminded me of this (hat tip Direct Marketing Observations). Take care where you are if you play this (F word alert), but "I bore of your analogue attitude.... ":

FutureStory launches at the North East Economic Forum

David Terrar — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:23:51 GMT

Last Thursday in Durham FutureStory launched as part of the North East Economic Forum. I've already blogged about why I've got involved in this joint initiative between Lucy Parker's Talent and Enterprise Taskforce and the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS). The BIS press release on the day started like this:

"Business leaders in the North East today (on Feb 18) urged young people to proactively research local industries so they can rise to the challenge of getting a job in tomorrow’s global economy. In return they pledged to help local schools and colleges play an active role in plotting the North East’s economic future."

The NEEF annual conference was a fitting forum for promoting this new initiative. Adam Boulton of Sky News introduced a series of speakers focusing on the regeneration of the region which has moved from its industrial heritage of mining and steel to housing the UK's largest car exporter, the National Centre for Excellence in Plastics, and a whole host of low carbon initiatives. During the day we heard about huge off shore wind farms, a national training centre for Green Collar Workers that is in the process of being set up, Nissan's new battery plant at Sunderland, the installation of 1000 electric charging points for electric vehicles (619 by 2011) and I discovered the location of the UK’s first Low Carbon Economic Area for Ultra Low Carbon Vehicles. We even heard about a local venture capital fund called Jeremie!

The Rt Hon Rosie Winterton MP, the Minister of State for Regional Economic Development and Co-ordination, talked through more of the region's achievements and suggested we are a nation of inventors, so lets get on inventing things. She explained how FutureStory intends to bring home to young people exactly what globalization means , and what the business leaders in the room were actually up to on their behalf. More importantly to show how young people can contribute too. Then she departed from the script and asked everyone in the room to sign a pledge to connect their business to a local school or college and get involved.

She handed over to Lucy Parker, who explained how FutureStory is a communication device that began as a half a dozen books, explaining how globalization is already changing the way we work. For many this topic is an abstract concept, and possibly even intimidating. When it's discussed it's often explained in terms of dangers and lost jobs more than for the new job opportunities coming through. But actually there are positive stories from all over the country, and she described it as a:

"major renaissance in the next stage of industrial development"

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary, the other blogger invited to attend and promote the event, filmed Lucy's introduction. I'll put that here soon, but a photo in the meantime:

She then brought Mark Churchill (16) and Jonny McGuigan (14) along with teacher Tim Smith from Prudhoe Community High School in Northumberland on stage to explain their own FutureStories. Mark and Jonny presented short films (which I missed, as I was ushered off for a photo shoot with Rosie Winterton and some of the students from the Prime Ministers Global Fellowship). Tim explained that the school is built on a former open cast mine, and described the new school building as an ideal example of exactly what this initiative is all about - something:

"Built on the past shining out to the future"

Each of the six FutureStory books consists of a set of case studies and follows the same template, which identifies ten building blocks that are essential for a town, city or region to succeed in the global economy. If you go to the website that template is available to you so that wherever you live, you can tell your own FutureStory – and become part of building the FutureStory of the UK.

While I was at the event I met some fascinating people with great globalization stories. Mike Hanley, the contract manager for The Crown Estate, is involved in managing the huge offshore wind farm with a consortium of 4 International power companies on the Dogger Bank, generating 10GW of power using 3000 wind turbines. That's the equivalent of 10 large conventional power stations, say the size of Ratcliffe-on-Soar. Then I spoke to Tony Trapp, chairman of IHC Engineering. Tony's firm started as agricultural engineers getting involved with working on the sea bed with the oil and gas industry, but have grown in to experts at creating trench cable laying equipment for the wind industry, or building the kit for deep sea pipe laying. He talked about one contract where something of the order of £35m of equipment and software would be manufactured in the North East, but then taken to Japan to be installed and commissioned on a ship there. Tony told me that sometimes it was difficult to attract managerial staff to the region, but that they could get their engineers, research and creative skills from the Universities at Newcastle, Northumbria, and particularly Edinburgh. Tony's key message to me was that the UK should be thinking about:

"niche manufacturing, and focusing on cleverness."

One of the most interesting sessions of the day was James Dehlsen, the Chairman of Clipper Windpower. He talked through the turbines his company designs and manufactures. Carbon fibre spars where the structural design is on the limit for that type of blade. Some of the statistics were staggering - a drive train weighing 65 tonnes, rotor and blades weighing 500 tones on top of the tower, and the whole thing down to ocean floor being 2200 tones - that's a lot of steel! He said it was all about providing electrons at the lowest possible cost, and that he believed the UK could take global leadership in this industry. Then he talked in terms of two of these things being installed per week. Thats 4400 tones of structured steel. To put it in context a 133m frigate has a displacement 3500 tonnes - so we're talking about a frigate's worth of steel every week. Once you take in to account the installation vessels on the sea, and then operations maintenance vessels, this will be a huge long term industry providing clean and competitively price electricity in to the UK grid.

Other speakers at the event included Alastair Darling, Ed (not David) Milliband, Greg Clarke and Sir Alan Beith, but things didn't get too party political. Overall, this forum highlighted some real global success stories, some surprising low carbon initiatives, and some great British innovation - an excellent backdrop for FutureStory.

Shift Happens! revisited

David Terrar — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 05:23:37 GMT

Way back in August 2006 a teacher called Karl Fisch at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado, USA created an 8 minute PowerPoint presentation with some music. It aimed to highlight the rate of change of the world we live in, and remixed content from David Warlick, Thomas Friedman, Ian Jukes, Ray Kurzweil and others. I blogged about it November 2006. It went "viral" through bloggers and YouTube so that by June 2007 it had been seen by 5 million people online. As of today, versions of it have been seen by more than 20 million people.

Here's version 2.0 from June 2007:

Here's version 4.0 from September 2009, which shifts the focus a little more towards the changing world of media:

Here's the wiki with more detail behind the story. I started thinking about the rate of change when I got involved with FutureStory, but the message is even more important today than 4 years ago.

Introducing FutureStory on BTZ

David Terrar — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 04:20:27 GMT

This will be the first in a continuing sequence of posts here on BTZ about FutureStory, a government initiative from the Department of Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) which connects businesses to schools to help make young people wake up to the opportunities, rather than the threats, of globalization. Caroline Teunissen called me and Mark Kobayashi-Hillary, and a number of other interested bloggers in to help promote the topic. Caroline introduced me to Lucy Parker, head of Talent and Enterprise Taskforce, who is spearheading the initiative in conjunction with the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS).

So why did I think this is important? Why did I want to get involved? As we progress in to the 21st century, we live at a time of astonishing extremes and rapid change. Globalisation, climate change, the explosion of advanced technologies and what some would call a broken education system here in the West have come together to make a perfect storm of complexity. FutureStory directly addresses two of these components. Globalization is a fact of life to be dealt with. Although we hear many stories of losing jobs and manufacturing capacity from the UK to lower cost producers in India or China, there are just as many good news stories of local companies, large and small, using technology and innovation to compete on the World stage. Too often for young people, globalization is spoken of in terms that are too abstract for them to think it means anything to them. When it is raised, it is usually as a threat to the jobs market and their future livelihood because of some factory closure. FutureStory aims to bring globalization to life by focusing on real stories of successful, local businesses who are going global or local research establishments that are doing world class development and innovation. The key message is that you can see positive examples of globalization in your town or city all over this country.

We have an education system based on a 19th century design which catered for the industrial revolution, but we're actually living in the information age and a digital revolution. It seems to me that our education system is focusing too much energy and resource on the quantity of graduates we produce and that isn't the answer. India, China or Brazil can (and does) produce more graduates than we do, often just as well, and certainly at much lower cost. If we really are going to compete as a country then we have to think differently and focus on the something that the UK has always been good at - invention and innovation. But one of the challenges for the education system is that things are changing so rapidly, probably half of the jobs people will be doing in 10 years time don't exist today. How can you plan for that? For me one of the keys to the answer is creativity, and the successful companies are doing something clever and unique, rather than cheaper and faster.

FutureStory has started with a series of six books focusing on the cities and regions of Newcastle and the North East, Southampton, Derby and the East Midlands, Manchester, Bristol, Glasgow. Each book is made up of a collection of stories with accompanying video (see Newcastle snippet above, go here for the Newcastle video) which help bring alive how globalisation is already with us, in our midst, changing the workplace, the jobs we do, the way we live and the cities we live in. Yesterday the website was launched at http://futurestory.enterpriseuk.org. You can download the books and watch the videos, and there's even a place where you can begin to build the FutureStory of your own town or city. There will be a programme of events, a competition for schools, and teaching materials which will be linked in to the standard curriculum. Anything that connects schools and colleges to local businesses has merit. The objective of FutureStory is to help prepare young people for what lies ahead and to unlock their talent, and that has to be good.

My post describing the official launch of FutureStory in Durham coming soon.

2.0 Adoption Warfare - can military tactics help?

David Terrar — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 02:35:27 GMT

A few weeks ago, as part of Social Media Week, Alan Patrick and I ran the very well received Social Media in Enterprise event (which we'll run again!). It provided 8 different perspectives on collaboration in the enterprise using the new tools. Amongst the many issues raised in a night of some great discussion and excellent follow up blog posts, I see two key themes:

A dichotomy between the social media practitioners, like Adriana Lukas, who think the only way to make this stuff work is a bottom up, guerrilla warfare style approach, versus those of us (including me) who see that way can be perfectly effective, but believe a top down, old fashioned approach to implementation with senior executive sponsorship can work just as well or better.

The fact that we all talked about organizational hierarchy and culture as a major factor, and that these tools subvert the "natural" command and control management structures that most big corporations have, and which many of our newer companies grow up to adopt. The new tools are overlaying a network centric communication approach, which is beginning to flatten the organization and reduce the power of the traditional organization chart.

That got me thinking about whether we could learn from the way military tactics and warfare have evolved up to the present day, and particularly from the tactics of special forces. Could we develop an approach for enterprise 2.0 adoption, doing the kind of job that Al Ries and Jack Trout's Marketing Warfare book did 20 years ago applying military thinking to the marketing mix?

Commander's Intent

One of the first success factors for any company or project is "the vision thing". In Benjamin Ellis's great post on "Anti-Social Business" he says:

"Businesses that succeed, and continue to succeed, are driven by a big vision that reaches beyond the walls of the business itself"

Whether it's the mission of the company, or the objectives of a particular plan, things have to be clear. I blogged recently about Trout's book and making things Obvious, and the fact that we see too many mission statements that are so generic as to be meaningless. We live in a world of killer competition, and whether we're fighting the marketing battle, or internal red tape and politics, things change fast. So looking for a parallel in military thinking, "commander's intent" has been an important concept on the battlefield, particularly because of this dose of reality from Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke (1800–1891) who was a student of the great military strategist Carl von Clausewitz:

"No plan survives contact with the enemy."

I found the 1993 US Army Field Manual (FM) 100-5 that described it as follows:

"The commander’s intent describes the desired end state. It is a concise expression of the purpose of the operation and must be understood two echelons below the issuing commander. It must clearly state the purpose of the mission. It is the single unifying focus for all subordinate elements. It is not a summary of the concept of the operation. Its purpose is to focus subordinates on the desired end state. Its utility is to focus subordinates on what has to be accomplished in order to achieve success, even when the plan and concept of operations no longer apply, and to discipline their efforts toward that end."

One of the key things here is concise instead of detailed instructions on how to execute. The manual points out that any long narrative descriptions of how the commander sees the fight will tend to inhibit initiative, and we'll need plenty of that along with innovation in any fight. So whether it's the vision for the company as a whole, or the required end state for implementing social tools, this is a good explanation of how you need to think through communicating a clear and simple message if you going to be successful.

McRaven’s Theory of Special Operations

I've explained before that the name of this blog connects to the Special Air Service because of my father. One of my themes has been applying SAS tactics to business. Is there something we can learn from special forces tactics that can apply to enterprise 2.0 adoption too?

Although there are plenty of first hand accounts of special forces missions from around the world in books, the tactics and principles taught to these elite troops, unsurprisingly, don't make it in to print that much. However, one theory, popular within the special operations community, is Captain Bill McRaven’s Theory of Special Operations (he's a Vice Admiral now). He looked at eight historical special operations cases and from them isolated six principles that are key for success in any special operation. For McRaven, a "special operation is conducted by forces specially trained, equipped, and supported for a specific target whose destruction, elimination, or rescue, is a political or military imperative."

From analyzing these historical raids and rescues, McRaven postulates that relative superiority is a necessary condition for success.

"Simply stated, relative superiority is a condition that exists when an attacking force, generally smaller, gains a decisive advantage over a larger or well-defended enemy."

The basic properties of relative superiority are that it is achieved at the pivotal moment in an engagement and that relative superiority must be sustained because it is difficult to regain. McRaven was able to deduce six principles for special operations, which are:

Simplicity
Security
Repetition
Surprise
Speed
Purpose

According to McRaven "a simple plan, carefully concealed, repeatedly and realistically rehearsed, and executed with surprise, speed, and purpose" provides special operations with the highest probability of succeeding. He divides special operations into three phases:

Planning (simple)
Preparation (security and repetition)
Execution (surprise, speed, and purpose)

As you might expect, he sees simplicity in planning as the most crucial of the six principles. Even for a complex mission you can break the plan down in to simple steps. Special forces teams are limited by particular military doctrine, rule sets, and the commander’s intent They increase the effectiveness of their execution by standardizing each team member's performance through intensive training and simulation. Designing this guidance for each team member is the key task in the planning phase.

As well as being simple, the plan also needs good intelligence and innovation. Attaining good intelligence is critical in all military planning. Good intelligence can limit the uncertainty in planning, however, intelligence gaps will always exist. The final element of simplicity is innovation. Innovative planning overcomes foreseen obstacles that would otherwise inhibit surprise or increase the time special operators spend in the field of battle.

This approach to planning makes as perfect sense for implementing 2.0 and social tools in an enterprise as it does for the "Raid on Entebbe".

In the preparation phase security and repetition are key. As you might expect, the missions that McRaven studied usually had special operations attacking a larger force prepared to defend fortified positions. Strict security was required to protect the timing of the operation, as well as the method of attack. Without the element of surprise, the chances of success are always reduced. The second principle for the preparation phase of special operations is repetition. During preparation, full mission rehearsal allows planners to identify critical areas and vulnerabilities to address or mitigate. Adaptability becomes a key tenet of planning, in which rehearsal and repetition focus on understanding how to prioritize the unexpected. That then gets fed back in to improving the plan.

I can see how preparation and rehearsal are as vital in effective presentation of the ideas behind successfully implementing social media tools as they are for the SAS team preparing to enter the Iranian Embassy. Security for our type of project can cover intelligence gathering so we know exactly what we are going in to, but we're not talking about a covert operation when it comes to 2.0 adoption (although some of my social media colleagues certainly think in those terms). The other side of security for a social media in enterprise project is all about choosing a safe approach and the right technology, in support of what we are trying to achieve, rather than in the lead. Picking technology first is always risky.

Let's move on to the execution phase. According to McRaven, relative superiority is a condition which exists when the "attacking force, generally smaller, gains a decisive advantage over a larger or well-defended enemy." Since relative superiority is perishable and critical to success, McRaven recognizes the importance of surprise as one of his key principles. In this military sphere of operation surprise and speed are paramount.

There's another strategy that I want to bring in to play during execution - the OODA loop (for observe, orient, decide, and act). This is a concept developed by military strategist and USAF Colonel John Boyd. It can be applied to combat operations, but can also be applied just as well to understand and improve business processes. In the context of special forces, the troops are trained to observe and adapt and innovate. Surprise and speed are used to disrupt the enemies own OODA loop, to disorient them so they are slower to react, to breakdown their own process, and so improve the chances of our success.

These ingredients of the special forces approach map in to a couple of key things in social media projects. I often use a phrase I saw in a Lockheed Martin presentation about their Unity project - think big, start small, act fast. That's exactly what we are saying here. The other aspect is culture change. For some organizations, there needs to be a massive re-orientation, and the rate that people can adapt to change will vary dramatically. Practitioners working in the thick of the social media battle need to think OODA loop and make sure they are both adaptable and responsive to bring people along. I see too many "one note" evangelists who only bring some of the hostages to old style thinking and business process along with them.

Lastly, McRaven describes his sixth principle of purpose as "understanding and then executing the prime objective of the mission regardless of emerging obstacles or opportunities." If you haven't "got" the purpose, this project isn't going to succeed. Here we've come full circle back to commander's intent, but it's important to realize that in social media projects purpose is a two way street. The CEO may offer a clear vision for the company. The objectives of the enterprise 2.0 project might be straightforward and succinct, but the purpose has to work for every individual team member too. In my company's SWITCH methodology, the W stands for "what's in it for me?". Just like on the battlefield, the troops need to believe in what they are doing. In the social media landscape, they need to believe in it, AND get something out of it themselves.

In conclusion, I can see how commander's intent, the OODA loop and McRaven's six principles of special operations are directly relevant to my experience of a successful enterprise 2.0 approach. A combination of top down and bottom up. It begins to feel like a guerrilla campaign, or a hostage rescue mission because of some of the entrenched culture and outdated processes that we are trying to subvert. If people are going to put up resistance, then this military thinking is going to help understand both the way around the obstacles, and the way we rescue the poor souls stuck inside the old processes.

This is just the start of a thought process and discussion of 2.0 Adoption Warfare (which could be a good title for a mini-book). Now I'm beginning to wonder about the relationship between enterprise 2.0 practitioners like myself and corporate IT. What role does IT play using this military strategic and tactical view of the world? That might be the subject of a follow on post, or a panel at the next Social Media in Enterprise event. Let battle commence.

Reference: McRaven, William. Spec Ops - Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare: Theory and Practice, Presidio, Novato, CA, 1996

The SaaS applications wiki - open for business

David Terrar — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:59:29 GMT

Over on AccountingWEB's forums (you need an AWEB account to log in, but it's free) there have been some heavy exchanges discussing the barriers to adoption of Cloud solutions by accountants in practice in the UK. I found it interesting, but sadly the dialogue has been too vendor driven, with plenty of verbiage from the opponents of SaaS and the Cloud, along with positive stuff from evangelists like me. I couldn't resist chipping in to make the business case for SaaS and the cloud, but Gary Turner of Xero thought we weren't being too helpful for the accountant audience because it was all getting too "inside baseball". That was a new one on me, but the trusty Wikipedia describes the expression as follows:

"The expression "inside baseball" is sometimes used as a metaphor for details or minutia of a subject so detailed that they generally are not well known by outsiders."

Part of the need for going through the arguments (again) is that although AccountingWEB has some good reviews of the available products, and has covered the online accounting topic to some degree, there isn't one place that pulls together the SaaS and cloud story or lays out the issues for consideration. We need the business case for SaaS along with links to anything useful. That one place has just been created by Dennis Howlett, and as a wiki so that we can all help make it more "open" and even better. He has created a database of the available online accounting and ERP suppliers, within a set of PBworks wiki pages that look set to grow in to a very useful resource. Without much fanfare or marketing the resource got over 2,500 reads in the first 4 days it was available. Both myself and Ben Kepes of Cloud Avenue quickly requested editor rights from Dennis, and we've got stuck in adding links and more text. So far there is a:

Front page explaining the whys and wherefores
What you need to know page laying out the business case with links to tools, case studies and things like the Intellect document on the topic
Suggested external resources page pointing at blogs, trade groups and useful directories
Services Database showing the available online or SaaS solutions

There are already place holders for more pages so, in usual wiki fashion, this resource will be a perpetual work in progress. If you want to join in, use your existing PBworks account to log in, or sign up. You'll need to request access rights, and then as soon as Dennis gives you the OK, you can help us build. This is exactly what we needed for SaaS and cloud business applications here in the UK.