A VC - Latest Comments in Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

fredwilson — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 08:43:03 -0000

Me too!

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

Defrag/Glue — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:14:56 -0000

hey fred - great post (as usual). I've been thinking/writing about this as of late, see -
http://defragcon.com/Blog/?...

...and am looking forward to digging in at Defrag.

see you there!
ejn

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

Steve — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 15:34:32 -0000

You can also try Manymoon, it's free:

http://www.manymoon.com

With Manymoon you can:
* Managed private and shared To Do Lists and Projects.
* Works with clients, co-workers and partners...anyone with an email address!
* Upload documents and add them to tasks and projects.
* Integrate with Google Docs and Google Calendar.
* Twitter-like feature to let people know what you are working on.
* Automatically convert emails into tasks.

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

Thomas — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:13:36 -0000

No, it's not an oxymoron. The problem is that the skills required to give enterprises comfort don't generally come from those developers who have made a living creating social software and wind being executives of these types of companies. As an enterprise that has evaluated a few of these offerings, it's clear that there is a huge skills gap in terms of selling to and servicing enterprise customers. You may think Web 2.0 is great, but a lot of enterprisers think it's cute. At best.

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

alive88 — Tue, 06 May 2008 02:01:30 -0000

>> Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?
doesn't sound like one to me.

>> But to me, the heart of social software is the community of users that forms around the software/service.
>> What would twitter or facebook be without users? Nothing. Same with blogger, flickr, friendfeed, etc, etc.
I find that internet provides an interesting dichotomy of community. on one hand there is strength in numbers, and there is a power that is created by unifying a large number of people into a community. But on the other hand, the power of unifying specific communities however small is also very powerful. My main example is really a statement on cultural melting versus cultural preservation.

ie a cultural community in separation and isolation will clearly die. However, if given the opportunity to connect - there is a new unified strength. (this community can be very small - but it is their common fabric that gives it strength.)

[Note: I also recognize that in some respects I have been bucking unabashed sharing to the world. There are certainly times when I am cool with that and want to do that. But for a lot of stuff, and for the most part - I simply want to share socially, and only share socially. To my friends. and maybe their friends. Not sure this distinction is clear or not. ]

>> facebook be without users
or more accurately without the 10 people I most want to connect with. of course this in itself is a viral statement, since all of us need the 10 (or 5000) most important people to give facebook relevance. But in an enterprise this is easier to reach this critical mass.

And what is the value of facebook anyway? and how would that relate to enterprise that can dictate adoption and use?
personally I think friending isn't particularly relevant within the enterprise. You should have access to anyone in the organization, and you are more interested in connecting with specific communities, functions, and roles.
And the enterprise profile is arguably more important than the social profile.
: Communities - interested in the same things. have the same skills. membership in something.
: Functions - job roles and job related relationships. a Functional Enterprise Graph. - I don't know if anyone has ever built this. Certainly w/in your job function you are going to want this to also be external to the organization to include your customers.
: Roles - your organization chart.

I personally believe organizations need centralized authentication, and profiles. And I also think intranets and instant messaging should also be standard.

>> And most enterprises don't want their employees to be active members of a community that it can't
>> control, monitor, and moderate
I think it depends on the context. certainly communications in public communities that should be private are a huge enterprise issue. But in the absence of enterprise tools - they may be moved into the public domain.

>> consumer facing social web apps like delicious, linkedin, AIM, and skype brought in
enterprise tagging/bookmarking - integrated into enterprise search - is pretty useful, and certainly will improve.
linkedin. I'll be honest - I don't really find any utility. But an enterprise specific searchable directory of people adn resources - certainly is useful.
IM/VoIP - of course we (enterprises) need them.
Feeds? - yeah!
Personalized Activity Streams? - yeah.

sorry for the noise.

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

Avi Flombaum — Tue, 06 May 2008 01:41:10 -0000

2 examples of social software for the enterprise: http://www.sermo.com and http://www.designerpages.com

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

alive88 — Tue, 06 May 2008 00:16:33 -0000

and how do you manage these challenges now?
VPN, common tools for communication (or protocols/standards), Cloud storage (with revision control)
intranet based application for tracking progress.
- or what more do you need?

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

alive88 — Mon, 05 May 2008 23:53:37 -0000

Certainly internal LDAP for universal authentication and a directory of staff (profiles) is useful.
ACTIVITY streams tailored to an individual built from enterprise sources, organizational, functional and relationships is killer.
I have personally never separated instant messaging and email from social networking - in fact I think these applications are starving for graph integration. Self building IM lists and INBOX management based on social relationships and org charts sounds exciting to me. browsing an organization by org chart, and functional support lines (and relationships) are also very useful.
shared learning streams, and peer generated, just in time knowledge is another killer enterprise application.
internal blogging. internal open source. mentoring. recognition.
tagging, bookmarking, digg, answers
mashups. internal web services.
I think it is all exciting. especially in an Enterprise setting. maybe you need to a large company, but how large?

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

Cathleen Rittereiser — Fri, 02 May 2008 01:13:20 -0000

Fred,
I moderated a session at O'Reilly's Money:Tech conference in February called "What Do Hedge Fund Managers Want?". Our panel focused primarily on Wall Street's resistance to technology concepts like Open Source and technology services like blogs, wikis and social networks.

One of our panelists, J.P. Rangaswami, was way ahead of his time in implementing these services while CIO at Dresdener and has written on this topic extensively. In my introduction I characterized him as standing for "collaboration across the enterprise." J.P. had several comments on this topic the day of the conference, including the revelation that Goldman employees are using Facebook more extensively than one would think to collaborate with each other.

If you aren't familiar with J.P. Rangaswami, his blog is called Confused of Calcutta and here is a link to a relevant post: http://confusedofcalcutta.c...

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

Mike Rowland — Thu, 01 May 2008 10:58:42 -0000

Andrew, you are spot on with your comment. I would add to this that in the echo chamber you mention, the discussion of tools is prevelant. This is the totally wrong focus to move the Enterprise 2.0 or other jargon labelled projects forward in the large organization. Sure, you'll get attention from a low to mid level director or manager who wants to make a name for him/herself... but the line of business or c-level executive will shoot the project down.

Why? Because none of the discussion ever seems to focus on the tangible, measurable benefits to the organization. Top execs do not care about tools, they care about the TCO and ROI to the organization. They care about hitting KPIs that measure concrete organizational goals. (Low and mid-level managers usually miss this point in the discussion.) Think more like SAP, IBM, Oracle and less like the small company that discusses its "cool" technology offering...

In our opinion, to make this work and scale, we need to change the discussion away from tools towards results that engage the ultimate business decision maker. That's why this 'trend' hasn't moved as fast through the large organizational world as we want. To place the blame on firewalls or IT security is a much lower level issue than we tend to make it. The real issue is getting top level executives to understand the tangible benefits that communicating with customers, prospects, members, partners, and employees can bring to the organization. Until we change the discussion, we are working at the wrong level of the organization to gain traction and adoption.

We see a very large market out there, one that is expanding in interest. But can we meet the demand for services that deliver tangible organizational results whose measurement is believed by top level executives? That is the real challenge.

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

andrewbadera — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:30:05 -0000

I think too many people are coming at this from within the echo chamber. A large majority of business people, outside of the largest trendy markets, still don't use, could care less about, Anything 2.0. They know MySpace and Facebook and blogs are something their kids play with. Something with the likelihood of causing more problems than anything else. Blackberries are still the hottest thing in many of their minds, and always-on email is too much for them, much less the rest of this connected community constant conversation hooplah.

I believe there is value to be found, to be realized, to be discovered in the 2.0 world. However I think that value, to most enterprises, is going to be absorbed slowly, as accessory features to infrastructure upgrades and enhancements. The wiki is still unheard of, or a new thing, within many enterprises, where collaboration in general is often still a mess. Chat clients are still seen as evil, not as productivity-enhancing, or in cases where it's available, it's not widely supported, understood nor adopted within the guidelines or strictures the org puts forth. With basic elements like that lacking, with the essence of mindset that this evidences, how can you expect COOs and CIOs and CEOs outside of the Fortune 500 to care about anything more 2.0-ish? It's just another bubble to them.

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

Kyle — Thu, 01 May 2008 02:00:10 -0000

I think there's quite an opportunity to take the Google Apps Suite, add an elegant social network with profiles, updates available on your start page, and cross linking between teams and interests to create a enterprise social software. Infact, before leaving my last company, I was designing exactly that, along with the ability tie in some b2b services (health benefits, discounts, etc) to help drive further adoption.

Now, if I could just find someone to help fund me for the project. ;-)

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

brooksjordan — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:44:28 -0000

This is how Jive describes itself on its homepage:

"Jive Software makes enterprise social software that unites employees and connects them with their customers and partners."

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

brooksjordan — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:39:45 -0000

Someone above mentioned it, but I'll just highlight it here:

Jive Software's (http://jivesoftware.com) Clearspace and ClearspaceX are social software apps for the enterprise, and they definitely represent the best of the open Web.

Jive is growing like crazy, winning every award it comes in contact with, and has a horde of evangelizing customers like me.

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

fredwilson — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:02:03 -0000

Visible path, which I was a small angel investor in, also comes to mind as a
painful example

fred

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

Perry Mizota — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:40:06 -0000

I agree with your point, "the heart of social software is the community of users that forms around the software/service". Where I disagree, however, is that you only reference employees as a user segment. How about businesses that want to use social software to enable a community among their customers?

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

Joe Latone — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:34:08 -0000

This gets to a related comment I've been leaving on various blogs: There may be a great oppt'y if the social software platforms (facebook, twitter, etc) could be lifted and run behind the firewalls of large enterprises (e.g., IBM's 380K employees).

I keep asking the twitter folks about this. ):

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

tweetip — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:52:36 -0000

mccv, thanks for the clarification - our app doesn't care where the twitter infrastructure is located. We feel twitter will offer up their tech foundation, so you don't have to build one from scratch. We don't know when - but we also see the conversation for "inside the firewall" ramping up.

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

Dennis D. McDonald — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:02:33 -0000

The term "social" by itself is a problem since it implies external and non-work types of relationships, even though many "social" applications are primarily professional- or task-oriented in ways that are very supportive of enterprise interests. For a list of "social" applications that are relevant to large organizations, see this page on my blog, which is based on a presentation I give to large consulting organizations and government agencies:

http://www.ddmcd.com/readin...

Dennis D. McDonald
Alexandria, Virginia
http://www.ddmcd.com

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

mccv — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 11:55:03 -0000

I do, but to be clear, I don't think using twitter as it exists today is viable in an enterprise setting. Being internally transparent is perceived as good. Using a twitter-like solution outside the firewall would be shot down immediately... Hence the market for social enterprise software.

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

Aruni S. Gunasegaram — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:43:39 -0000

I saw that news yesterday as well. It will be an interesting play for Austin in general. We have another company in town, Small World Labs, who I believe plays into this 'social enterprise market.' They bootstrapped to good revenue before taking on their first outside capital only recently. It will be interesting to see from a local perspective if this will bring more talent and understanding of Web 2.0 and social networking into Austin. I hope so!

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

dsheise — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:55:44 -0000

Social Enterprise Software is not an oxymoron, it´s just the wrong way to address the problem. The problem (for the enterprise) is that individuals now own much more stuff (information, relationships, credibility). From a corporate executive´s point of view it´s like trying to hold water with your bare hands, it will slip through your fingers. Enterprises are just a bunch of people trying to work together. If people are getting used to collaborate on the web they will use these habits to get their jobs done.
The enterprise should not want to replicate social tools inside the firewall because the enterprise is not the owner of individual´s relationships. It´s how people are getting things done that is changing. The enterprise must adapt management practices, not software. Come in the consultants..
Adoption of these tools inside the enterprise might be very clumsy when led by corporate IT departments with a "defend my job agenda" but can be smooth if led by people who actually know how to deal with these tools. I believe there is a huge market for consultants to help companies to figure out what and when to adopt (how to let people use) different new tools. Great conversation and excellent subject!

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

tweetip — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:19:06 -0000

our app is attempting to address group pods using twitter/rss - do you have a macintel sitting around somewhere for a demo?

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

RacerRick — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:44:33 -0000

Publishers are really the only "Enterprise" customer base out there for web 2.0 software. Media, newspapers, tv, video etc.

Other industries haven't figured out a way to apply it to their industries, yet.

Customer service could be aided by some sort of social networking. That's an obvious market and I'm sure there are others, and it might take some time.

(My apologies for the "web 2.0" reference.)

Re: Is "Social Enterprise Software" An Oxymoron?

Arin Sarkissian — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:10:27 -0000

we walked the social/enterprise line back when I was working at Spoke Software. It was pretty painful.

We had a public site but also sold private instances to big companies for big-ish $ ... at least we tried to ;-). The network on the private instances was never big enough to catch up to the potential value you could have garnered from the publicly accessible instance.

- Arin