The AppGap bloggers are excited to announce the launch of a new section of reviews - The AppGap: Appopedia.  The section brings together the growing number of enterprise 2.0 reviews (nearly 150 to date) that my AppGap colleagues and I have written. It has been fun interviewing vendor spokespeople, seeing demonstrations, and learning about all the innovation within the enterprise 2.0 space.  Now you can better access the entire collection.

And while other directories of 2.0 apps exist, we believe Appopedia serves a particular purpose, focusing specifically on work-related tools that help you manage and grow your business rather than every Web 2.0 app in the market. Hylton Jolliffe and others at Corante have been developing the new section over the past month or two. We all hope you’ll check it out and provide input on what admittedly is a work in progress (there are already got a few tweaks on the way).

As you’ll see we’ve organized the reviews by various criteria, e.g., product category, we hope you’ll find useful. If you’ve used any of the tools please feel free to weigh in with any feedback in the comments of the respective reviews.

For vendors: if you’re a company with a tool that’s already been reviewed, we encourage you to visit the review and provide any information on updates in the comments or contact us if you think your tool could be better classified by product category or function. For those that are interested in having your app reviewed, please visit our contact page where you’ll be prompted for information that’ll help us add you to the queue.

Again, we hope you find Appopedia a valuable resource. It builds on The AppGap’s mission - to help individuals, large organizations and small businesses better understand how work and our tools for working are changing - and aims to provide a practical destination for those looking to assess which apps can help them better manage and grow their businesses.

I get really uncomfortable when I log in to many enterprise systems for a whole host of reasons. Until now it has been easiest for met to blame the platforms themselves.

So the question I have is this: In light of a shift to mobile, the slow but constant inroads being made by social software and the coming net-generation (or whatever you call it) of employees, what is the future of Enterprise Data? What is the true culmination of SOA based enterprise applications? I am convinced that the end product of SOA based platforms IS NOT two applications sharing a little bit of data over their garden walls, I think something far bigger is at play, and I think we are seeing the result in consumer applications already.

My sense is that the future is going to look different than what we are used to today. I believe that data will become more accessible, be more end user directed and will be a fulcrum for collaboration.

I am still squnting my eyes and scratching my head here,. but I get the sense that there is a shift that is coming, and I am more and more convinced every day that the promise of Enterprise Social Software and Enterprise 2.0 will not be fulfilled by a facebook-clone inside the enterprise, but something much deeper and more action-focused.

A few years in, I feel like we (you, me, all of us) are just getting started on the second iteration of this big idea.

Use of social media

• The Machinery of Hope : Rolling Stone - A substantial article analyzing the volunteer organization in the Obama campaign and the role of social media tools
• BBC NEWS | Technology | Internet key to Obama victories - A fairly substantial report on the Obama campaign’s effective use of the Internet during the primary season
• Inside Obama’s Surging Net-Roots Campaign - Analysis and commentary of the Obama campaign’s use of the internet as an organizing and fund-raising tool
• Members vs. Customers: How the Obama and Clinton Online Campaigns Differ - Harvard Business Online’s Conversation Starter - An analysis of the differing approaches to enlisting supporters by the Obama and Clinton campaigns during primary season. Turns an eye toward the differing uses of supporting technology and how those differences reflected differing assumptions and goals about the role of supporters
• The Media Equation - How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power - NYTimes.com - An excellent overview piece of reporting on how the Obama campaign made effective use of social media tools and thinking.

Effective use of engaged volunteers

• Obama Opens the GOTV Firehose | The Next Right - Analysis of the organizing principles and strategies behind the Obama campaign’s ground organization
• Obama Camp Relying Heavily on Ground Effort - A fairly detailed analysis of the organizing principles behind how the Obama campaign built its volunteer organization
• Zack Exley: The New Organizers, Part 1: What’s really behind Obama’s ground game - A case study of the principles and approach behind the ground level volunteer organization in the Obama campaign. Some good insights into how to take full advantage of a motivated volunteer force with the right organizing principles and the right supporting technology

Lessons for organizational design and strategy

• Obama’s Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators - Umair Haque - Umair Haque is one of the most insightful analysts and interpreters of how new technologies are influencing and shaping organizational design choices. Here he turns his eye on the lessons available in the success of the Obama campaign.
• Barack Obama’s Edge-Based Organization - John Sviokla - An early analysis of some of the broader lessons for organizations and organizational design that can be drawn from the Obama campaign

Many people have been writing about the explosion of information through web 2.0 for some time and the need to provide better ways to understand it. Let me start with a fable I have mentioned before in connection with the web. Here is a summary of Borges Library of Babel from the wikipedia:

“…his universe consists of an endless expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival—and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just a few basic characters (letters, spaces and punctuation marks). Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books. The narrator notes that the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages. Conversely, for any given text some language could be devised that would make it readable with any of an infinite number of different contents. Despite — indeed, because of — this glut of information, all books are totally useless to the reader, leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. However, Borges speculates on the existence of the “Crimson Hexagon”, containing a book that contains the log of all the other books; the librarian who reads it is akin to God.”

Well, the Crimson Hexagon has arrived and it came from Harvard. Now this one is a bit more focused than Borges version. Crimson Hexagon, the software service, provides brand monitoring that takes analytics beyond counting mentions or positive / negative / neutral ratings to focus on finding and understanding relevant opinion. It enables marketing professionals to measure and understand opinion according to their own business criteria. Crimson Hexagon is currently available via consulting services and will be available via Software as a Service (SaaS) in 2009. The technology within Crimson Hexagon was developed under the direction of Gary King, a Government professor at Harvard and director of its Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Crimson Hexagon has an exclusive licensing agreement with Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development.

I spoke with Perry Hewitt, their VP of Marketing. Perry said that in the old world, information was expensive to acquire. Now it is free or almost free but it is expensive to make sense of it.  This is especially true for brand related information. Some companies have a person, often an intern or new hire, sit in a back room and go through Google Alerts or some other tool.  However, the information glut will soon drown this strategy.  Crimson Hexagon is designed to let the computer manage the analytics, after a person teaches it what to look for.  This education occurs by providing the system with a sampling of 10 to 20 instances of specific types of opinion, either positive or negative, you would like the algorithm to be able to recognize. Then it can cover millions of new content examples looking for what is said and when the opinions reflected in this content. 

For example, looking at comments about wait time at a help desk can help a consumer electronic firm understand if there is positive or negative climate and what are the causal factors.  You can track these opinions over time to see the effects of new events or programs. Do you see lasting effects, positive or negative, or do the effects fade over time.

In another example, I saw the tracking on public web content about the iPhone and you could see the range of opinion on: Apple apps, web access, third party apps, app store, interface, and other positive.  You can also see temporal events such as favorable reviews or announcements and see if there are correlated changes in opinions in any of the categories.

There used to be a saying that any publicity was good as long as they got the spelling correct.  Perry said that Crimson Hexagon lets you go beyond the buzz to understand the nature of this buzz. They have a saying, stop counting and start learning.  The Tower of Babel is built on numbers. Crimson Hexagon plans to go beyond this. I am going to learn more in the coming months about how this will work and will do a more detailed post on the AppGap.  In the meanwhile, they have a Crimson Hexagon blog where you can follow the story.

I have just had the opportunity to spend a week in Paris, meeting and talking with the team at blueKiwi, under the leadership of Carlos Diaz and Christophe Rouitheau, two dynamic and intelligent young French entrepreneurs.  They and their team, thanks to live-wire Bertrand Duperrin, invited me and Stowe Boyd to speak at the launch of the 2009 version of blueKiwi collaborative platform.

I’ve also had the chance to connect with Headshift’s Dr. Olivier Amprimo, a young organizational sociologist, strategist and early-stage entrepreneur who is (I believe) helping to raise the bar regarding the mass customisation of work with his involvement with Personall, the brainchild of he and Jeremy Grinbaum (ex of IBM and Google Enterprise) and Jean-Patrice Glafkides, also an ex-IBMer.

Additionally, I’ve had the pleasure to meet and discuss with Dr. Miguel Membrado (co-founder of several leading search and collaboration related software applications), David Guillocheau and Patrice Malaurie of Talentys, and Philippe Colin of Itexium, an IT strategy and implementation consulting boutique.  There’s even an Enterprise 2.0 Institute at the Grenoble Ecole de Management, headed by Richard Collin

France has a long history and reputation of hierarchical organizations headed by (generally) imperial and autocratic top management (at least, I believe that’s a reasonable way of phrasing their reputations seen from a North American point of view.  I am certainly no expert in macro-economics but am aware of the general belief that France needs some economic revitalization (who doesn’t, these days ?) and that some of that has to do with its organizations and their structures and methods. However, France’s companies and economy still produce(s) some very interesting products and services, the country has healthy financial and medical care and educational systems

But .. and I believe this an important "but" … France also has a very well educated work force (compared to the North American workforce), a culture that enjoys examining and discussing issues (they cannot help themselves ), and workplace cultural habits that encourage and reinforce teamwork. In addition, in no small part due to the maturing of the EU, there are young people from all over western and eastern Europe living and working, and contributing their brainpower and energy, to the workplace in France.

Additionally, the social culture in France is essentially based on discourse, examination of ideas, arguing in friendly (mostly) ways about almost  any issue under the sun In my books, that makes for fertile ground for the enracination (taking root of) effective social computing.

We bloggers with a strong interest in Enterprise 2.0 and who carry out research and practice consulting, strategizing, theorizing, or coaching tend to believe that social computing in the workplace is inevitably tomorrow’s foundation for knowledge work.  According to almost any theory, its use along with the inputs of factual information and decent brainpower should lead to increases in intellectual capital, organizational capability and thus enhanced productivity over time.  If this is the case, then it’s my belief that France’s workplaces of the future should be interesting places should the stereotypical dependence on elite autocracy and its orientation towards hierarchy be reduced.

If the traditional reliance on top-down dynamics can be viewed with a critical eye, and if France’s leaders of tomorrow can bring themselves to adapt to th e new leadership style(s) born of listening, sensing and helping interdependent systems respond to the ongoing rapid changes we face today, then France has a lot of potential with which to work with regard to the promise(s) of Enterprise 2.0.

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RightNow Technologies 2008 recently released their Customer Experience Impact Report conducted by Harris Interactive.  I have written about RightNow a number of times (see - RightNow Offers New Features with August 08 Release) for the most recent. The survey polled 2,112 US consumers* online about how they engage with companies both online and via phone, what they find frustrating and how negative and positive customer experiences affect them.

For the third year in a row, an increasing number of consumers indicate they will stop doing business with an organization or company because of a negative customer experience. This year it was 87%, up from 80% in 2007 and 68% in 2006.

The study was done recently but before the major economic down turn. However, the results indicate that the significance of customer experiences does not go down in bad financial times. More than half (58%) of consumers said they will always or often pay more for a better customer experience during a down economy. Consumers also said the most important thing companies could do to encourage them to spend more is to improve the overall customer experience. As a consumer I would agree with all of this.

In recent years, contact centers have faced mounting pressure to move from being a cost center to both supporting the customers and generating revenue.  The study addressed this issue and found that more than half of consumers (58%) are at least somewhat likely to make a purchase during a service engagement, and 24% of them have already made a purchase based on an agent’s recommendation.   This is consistent with my own experience.  For one major telecom’s call centers, we found that call center agents who used the knowledge management system to improve the customer experience were three times more likely to successfully cross sell during the call.

This extends to referrals. They study found that 58% of consumers said outstanding service is the number one reason they would recommend a company to someone else; up from 51% in 2007.  This beats service low prices (44%) and quality products/services (43%) in the recommendation-stakes. The flip side is that customers are almost twice as likely to tell others about poor treatment. The study found that 84% of US adults who had a negative experience with an organization or company said they would spread the word about a bad experience – up from 74% in 2007 and 67% in 2006. In addition, 26% of customers said they have sworn at bad service; 17% have shouted and 9% have felt sick.  I stopped doing any of these things. I just do not go back.

These results are very similar to another Harris Study sponsored by Tealeaf – see Online Customer Experience – What is Going On? It found that early 9 out of 10 (87%) online adults who have conducted an online transaction in the past year have experienced problems. Those who experience problems conducting online transactions also reported feeling disappointed (55%), angry (41%), and confused (23%). As I said then, I usually feel all of the above even though I do not actively engage in the reactions found in RigthNow study.  Tealeaf addresses the issue with web analytics (see Tealeaf Brings Visibility to Online Customer Experiences) and Rightnow provides technology to support online and call center customer support. (see Customer-centric CRM from RightNow). It seems these solutions can work together.

In a new report in Knowledge@Wharton, Paul J.H. Schoemaker, research director for UPenn Wharton School’s Mack Center for Technological Innovation, suggests that, for some companies, the economic crisis can actually provide an innovation platform:

“The crisis has multiple impacts. Loss of revenue and profit will at first instill a cost cutting mentality, which is not good for innovation. But if the patient is bleeding you need to stop that first. Then, however, a phase starts where leaders ask which parts of their business model are weak (and perhaps unsustainable) and that, in turn, can lead to restructuring and reinvention.”

How does a company foster radical innovation? Schoemaker’s associate, George Day recommends an “Open Innovation” approach, which is also known as “crowdsourcing.” In essence, partners collaborate to solve business problems. The article cites Waltham, Mass.-based InnoCentive, which matches corporate “seekers” who have science, engineering and business problems with amateur “solvers” worldwide. The “solvers” then compete — for bragging rights and often token rewards — to provide the best answers to the corporate problems.

With the rise and ubiquity of enterprise 2.0 approaches — from wikis to blogging to sites such as Twitter — makes such collaboration possible, at minimal to no cost.

For those of you who want to dig in a little deeper on what your options are for enterprise micro sharing, Pistachio Consulting has released a report that examines the state of what is available and what your options are in terms of deployment. You can view or download the report here.

This report is an ideal tool for kickstarting discussions in your organization, and I know how much work Laura at Pistachio has put in to this.

Go get a copy.

Any fast following strategy assumes learning from the leaders as a necessary first step. If you actually believe that the strategy can work, you need to be operating with something along the lines of the following as a theory of learning over time:

In this model, watching a first mover and waiting allows you to start your learning at a higher level and sometime later pass the first mover as their learning process peaks and levels off or slows down. I have two problems with this model. First, it assumes that the lessons learned by our first mover are easily observable and quickly transferable. Second, it still denigrates learning as an ongoing requirement. In this model, learning only needs to happen long enough to figure out the new strategic game and we get back to execution as the only relevant differentiator. It encourages you to undervalue and under invest in learning as a strategic competence.

I suspect that strategic learning is much more likely to follow a logistics curve of some sort. Early learning is relatively slow, followed by a period a very rapid learning, and ultimately a leveling off. If you accept that model of learning, then a fast follower strategy becomes even more suspect. In that environment, first mover advantages are likely to be more pronounced, with something like the following representing that situation:

At this point, being early in my own learning process, I mostly have more questions, not answers. Among them, in no particular order, are:

1. What’s the relative value of competitive secrecy vs. the internal organizational drag on learning imposed by attempts to preserve secrecy?
2. What can you do to shorten the slow ramp stage of learning?
3. Under what circumstances would fast following remain a viable strategy? Are those circumstances strategically interesting?
4. How do shortening learning cycles alter this argument?

Jevon MacDonald posted an interesting piece, In uncertain times, Enterprise 2.0 takes the stage. He began with the statement that, “for many people the positioning of Enterprise 2.0 as a cost reduction engine is not new. Complexity reduction, efficiency increases and fast response times have been the cornerstone of many Enterprise Social Software pitches in the last 5 years.” He concluded, “In a time of uncertainty such as we have seen in the past several months, new and promising technologies may prove to be the safest harbour for those who must continue to deliver growth.” I certainly agree.

In a related post, I wrote on Potential Social Software Winners in our New Economic World. In that post, I reported a conversation with Ali Riaz of Attivio about the potential impact of the current economic crisis on technology adoption. He noted that some of the large enterprise application providers are seeing decreasing sales. For example, SAP, has recently issued earnings warnings (via Jevon MacDonald). At the same time, Ali said they are finding an increasing demand at Attivio for their BI-search combination as companies want to better understand what is happening within their enterprise and customer base.

Now another enterprise 2.0 vendor, MindTouch, has now announced significant growth in Revenue, Customers and Partners. They are the developers of MindTouch Deki, a wiki-based collaboration platform for enterprise collaboration and mashups. (see my post - Deki Wiki Tees Itself Up as Your Intranet) Their reported growth benchmarks include: 368 percent increase in customers in the last 12 months through October of this year, 612 percent increase in revenue over the previous year, 132 percent growth in partners, value added resellers and system integrators and thousands in daily distribution and millions of users globally. MindTouch said that “customers and industry experts cite the immediate gains in productivity and operational efficiency afforded MindTouch Deki users as the cause for the dramatic growth in customer acquisition and new partners.”

Mindtouch also quoted Michael Coté, industry analyst with analyst firm RedMonk.

“When belts tighten, businesses don’t have the option to do less, they just need to pay less. So called Enterprise 2.0 software has been trying to streamline and modernize aging approaches to collaborative software for sometime now, and products like MindTouch Deki are results of those efforts. For companies looking to keep their collaborative applications up-to-date and cut back on costs at the same time, the crop of Enterprise 2.0 software that Deki belongs to is worth investigating.”

I think this is good news for MindTouch but also good news for enterprise 2.0 in general. It also makes sense to me. These tools are both relatively lower cost and also potentially led to both innovation and cost reductions. I have heard similar comments in informal conversation with other vendors in this space. What are you hearing from venders? If you are a vendor, do you have similar results to report?