The Forum Corporation blog
offers some excellent content on such topics as learning, leadership,
collaboration, enhancing customer experiences, and accelerating strategic
execution. It is a collaborative effort by a number of the Forum team members.
The Forum Corporation began in 1971 and it “helps senior leaders
execute innovative, people-driven solutions that accelerate business growth,
corporate change and overall performance.”
I have known and respected Forum for some time as I competed against them in
the 1980s when I was with Spectrum. See my post, Useful Guidelines and Metrics for Speeding Up Your Organization, for a review of their recent book, Strategic Speed: Mobilize People, Accelerate
Execution.

Recent posts include,
Why is it so hard to create a great customer experience? by Jane Marham
Weinstein that makes a great organization structure point.  Customer experiences, whether viral or
physical, generally require an end-to-end process that involves multiple
departments. If the organization is structured around these different
departments (e.g. marketing, customer service, order fulfillment) it can be
like the blind men and the elephant with each department having a different, and
incomplete perception or the customer. However, if the organization is
structured around the customer experience, it can have a more accurate picture
of the customer and provide a better and more coordinated customer experience.

The VUCA Future – Are You
Ready? by Steve Barry describes the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous
business environment. I have heard of complex adaptive systems for some time
but this was a new term for me. Forum interviewed futurist Bob
Johansen for his thoughts on VUCA and what lies ahead for business. Bob said
that the term VUCA was coined at the US Army War College that is the graduate
school for future generals. In a VUCA world the best leaders have vision,
understanding, clarity, and agility.  Clarity and agility were two of the leadership
characteristics promoted in Forum’s new book, Strategic Speed: Mobilize People, Accelerate Execution. The world is
changing and leadership skills need to transition to adapt. The complete
interview provides many useful insights.

In the post, New Motivation Theory in Business: n Lrn?, Jocelyn
Davis builds on David McClelland (need for achievement, need for affiliation, and need for power) to offer a fourth
motivation, need for learning. People moved by this trait “would have a
strong need to collect and synthesize new information, to reflect on their
experiences, and to master new skills.” I would certainly fall into this
category so it makes sense to me.  Jocelyn goes on to compare these n Lrns (to use McClelland’s
notational style) with those primarily motivated by the three original
traits. 

For example, someone with the power motivation (n
Pow) would be motivated to teach for the ability to influence while a n Lrn person
would be motivated by what they could learn from the experience.  In contrast, someone with the affiliation
need would be motivated to teach by the possible relationships they could
establish. Of course, there can be more than one of these traits within an
individual but one or two are often dominant.  While Jocelyn notes that there does not seem to be
experimental evidence for this trait, it makes intuitive sense.  If you have employees with the n Lrn
trait, then you need to make sure they are properly motivated in their work.

This is just a sampling. There is much more by
additional authors. I would encourage you to explore if you are interested in
the learning, leadership, organizational development, collaboration, and other
related fields. 

I have been covering the
Cisco I-Prize for several years and continue to be impressed with this
initiative.  I spoke with Sharon
Wong, the Director of Business Development for Cisco’s Emerging Technology
group to discuss the conclusion of the second I-Prize. She said that the first
one validated the desire for teams to work together on innovation on the global
scale and they learned how much people really like to collaborate (see Cisco Announces I-Prize Winner and Results of Their
Global Collaboration). 
So this time they provided greater collaboration support through Cisco
tools including the following four.

The IT Channel Planet reports
that Gartner has predicted SaaS revenue
within enterprise application software market will jump up 14 percent over
2009, based on convergence with cloud computing models and diminished security
and availability concerns among business customers. I heard about this through
George Dearing on Twitter.

Three of the growth markets are project
and portfolio management (PPM), content, communications and collaboration
(CCC), and customer relationship management (CRM). These are all areas I continue
to cover on this blog and the AppGap as they are key aspects of enterprise 2.0.
It is encouraging to see these numbers,

It is interesting to note that the
collaboration market exhibits the most noticeably disproportionate SaaS
adoption rates range from 4 percent for enterprise content management to 82
percent for web conferencing. However, I have seen that most collaboration platform
vendors are offering a SaaS option. I think this will continue to grow. 

A week ago, I wrote an article for CMS Wire on The Long Hill for Enterprise Collaboration.  Normally I put an announcement at the top of my blog sharing the link, but I wanted to write this post, and I’ve just been a tad busy…

You should read the article before proceeding much further.  In the article, I talk about the challenges facing the adoption of collaboration tools, an important one being the desire to perform one activity in one interface.  Email is a classic example because, for all its faults, you can collaborate with anyone with an email address.  People will tend to stick with one tool and not keep switching unless they are the “stopper” that is always on a mission to convert people to the good of collaboration platforms.

Well, this scenario is something I have seen quite a bit.  There is one example that really drives home the need to get people not just out of email, but to get everyone into something that can transfer collaborative data between systems just like email is transferred using SMTP today.  That example….me.

Pie Said What?

That is correct, I am a violator.  I am not always compliant.  I have been implementing collaboration solutions for a long time.  I almost always play the role of a stopper in any organization or project that I join.  In the last six months, I’ve noticed something….

I’m spending more time collaborating in email than ever before.

I am working more with people outside my organization than I ever have in the past.  Doing a lot of work in the Federal market, my company is frequently teaming with other companies, and not always the same ones.  For each effort, we have to find different ways to share content and track actions.  Rather than supply the collaboration solution for everyone, we tend to use email.  Why? Simple, our partners use it as well.

It doesn’t stop there though.  I have also been working with people at AIIM and vendor companies on CMIS efforts.  More users and more reasons to collaborate, but still no single system.  Once again, we all use email, so that is where we work.

Doing all of this in email, I have found myself collaborating with colleagues on purely internal efforts via email.  I’m just cruising along in my workday, and before I know it, I’ve sent documents via email rather than sending an alert or a link to a document in an email.

I’m regressing!!!!!

What Can Be Done?

Well, like any good American, I’m going to blame someone else for my problem.  There are two solutions which would solve the problem:

• Universal Collaboration: So we need an incredible, kickin’, collaborative platform with no storage or user limits that is online an free to everyone.  Let’s not forget security because I want to collaborate in one place on all my efforts, not just the public ones.
• Universal Communication: Bad name, I know, but the point is simple.  If my collaborative artifacts could be sent to anyone for interaction the way I send email, but they do their work in their collaborative environment and I am staying in mine, that would be great!

I think it is pretty safe to say that the first will not happen in the foreseeable future.  The second sounds like a lot of work.  Well, the efforts we expend to push Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 adoption is a lot of work as well.

Fun fact, one old, and lovely feature of eRoom is the ability to email content to a room.  That was a first step in the right direction.  If collaborative packages could just be emailed between systems in a standard format, that might solve all the problems.

There is no easy path.  Maybe instead of trying to get over the hurdles by creating new features, selling, and evangelizing, maybe we should make the tools the obvious in-process tools.

But why solve it?  There is a lot of money to be made telling people how great the software is now.

I recently received a review copy of a useful new
Forrester report, Four Giants Compete For Your Cloud Email
Business
by Ted Schadler, that has a cost breakdown of cloud-based email services from
the four leading vendors- Google, Microsoft, IBM and Cisco – and indicates that
Google and Microsoft are in the lead for customers. Here is a good overview in
Ted’s words from the executive summary.

“Google jumped into
the enterprise email market in 2007 with a $50 annual subscription to its cloud
email service and turned the market upside down. Microsoft quickly re-evaluated
and repriced its Exchange Online offering to $5 per user per month; IBM
launched LotusLive Notes and iNotes for $5 and $3, respectively; and Cisco
purchased PostPath and opened its WebEx Mail offering with a 5 GB mailbox for
$5 per user per month. Each of these big four collaboration vendors has since
beefed up and clarified its road map for cloud email and collaboration services.
Their email offerings are rapidly approaching feature and price parity — at
least on the checklist items.”

Since I became an enterprise of one in 2004, I
missed these most recent corporate email wars. My last employer moved from
Notes to Outlook but Google had not yet turned the market upside down. Now both
Google and Microsoft have bundled in their Web productivity apps, something
that IBM and Cisco do not. Cisco allows you to use Outlook.

Over
the next five years, Ted writes, enterprises will be re-evaluating their email
strategy and partner. For vendors, it will be a tough five years as companies
pick a messaging and collaboration partner for the next decade. Ted gives a
nice way to estimate your total email costs that appear to be significantly
cheaper in the cloud. However, there are migration costs to get there.

Forrester also expects
that email will improve it gains features that improve usability and
functionality such as: “analytics to perform triage on messages; collaboration
features to make it easier to act on a message; in-message widgets to pull
information relevant to the message; pushbutton publishing to a team wiki;
messages, activities, feeds, tweets, etc., in a single inbox; and so on.”  This is good news and another alignment
with the enterprise concept that suggests it is becoming standard. Many of the
collaboration platforms already allow you to use them within an email client so
this is going in the other direction but likely focused on the tools offered by
the email provider. 

PBworks has now launched its
PBworks Customer Relationship Edition, which extends CRM solutions such as
Salesforce.com by offering shared online workspaces for collaborating with
customers and prospects throughout the entire customer lifecycle.  I recently spoke with Chris Yeh, VP Marketing at
PBworks about this new offering that
they refer to as CRC or Customer Relationship Collaboration. This new term indicate
support for collaboration with customers rather the management of them through
CRM.

Our new book, Empowered, will be in book stores on September 14. But for a real-world conversation about what it means to unleash employees to solve customer problems using readily available technology, come to our Content & Collaboration Forum in Maryland just outside of Washington, D.C. on October 7 and 8.

Yes, this is a pitch to come to a Forrester event, but I promise you that it will be worth your time if you're looking for help with such Empowered topics as enterprise social, empowered employees, iPad in the enterprise, innovation, collaboration in the cloud, videoconferencing, and IT consumerization as well as deep dives into critical topics like search and taxonomy, enterprise content management, and what it means to be a content & collaboration leader.

You'll get two days of my Forrester analyst colleagues' presentations and face time as well as keynote presentations from some great and experienced content & collaboration executives. GM's Steve Sacho is way ahead of the curve in understanding how to turn consumerization from IT threat to business opportunity. Richard West of the defense firm, BAE Systems, is bringing his story of how investments in knowledge management and collaboration have empowered employees to work more efficiently together to solve customer problems. Both speakers as well as Zach Brand, head of all things interesting at NPR Digital Media (yes, that NPR), will share their stories, lessons, and experience.

Read more

VMWare has got it down: Sell a virtualization solution with anchor applications (and seats) that no service provider can live without, starting with email. This is the call we made when VMWare bought open source email and collaboration provider Zimbra from Yahoo! last February. And now they've delivered with the upgraded Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance 6.0 targeted at service providers and other virtual cloud hosters. What it means:

What it means #1. VMWare is solidly in the market to provision service providers with email. Service providers that want to resell Google or Microsoft's email have the benefit of low capital costs and rapid deployment. But service providers that don't want to resell another vendors' cloud services need a solution that runs at low cost on cheap servers with easy peasy provisioning. That's what the Zimbra collaboration appliance promises. Will it deliver? Love to hear from service providers on this one.

What it means #2. VMWare drives another nail into the coffin of on-premises business email. At $5/mailbox/month for cloud email, if you take away client software and mailbox administration costs, our analysis shows that it costs twice as much to host a mailbox yourself than to host it in the cloud. This offering gives service providers around the world the opportunity to compete at that price. So who would use on-premises email? Only someone with stringent requirements, massive scale, or a recent upgrade. Even the federal government is moving to cloud-based email as GSA has announced.

Read more

Remember portals? I
have heard about a number of cases where enterprise 2.0 collaboration systems
have replaced portals. One firm even replaced their portal with Facebook and
got a lot of PR for it. Is this a trend? I do not mean the Facbook part, just
the E20 part.

Perhaps but a recent
Forrester report, Portal Servers Refuse To Go Quietly, by Tim Waters found that
portals are still popular in many circles. As the report summary cited, “portal
server technologies continue to be widely deployed by enterprises. Although
leading vendors are evolving portal servers into broad content and
collaboration platforms, the core portal services — aggregation “on the glass”
and user authorization for access control and personalization — remain the
leading use cases. Newer alternatives, including open source platforms and mashups,
are gaining ground.”

So portals may remain
popular but they need to look over their c shoulders as the report also
recommended that, “knowledge management teams should carefully evaluate their
needs to determine if a portal server layer is appropriate.”  

Drawing for a survey
taken in North America and Europe, Q4 2009, they found that 20% of the firms
surveyed planned to expand or upgrade existing portal server implementations,
26% had already implemented and were not expanding while 15% planned to
implement over the next year or longer. 
 

There were some
concerns. Many users suffered from the complexity and the extensive
customization effort. I have seen many of these drawn out portal
implementations first hand.  They
can be the darling of the solutions integrators looking for big time projects
with ever expanding budgets.  The
report offers a number of instances of similar outcomes. It
also said that the majority of the users they interviewed were surprised by the
amount of customization required. 
I am not surprised at this finding as I have rarely seen a portal
project come in on budget or time.

Downsized budgets can
be an obstacle for new portal efforts. 
The report found that many firms indicated that the
move toward Lean and Agile development practices has encouraged them to
reevaluate the rule of heavy handed portal servers. The report encourages
knowledge management and IT people to be aware of the other options available. 

Adobe has gotten into the content management business, with its announcement earlier today of its intent to acquire Day software for $240 million. Day –with its WCM, DAM, and collaboration offerings — has had a good deal of buzz over the last year or so. Why? Mostly due to a renewed marketing push, demo-friendly products, and occasional uncertainty around competitors due to acquisitions (Interwoven, Vignette) . Day was one of the few remaining independent WCM vendors with enterprise credentials and was ripe for the picking, particularly given the strength of its WCM product. Adobe, of course, brings its document, creative authoring, and rich Internet application development tools to the table.

With the Day deal and last year’s Omniture acquisition, Adobe continues to assemble components of the online customer engagement ecosystem that we wrote about earlier this year. What’s interesting is which vendors are approaching this ecosystem — from the standpoint of ECM (IBM, Oracle/Stellent, Open Text/Vignette), marketing software (Alterian/MediaSurface), enterprise search (Autonomy/Interwoven), and now creativity software/interactive Web applications (Adobe).

So, what does this deal mean for content and collaboration pros?

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