The Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last week provided a fascinating insight into this nascent field, and suggested several possible futures (including some ideas for next year).

The official part of the conference programme was OK, but there were too many pay-to-speak slots that let it down, and not enough deep thinking about what this all means for the future of work and organisations. There were also some curios like AIIM trying to hitch the old KM horse to the E2.0 buzzword. This was interesting, as it also points to one potential future for enterprise social computing: death by buzzwords and vendors, as happened to the KM 'scene'.

A constant underlying theme was cloud computing, and Google gave an excellent introduction to how they see this working in combination with internally-hosted software, but I got the impression that next year will be when this takes centre stage.

For a good overview of the event, I recommend:

• Doug Cornelius's diligent session notes
• Trib's piece "there is a community out there"
• Ross Mayfield: "2008:process-specific solutions"
• Dion Hinchcliffe's roundup

So, where are we?

Well, we have some smart companies adopting social tools for practical purposes: Wachovia, Pfizer, Lockheed Martin and Bearing Point all shared case studies. So did the CIA, as covered by Stewart Mader, who humorously suggested the way we run enterprises is similar to their own 1944 Manual on corporate sabotage (see also this video interview).

There was a lot of interest in case studies and real experience among the attendees, and this was perhaps not given enough attention in the programme. Partly in response to that, the Headshift team worked hard throughout the week to release our first batch of 30 case studies and 45 use cases that we have come across in companies we work with. Lots more to come...

E2.0 showed that we have some really passionate, smart individuals working in customers, vendors and consultancies who really get the value of lightweight social tools as an alternative to lumbering, expensive enterprise IT. This is very important, as these people are the community that will be taking this work forward, and they seem to have a remarkably collegiate and open attitude to learning together, which is a key success factor in my view.

We also have a plethora of small, fast moving vendors and an even more rapidly evolving open source, mashup and integrator scene. Some of these are very specific, and some are growing into proto-platforms that cover a proportion, but so far not all, enterprise social computing features. And features is the operative word here, because features alone are not enough to drive adoption.

And, we now have competing, traditional vendor platforms in the shape of IBM Lotus Connections, whose new version launched at the event, Microsoft Sharepoint and Oracle BEA. Connections looks by far and away the best all-in-one product right now, but Microsoft have recognised Sharepoint's weakness and now offer a range of partnerships and third-party extensions to bring some of IBM's feature list to MOSS. The IBM/Microsoft bake-off on day one of the conference was astonishing for the contrast between Lawrence Liu's embarrassed demo of basic Sharepoint "features" (I felt for him, as he is clearly a really nice guy) and Susanne Minassian's confident, informative demo of Connections.

Connections will do well because it is a good product. Sharepoint will have a greater install base because of ignorance and laziness among IT departments, but where it actually works for users, this will be as a result of either very expensive customisation or the leveraging of the partnerships mentioned above that provide social features. A default install of Sharepoint, as Lawrence Liu's demo proved, is a very lonely and sad place to be.

Overall, I think the best value and most flexible feature sets are to be found with the specialist vendors, but it takes quite deep knowledge of the field to integrate these tools in the right way. That's where consultancies like Headshift can, I think, make a big difference by bridging the gap between the feature sets of the products and the real-world business use cases and needs of people working in companies. Our customers are the individuals who need these tools, not the IT or procurement departments, and I think this gives us a different perspective.

Barriers to adoption

A prominent topic among hallway conversations at E2.0 was the issue of barriers to adoption and how we overcome them. There was a good thread on the E2.0 community site, and several of the E2Open sessions (well done Ross!) covered this as well.

Mark Masterson from CSC warned us (and probably me in particular ;-) not to fall into the trap of just blaming IT:

The funniest thing, in this regard, to happen at the conference, was to listen to someone make such a "I hate IT! The hell with them -- this stuff is so important because it frees us from them!" comment, and then, moments later, hear them cursing under their breath because the hotel WiFi had failed again. Irony of a fine vintage.

Whilst he has a good point, I think this also supports my thesis that IT needs to split into plumbing (e.g. making the Wifi work and running underlying networks), core systems (the old school apps management) and business-focused facilitators (people who are free to help departments do whatever they want, including experimenting with social tools). These three areas of IT work have different skillsets, velocity, goals (five nines vs best endeavours support) and also attitudes.

Our former colleague Suw picks up on Andrew McAfee's remark at E2.0 about barriers to adoption:

I didn't expect the panelists to say that the Enterprise 2.0 tooklit is so incomplete as to hinder adoption, but I was a bit surprised that none of them identified management as a real impediment in their first round of comments. So I pressed the point by saying something like "I didn't hear any of you point the finger at the managers in your organizations. Were you just being polite, or are they really not getting in the way of Enterprise 2.0? The new social software platforms are a bureaucrat's worst nightmare because they remove his ability to filter information, or control its flow. I'd expect, then, that each of you would have some examples of managers overtly or covertly trying to stop the spread and use of these tools. Are you telling me this hasn't happened?"

That is in fact what they were telling me, and I didn't get the impression that they were just being diplomatic. They said that managers were just another category of users that needed to migrate over to new ways of working, and not anything more. In other words, the panelists hadn't seen managers in their organizations actively trying to impede Enterprise 2.0.

To what extent is "management" really a barrier to adoption? I am not sure, because I have seen the whole spectrum of reactions from management spanning enthusiasm, "we must do this" or cautious support all the way to "over my dead body" (ironically in a company where we had been running successful wikis for two years prior to this comment being made ;-). I think the issues are more granular and diverse than just the attitude of management. Asking people to change the way they work, even if that is as simple as just adopting new tools, is always hard when they also have to continue doing their job at the same time.

There is no easy formula for overcoming barriers to adoption, but we can share some tips that have worked for us:

• entertain and excite key stakeholders and make them feel IT can be genuinely liberating - we call it creating headshift moments :)
• try to stimulate demand among early adopters that span different status levels and functions - e.g. management, operations and support roles - and support this group as closely as possible
• focus on supporting concrete, clearly bounded use cases or scenarios based on what people actually do day to day, and set yourself the challenge of achieving demonstrable improvements in existing ways of working before trying to move on to new ways of working
• create new 'watering holes' where people can get better information than from traditional systems - e.g enterprise RSS on blackberries and mobile devices rather than just email - to develop more touch points with potential users
• once people are comfortable using new tools to support existing work, start to create bridges between this and entirely new modes (e.g. social bookmarking or personal blogging)
• target individual incentives, not collective benefit directly
• do not try to target culture change directly, but use tools that embody the new culture as a 'trojan horse' to effect change
• do not allow projects to be handed off to IT alone for implementation when they move beyond pilot
• get users (and in some cases clients) involved as soon as possible in the process, and let their experience be the judge of what works and what does not work
• avoid the usual 'roll out' process and instead build outwards from successful applications, person by person and group by group - ideally using early adopters to recruit second wave adopters

Of course, the real approach varies considerably from case to case, but I hope these generalities are useful nonetheless. Sam Lawrence of Jive Software posted an entertaining piece yesterday about some of the new behaviours we can expect to see within new enterprise social computing scenarios.

I think we might extend our use case gathering to look at barriers to adoption and how we overcome them. Could be a useful repository.

Possible futures?

The E2.0 conference reminded me in a way of the late KM-era events that were all about the tradeshow, vendors and software-as-the-solution rather than the nuanced, complex issues of how to make it work for real people. So the future I think we should try to avoid is one where the solution to every problem is to buy software.

Another possible future is one in which enterprise social computing is smothered by the dominant major players (Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Cisco, etc) who assimilate its features into their platforms and systems, helped by tick-box procurement where more features = better. Whilst I think Connections and Sharepoint will be important parts of the enterprise social computing world, it would be a real shame if the cambrian explosion of innovation that created the enterprise social computing field was gobbled up entirely by a few big dinosaurs.

How about a balanced, blended future where we continue to innovate with both tools, adoption techniques and business models? That sounds desirable to me, but I think we need to think very carefully about how we design, procure and integrate tools into businesses. Existing processes favour the big purchase that lasts around 5 years, but the problem is that waves of innovation and re-invention are coming in on a much faster timescale, so the first challenge is how to provide stable systems that can refresh and develop more rapidly than companies are currently comfortable with. The second challenge is how to turn this into what Clay Shirky called situated software than looks and feels native to the environment and culture of the host organisation. One size does not fit all, nor is one interface the best for all users. We need to move from providing capabilities (blog, wiki, social network, etc) to providing contextualised solutions to specific business needs that build upon the new behavioural characteristics of social tools and the affordances of social networks.

But there is another challenge, and that is the need to maintain a level of simplicity that can appeal to second wave adopters in the enterprise - the kind of people who, in truth, have never really engaged with anything other than email. Clay Shirky has some intelligent things to say about this as well in an interview with CIO Insight:

The cognitive model is to treat the computer not as a box, but a door. It's something you need to get through to get to the value on the other side. People don't want a door with 32 different kinds of handles; they want a relatively transparent view of the other people who are using the system.

Given the feature creep and vendor competition I saw in the tradeshow part of E2.0, I think we should really try to heed this advice.

I suspect the best implementations of enterprise social computing in the next few years will continue to be constructed on a base of products (whether a major platform like Connections or a combination of best-of-breed tools), but their real value will be in the way these are moulded to individual and group needs within the enterprise to create truly situated, native tools that support both existing and new ways of working better than enterprise software ever has before. But even that is worth little unless we can also succeed in engaging people and weaving these tools into the social and political fabric of the organisation. Software can't fix that.

Sounds like we have our mission :-)