Dean Guadagni has 20 years of business development, national account management, and sales management experience. Dean’s career experiences include a position as national account executive managing a $50 million dollar software licensing budget for one of the top five banks in the United States. He is currently a consultant for Domus Consulting Group in San Francisco. Dean has kindly consented to share his valuable insights on Web 2.0 from the real estate viewpoint.
1. How would you best define Web 2.0 and its current state in the Enterprise.
Web 2.0’s state in the enterprise? Underutilized due to lack of foresight, fear of legal issues, or lack of control over content within the workplace
2. How does Web 2.0 capabilities redefine the “Management of Knowledge” to meet the organizational objectives of the Enterprise.
Internal Blogs could be the most valuable tool since the copy machine. It could provide a voice to staffers up to C-level, it could be a pool for ideas, it could identify talents that the company was ignorant to within it’s human capital
3. What in your opinion are the relevant tools and applications available to create a coherent Web 2.0 environment for the Enterprise.
Blogging is the #1 tool that should be utilized. My best example is that of the blog network aka uber blog within the Real Estate space. Internal blogs would connect Realtors with their counterparts allowing the sharing of referrals, techniques, and other important strategies.
Pat Kitano of http://transparentre.com and newly appointed contributor to Forbes.com is the creator of the blog network.
Here a large brokerage will appoint 1-2 authors per office location. In our example 25 offices would have 50 authors who would ea write 1 article per week.
The benefits:
A. 20 posts per day would be a Google SEO “juice” gravy train.
B. Ea Realtor would give expertise at the neighborhood, city hyper local level.
C. The aggregate of the articles would essentially lock the competition out of every important key word Google search from Big Head to Long Tail thus wiping out the competition’s presence and leaving them vulnerable to “reputation management” issues.
4. What are your experiences with Web 2.0 and its acceptance in the Enterprise.
Web 2.0 in the enterprise is scoffed at as unimportant and ignored for the most part as something that would not effect the workplace.
5. What are your insights about the impact of Web 2.0 and its future in the Enterprise
Web 2.0 has a prominent place in the enterprise, it remains a first adopters advantage, and it has multi faceted advantages beyond idea formulation, intimate communication, cross referencing divisions, time management savings, and recruiting within and outside the enterprise.
March 12th, 2008
Craig Cmehil is a web developer by nature, his experiences starting back in the early 90’s, turned SAP Evangelist by passion. From his time as community member and contributor through the SAP Developer Network (SDN) since the founding of the site in 2003, he’s found himself thrown into the dynamic world of SAP in many aspects. His adventures have lead him to where he is now, member of the global SAP family and Community Evangelist of SDN itself, having joined SAP in the summer of 2005. Craig has agreed to share his valuable insights on Web 2.0 in the Enterprise here.
1. How would you best define Web 2.0 and its current state in the Enterprise.
Web 2.0 seems to have meaning meanings, for me Web 2.0 is about the nature of sharing and working together to make a mutal dent in the overloaded work lives we all seem to have.
2. How does Web 2.0 capabilities redefine the “Management of Knowledge” to meet the organizational objectives of the Enterprise.
I think it’s still a little early to tell on this one, in many Enterprise organization the concepts of Web 2.0 have been around for years but the realization that what they have been doing is the same thing everyone outside the company are no talking about is a slow one. For example at SAP the use of a wiki has been on going for years, they are still probably the most dominant form of collaboration internally, then we’ve our own “Collaboration” tools with our Enterprise Portal which are heavily used probably more so than the wiki.
3. What in your opinion are the relevant tools and applications available to create a coherent Web 2.0 environment for the Enterprise.
This is a bit of a “hot” spot, everyone wants to know the “best practice”, it is after what Entperises do. I gave this some thought just the other day after having attended the Enterprise 2.0 Summit @ CeBit - http://craig.cmehil.com/2008/03/enterprise-20-and-acupuncture.html I captured my thoughts in that blog entry and I think that is the biggest problem many face both Enterprise and other firms. They are all looking for the silver bullet and there isn’t one. Blogs for one might not work for another. It’s matter of finding out first “Who is my audience” and how are they going to react, what are they going to be able to relate to and then once you start, start asking that all over again and do it often to ensure you are on the right track.
4. What are your experiences with Web 2.0 and its acceptance in the Enterprise.
Being the Community Evangelist for the SAP Developer Network, a over 1 million user strong community of developers focused on and around SAP technology I’ve had lots of experiences probably enough to fill a book. Also having taken those experiences back within the company I’ve had numerous positive experiences as well. It’s obvious that people see merit and value in the concepts that Web 2.0 offer but one of the biggest barriers is security. Sure it’s all about being open but a company also has to protect it’s interest and mindshare so most every company I know has guidelines for public communications as well as a business code of conduct. Many of the exisiting Web 2.0 tools do not take those things into account and there is a network ripple effect that can come into play. Let’s see for example I share something with “my friends” in a social application, now I protect my updates and I only “friend” the people I know. However let’s say one of my friends repeats part of my comment in their reply - now through the ripple effect every one of their “friends” many of which I may not know. This can be dangerous for many reasons not the least to say for the possibility of mis-information. Every play that game where you whisper a sentence into someone’s ear then they whisper to someone and you go down the line, try it. Try it first with 5 people then 10 then 15 then 20 - what was the result of the original sentence at the end of it?
5. What are your insights about the impact of Web 2.0 and its future in the Enterprise.
The biggest impact I think we’ll see is a broader understanding and a stronger desire to work smarter. Will Web 2.0 change the face of a company? Probably not but the ideas behind it will help make the information worker of tomorrow a much more efficient worker.
March 12th, 2008
Web 2.0 is beginning to be identified in the enterprise more with lightweight applications like blogs, wikis and mashups. These are what most users in the enterprise are already comfortable with while compared to much larger applications for enterprise kowledge and resource management. Web. 2.0 technologies like blogs and wikis, have always shown greater acceptance amongst users in the enterprise. Enterprises are rolling out Web 2.0 technologies to help its employees be more productive. New recruits are being trained on sites like Second Life, Facebook networks are part of the corporate intranet, and many more such instances where low-cost and lightweight Web 2.0 technologies have been incorporated into larger business strategies for harnessing collective intelligence. Gartner analysts have identified that Web 2.0 in the enterprise is unavoidable this year as changing demographics and consumerization drive this inevitability. It is with this focus that we have decided to share the views of experts on the following aspects of the state of Web 2.0 in the Enterprise. If you have an opinion on the same you are welcome to comment here on this blog or post the same on your blog with a link to this post here.
Questions for the Web 2.0 Expert
- How would you best define Web 2.0 and its current state in the Enterprise.
- How does Web 2.0 capabilities redefine the “Management of Knowledge” to meet the organizational objectives of the Enterprise.
- What in your opinion are the relevant tools and applications available to create a coherent Web 2.0 environment for the Enterprise.
- What are your experiences with Web 2.0 and its acceptance in the Enterprise.
- What are your insights about the impact of Web 2.0 and its future in the Enterprise
March 11th, 2008
Cloud computing is most certainly the hottest buzzword around and is identified by sharing infrastructure to provide IT services. Amazon is credited to have pioneered Cloud Computing. ‘Cloud computing‘ to the uninitiated is essentially accessing clusters of parallel running mainframes with hyper fast processing power. Samuel J Palmisano, chief executive officer of IBM, identifies that ‘cloud computing’ is about training ‘tomorrow’s programmers’ to write software that can support a ‘tidal wave’ of global Web growth, and trillions of secure transactions every day. Google and IBM have endeavored to popularize this flavor of large scale distributed computing in educational institutions. It is envisaged that eventually Cloud Computing will become as common as accessing a mass utility like electricity. Industry experts say ‘cloud computing holds the future’. For the Individual though it is far more likely that cloud computing will transform the digital life as it will be contained in multiple places and the web will be the hub through which it all flows. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM and Cisco are among the heavy weights with big efforts underway to harness cloud computing power for consumers and corporations alike. This certainly heralds the return of the mainframe and as with the clouds they are everywhere and will be always around.
February 16th, 2008
Virtualization is indeed taking IT departments by storm, as estimated by Gartner, 90 percent of Fortune 1000 companies will use virtualization in 2008. Virtualization is an approach that can be applied to manage complex IT environments and can save enterprises a lot of money. For the uninitiated, Virtualization is the technique of managing and presenting storage devices and resources functionally, regardless of their physical layout or location. Virtualization can be applied to software as well as physical resources such as servers and storage. Virtualization in the context of storage is a means by which multiple physical storage devices are viewed as a single logical unit. While many enterprises started their virtualization efforts with test and development servers in the data center, today the focus is shifting to virtual desktop infrastructure deployments. However “Virtualization technologies are not a one size fits all. It takes time to figure out your users’ needs and plan the implementation,” says Forrester Research. Hence a clearer perspective is required on interoperability of new virtualized systems and existing infrastructure, effective migration to virtualized systems and maximizing ROI.
January 10th, 2008
The recent buzz on Agile Software development only reaffirms it’s ascendancy over traditional IT design and development methodologies. This trend in the current changing environments will ensure a quantum increase from the less than 20 percent usage of agile development processes as indicated by Forrester Research’s “Enterprise Agile Adoption in 2006” survey. As CIOs turn believers in the flavor of Agile, its worth identifying the opposition from enterprise architects and QA testers alike as these become integral roles of self managing Agile teams which in turn increases project management time and cost efficiencies. The future of Agile will see important stakeholders turn evangelists for it’s cause.
October 18th, 2007
It is often remarked that Web 2.0 has evolved to the “next wave”. While serious discussions have visualized the natural emergence of Web 2.0, a recent post by Nat Torkington on the Future of Web 2.0 was indeed a refreshing perspective albeit in a lighter vein. He forecasts that in 2009 Firefox 4 would integrate with the native operating system’s desktop to offer a new cross-platform widget environment and in 2010 Semantic Web developers would release a new XML format which in turn would herald the next version of the web. While the time lines of similar forecasts are indeed debatable it would help to have a more comprehensive analysis of the future of Web 2.0 and the preparedness to integrate the same.
April 1st, 2007
Just recovering from an attack that had all my servers rootkitted it is all the more reason to believe what security analysts have been predicting that kernel rootkits, which cloak their activity by replacing a portion of a program’s software kernel with modified code, are expected to grow in frequency in 2007. Here’s the scary part, Even if you can identify the Firmware rootkit, there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. Current rootkit detection tools consider only the PC’s disk and overlook the devices that have firmware(software that is embedded in a hardware device). Why even the battery has firmware which can be updated from the operating system. Then what about PCI devices, Network cards, graphics cards, available on every machine on the network and more often these are flashable, allowing updates. This again is just one way the rootkit can get in and propagate. Even the Preboot Environment isn’t spared this way. So watch out… even if you are just updating a firmware from the manufacturers site for your network or graphic card.
March 27th, 2007
