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We are slowly beginning to hear success stories of the Enterprise 2.0 tools in the corporate world. Productivity increases, communications efficiencies, grassroots systems being validated by IT. E 2.0 is getting a lot of press, analyst and blog coverage and enterprise software vendors are launching their forays into the space every month.

One of the things I am reading and hearing very little about from the market is how these solutions are directly benefiting the customer. All the hype seems to have an internal, corporate focus. Of course there is nothing wrong with this, and the customer should ultimately benefit from corporate productivity enhancements. I believe however we would see higher adoption rates if these solutions were directly tied to customer benefit.

To clarify, I am not speaking of applications using web or Enterprise 2.0 technologies. I am referring to traditional brick and mortar business deploying applications using these technologies for their customers. I know there are some examples of this of course; even my company has launched a Facebook network for one of its products. I think when we see wide-spread and well documented examples of customer focused deployments adoption rates will soar.

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Andrew McAfee has posted a couple of great blogs (as usual) that mention the decline in “information costs”:

“Most of what I’ve seen recently strongly indicates that the sudden near-disappearance of information costs is bringing up a fascinating and consequential set of questions for organization designers and corporate leaders. They now have the freedom to place decision rights where they wish without being hampered by information costs. What are the long-term consequences of this great decoupling?”

While I certainly understand his point that Enterprise 2.0 technologies are allowing information to become available at a much reduced cost, I think he is missing, probably not addressing would be a more accurate description, part of the equation of the information cost calculation. Certainly E 2.0 tools which are often free open source, or extremely low cost, allow people access to information, and the ability to create information more cost effectively than ever before. However, there is still a large cost associated with capturing, storing, and disseminating structured transactional type data. Look at the market for ERP and BI as evidence.

Ask any company that has recently deployed SAP, and a BI tool on top of it if there is a disappearing information cost. Sure, you can create an RSS feed of an employee blog at virtually no cost or effort. But can you do so for information stored in an SAP Infocube of sales transactions? And secure it? Or add a continually updating scorecard to a marketing wiki page? Not to mention the cost of deciding who in the organization should have access to it, and what rules and processes must be aligned with displaying and distributing it.

I am actually very much in agreement with Mr. McAfee in principle. The day should and will come when companies demand their information acquisition, storage, and retrieval costs be minimal. Instead they will pay for the value-add applications that can mine, interpret, and analyze that information. Unfortunately, I think that there are too many parties, with too much leverage, to let information costs rapidly disappear overnight.

Things are never as simple as they should be…

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I’ve spent a lot of time implementing business intelligence solutions, and even more time using technology to help business maximize the value of information. In all my travels the one common problem that every deployment, and every product I saw had was a sepration of technical talent, and data knowledge. What I mean is the technical knowledge required to setup and maintain BI solutions created a barrier that prevented the everyday worker with actual knowledge of the data from being involved in that process. As a result, the solutions success was always limited because it didn’t truly meet the needs or empower the knowledge worker (despite what any of the big BI or ERP companies will tell you).

It would seem then a natural solution to the problem would be to create a set of tools, probably web based, that were incredibly easy for an end user with minimal training to access data, organize, and disseminate it. A knovel concept - give the people with knowledge of the information the power to manage it. In other words, it would be great to have a set of Web 2.0 (Enterpise 2.0 if you prefer) tools that actually do BI.

Imagine an RSS feed of new sales opportunities from Salesforce.com to your iGoogle homepage. Or a mashup, built by the Marketing Director that displayed advertising campaigns on a Google map along with a heat map of fulfillment orders. Maybe a gadget a customer can place on MSN Live which lists their open support calls with a vendor. Not to be too cliche, but the opportunities become endless if Enterprise 2.0 thinking gets applied to Business Intelligence.

I recently ran across a company, Worklight, that is promising to do just that. Admittedly I know very little about this company, so I don’t know if they have a viable solution or just some good marketing slides. In order to execute, they will need to have solved some of the problems this application of Enterpise 2.0 would present, namely security and access to corporate data stores. What I do believe however is they are on the right track.

Eventually, I would imagine that Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and the like will understand this. Just as they have empowered the user to get data in, they will empower the user to get it out. Why not have Oracle build RSS feeds right into Oracle Financials. Users can then use a mashup tool to combine the data from those feeds in any manner they choose, with any other Web 2.0 tool that they choose.

In the meantime, users will continue to use those incredibly complex and expensive BI solutions as a data feed to Excel. You know, an easy to use tool that gives users with minimal training the ability to access data, organize, and disseminate it.

I actually think this topic deserves a little more thought and discussion, so I’ll make sure to get back to it in the near future.

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