Just a Footnote on SAP’s SDN

I tried twice to post a comment on Jerry Bowles’ blog on his site and on the Enterprise Irregulars’ site and was unsuccessful. Since I don’t have time to keep fooling around with the software, I will post a link to Jerry’s post today here. Back from Sapphire, Jerry posted on how SAP is getting enterprise 2.0. religion citing among a few things, the SDN network and Harmony, its internal HR web platform, which I was getting around to writing about myself.

On the SDN network, Jerry writes:

The granddaddy of these communities–the SAP Developer Network (SDN)–has grown from 340,000 members in 2005 to more than 750,000 today. (SDN has its own “evangelist,” Craig Cmehil.) The Business Process community (BPX) was launched in the third quarter of 2006 and already has more than 100,000 members. Both have proven to be invaluable resources and converted even the most skeptical oldtimers to the belief that there may be something to this Enterprise 2.0 business afterall.

What I wanted to communicate to Jerry was this:

Hi Jerry. So wishing I had gone to Sapphire! It’s good to hear that SAP is getting religion on enterprise 2.0. It’s worth noting, however, that the SAP Developer Network is run on a Confluence Wiki (Atlassian). I’m pretty sure about this, although I’m sure someone will correct me fairly quickly if I’m wrong. Even a technology giant like SAP with its billion dollar R&D budget can benefit from innovation at the edge from a couple of college kids who started a company on a credit card a few years ago. I just couldn’t resist the irony.

Email this to your favorite Enterprise 1.0 friends and family

As they won’t be seeing it any other way…

Click To Play

There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don’t. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don’t know where to start.

 

Courtesy Common Craft.

It’s a New Day (Job)

Yep. I’m chuckin’ the binoculars and getting onto the field. The game is just too good to watch and not play.

Let me introduce my new company, BSG Alliance Corp. First, some history. As you know, my heritage is tracking IT services firms. In the 90s there was a handful of what we then called, “client/server integrators.” By far, the most animated, passionate and fun company in that space was a company called, “BSG” out of Houston (and then later, Austin). BSG was the brainchild of a zany entrepreneur who took a risk and started BSG with little more than what I once wrote, “an 800 number and a prayer.” The entrepreneur was Steve Papermaster. In the IT services sector– particularly the client/server arena— Steve’s reputation is somewhat legendary. In fact, if the IT services market had a rock-n-roll hall of fame, Steve would have been an early inductee. He doesn’t like people to talk about him this way, but today I’m writing as a blogger and a writer who followed Steve’s career from the early 90s, not an employee. He has that certain infectious enthusiasm that gets everybody in the room pumped. In BSG’s first iteration, the company’s culture was surely its greatest asset. I credit that to the sheer strength of Steve’s upbeat personality and unbridled enthusiasm.

Steve is a classic example of what I look for in a successful entrepreneur– a good sense of timing and vision. There are a lot of smart guys who start companies with one or the other, but if you don’t get the combination right, you won’t have a strong finish. Steve’s successes far outweigh his failures, and he’s right on the money with what he’s envisioning for the 21^st century BSG. This time ’round Steve is older and much wiser too. He’s surrounded himself with a management team that all have had considerable entrepreneurial successes. I’m sure it won’t slow him down; in fact, it makes decision-making a lot faster.

Where the 90s BSG was about helping companies through the transformation from legacy mainframe computing to client/server architectures, the 21st century BSG is about much more. It’s not even a pure-play IT services company. It’s about helping organizations get through the transformation to on demand, web-based solutions. There’s a lot of marketing rhetoric that goes into that I won’t bore you with here, but as we’ve seen in these enterprise 2.0 blogs, the user adoption process has been slow in coming. Enterprises could use some objective advice as they try to make sense of the new web landscape and the opportunities it affords. We’ll be launching our official web site soon and making some big announcements in the next few weeks. You can see some early press on our teaser site.

So, what will my day job be exactly? I’ll be continuing to track the developments in the market, the vendors/tools/technologies, highlighting case studies– same as always, but the position will provide me deeper customer access to explore these issues. In addition, we have some incredibly interesting alliances and relationships on tap that will provide a non-stop source of new insights.

I will be phasing out ITSA, but will continue to blog here. I promise not to shill for the new company here, but will enjoy posting about what I’m learning as I continue on the enterprise 2.0 journey. I’ll also be moving to Austin in the next few months, as I mentioned a few posts ago. Now you know why.

 

 

 

Did social media tools let us down?

I’m a little surprised no one in my regular blogging circle is commenting on the Virginia Tech massacre. I know the story is still unfolding, but I spotted this piece in Wired. The article is about the need for next-generation emergency alert systems, but a few paragraphs spoke to me:

As the carnage unfolded, eyewitnesses IM’d terrifying firsthand accounts to their friends, some of which appeared on blogs and MySpace within minutes of the shootings. Yet students complained that the first official word they heard about a killer on campus came a full two hours after two students were shot to death in a nearby dorm, just as their suspected attacker opened fire again in an academic building on the other side of campus.

 

Why, given the ubiquity of SMS-enabled cell phones and the growing popularity of social networking and communication tools like Twitter and dodgeball.com, did it take so long for news to reach students that class had been canceled and that students should stay in their dorm rooms?

A few weeks ago, the blogosphere was giddily publishing the widespread popularity of Twitter at SXSW. How is it possible that Virginia TECH students were so uninformed?

What will the new spring crop yield?

I’ve been taking a lot of satisfaction these past few weeks in how our little enterprise 2.0 garden is growing. In the past few weeks I’ve been asked to podcast, to appear on a video segment, and to participate in an enterprise 2.0 “rave.” All good stuff. The analyst and media coverage of enterprise 2.0 has really started to pick up too. I’m particularly encouraged by the management findings and recommendations we’ve seen coming out of MIT’s Sloan Management Report and McKinsey. I guess they legitimize our inner-circle zealot ramblings.

A few items of interest: I attended Ajax World a couple weeks ago. I listened to a few of the speakers, but spent more time trolling the vendors in the exhibit hall for real examples of how Ajax solutions were generating real business advantages for their customers. Nexaweb had some interesting case studies. They quickly rattled off projects at Bank of Toyko, Mitsubishi, Seimans, AFLAC and EMC where companies had built rich Internet applications that were making a difference in their markets. Another interesting observation was a casual chat I had with Chris Warner at JackBe. He basically told me the audience makeup is different this year. That it was not so much developers in jeans and ponytails asking technical questions, but guys in Polo shirts and khakis asking how to solve a business problem. He said, “When suits start walking around, we’ll know the market has matured.”

I ran into Dion Hinchcliffe in the lounge. Dion and Jeremy Geelan had kindly asked me to participate in their ground-breaking Enterprise 2.0 premier web TV segment. Unfortunately, I had to decline, but look forward to future episodes. Don’t miss the first episode, airing Monday, April 9.

Here is Dion’s description of the show:

The Enterprise 2.0 TV Show Airs Web-Wide This April from the Reuters TV Studio in Times Square

We’ve teamed up with former BBC producer Jeremy Geelan — and IT industry maven extraordinaire — to create a new world-class Web-based TV show with broadcast quality production values that obsessively covers the rapidly emerging topic of current industry fascination: Enterprise 2.0. Taped in leading venues throughout the country, the Enterprise 2.0 TV Show is designed as an open, freely-distributable communication stream created to tap the exploding popularity and delivery models of the online video medium. The show is carefully crafted to help non-technical business leaders explore the power and potential of the very latest industry developments on the Internet. Each show delves into the most important new trends that are helping reshape the face of the enterprise today and have the potential to unleash significant productivity gains and competitive advantage. Episode #1, a deep dive into the moving parts of Enterprise 2.0, has already been taped with industry leaders such as SocialText, Kapow, Jubii, and Near-Time and will be ‘airing’ in April on the show site as well as everywhere else on the Web. Also, if you are interested in appearing on the show or want to advertise or sponsor, please contact Jeremy directly.

I first started writing about what we now call “Enterprise 2.0” the end of June, last year. I believe it was about this time last year that McAfee published his seminal, “Enterprise 2.0: the Dawn of Emergent Collaboration.” Now, barely a year later, we’ve got our own T.V. show and we’re hosting Rave parties (more to come on that). I’m looking forward to harvesting the rewards of this year’s crop. It’s fun blogging history in the making.

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Update: the Enterprise 2.0 Rave has a web site now… Lots of buzz on this already.   They tell me they’re creating a button for blogger discounts, but if you want save $250 now, sign up here.  I think they are capping the number of attendees, so it’s first-come, first-served.