The Importance of Context: Why Enterprise 2.0 Still Fails to Deliver Value

By Aaron Roe Fulkerson (@roebot) Aug 25, 2010

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Enterprise 2.0 has been cited by analysts, vendors and consumers as one of the most important emerging trends in business technology in the last decade. Yet we still haven’t witnessed a glut of measurably successful Enterprise 2.0 deployments.

This is not a measurability problem — it stems primarily from the rampant misapplication of consumer technologies in the form of point applications. As the name indicates, Enterprise 2.0 requires enterprise-ready technologies. This requires more than tossing handfuls of disconnected and undirected blogs, forums, social networks, micro-blogs and wikis into the enterprise. Indeed, successful Enterprise 2.0 deployments begin by focusing on business problems and succeed by creating an integrated enterprise solution.

Enterprise 2.0 has become a crowded space. It seems new vendors are appearing, and disappearing, on a weekly basis. In addition to the upstarts, legacy software vendors are constantly rolling out their “updated” offerings. The combination of vendors and their various delivery models has created a confusing landscape.

As I’ve written here before, Enterprise 2.0 adoption is being driven by the need to accelerate how we collaborate, by reducing the friction between our systems, applications and human assets. But most vendors have focused almost entirely on improving human to human collaboration with short term fixes, by merely adding more application silos — silos that entirely lack context for the end-user, the business and the stated goals of a given deployment.

No Middle Ground

These new E2.0 application silos are certainly easier to use than the clunky enterprise software of even five years ago. However, these point applications do not scale, cannot be customized and therefore force the users to adhere to the workflows defined by the vendors. Ultimately, the buyers aren’t even able to integrate these solutions into the overall enterprise landscape. To put it simply: many IT managers and CIOs are watching a slow motion train wreck.

Newer Enterprise 2.0 vendors are in a mad dash to slap features into their offerings in an effort to keep up with the legacy vendors. This slap-shod engineering, which is reminiscent of 1990s software, ensures critical capabilities that enable security, governance and standards compliance are thrown out the window first.

Photo credit: Flavia via Flickr

Meanwhile, the legacy vendors that offer scalable, extensible, secure and governable frameworks commonly take over a year to deliver any value and an army of developers to implement a solution that is often entirely inflexible and absurdly expensive.

To complicate matters, too many organizations have taken a purely social slant on meeting the needs of their users. As Barb Mosher expertly noted, while today’s expectations are being driven by the consumer market, these expectations shift rapidly, leaving the enterprise vendors and enterprise deployment teams to do their best to keep up. Of course, because the younger vendors are delivering purpose-built point applications and the legacy vendors’ frameworks are laborious and time consuming to implement they are unable to keep up with the ever-shifting demands.