Michael Fauscette

Virtual Workforce, A Growing Part of the New Normal?

I was talking to the team from DoNanza the other day about their launch, business model, etc. (more on them below) and it reminded me of one of the top 10 predictions we did for this year around virtual workforce. I had intended to expand on the topic more at some point but I guess that point didn't come until now. The actual prediction, "In response to a productivity spike, VARs, SIs and ISVs will turn in force to contracting (virtual staffing) and partnering. Vendor programs will adapt to support these new models" was focused on software partners but in our discussions around the prediction we all thought that the trend was bigger than that small focused area. In fact I think that the trend to virtual workforce is showing up across all industries today and is gaining momentum.

First what do I mean by virtual workforce? A virtual workforce consist of any worker who is not a direct employee and carries out some paid activities for the company, which would include temporary workers as well as contract employees (tracked on a 1099 versus W-2 in the US). Virtual working relationships have become quite common over the last few years, and seems to be moving beyond tech, where it has been fairly common for years.

The economy and the loss of so many jobs over the last two+ years, millions of jobs worldwide and unemployment rate in the US of around 9.5% (or something like 14M unemployed) has created much uncertainty and businesses are reluctant to add headcount that they might not be able to afford. This is one factor in the rise in numbers of virtual workers, but I think there are a few other factors that are feeding this growth as well. One is choice, some unemployed workers established independent businesses, mostly consulting or service related and have realized that the lifestyle suits them better than their old employment relationships. Created out of necessity they continue out of choice. Employers are also looking for creative ways to reduce costs and risks. This contract employment model is a great way to add talent and minimize risk. This model is especially attractive in software development and has gained momentum over the last 2-3 years. From a business model perspectiv,e I have worked with and observed several start ups contract their entire product development process to independents, keeping only a few senior level architects on staff. This model fits well with professional services and value added resellers (VAR's) as well, creating a virtual bench of talent to use as needed.

Around this growth of virtual workers the need to manage the process of finding, managing, monitoring, paying, etc. these virtual workers has spawned a new type of online recruiting business. I wrote two years ago about one of those, oDesk. DoNanza is another business that is focused on this process of building and maintaining a virtual workforce. Their approach is a bit different and unique to the other vendors I have looked at recently. DoNanza is a marketplace for virtual workers to search across multiple virtual work services in a single web destination. You could think of them as a "Google" style search engine for virtual work focused on aggregating freelance jobs that can be done from home. As a freelancer you can search one site versus 5 or 6 to see what's available and use DoNanza's search tools to hone the search to your specific criteria. With 10 or 1000's of projects listed, they span a wide range of opportunities and add about 4000 new ones each day. They are targeting around 600 sites as data sources and add most data by scraping. Active on Twitter, the DoNanza folks tweet out new projects under a series of handles @dnzXXX (dnzwriting, dnzPHP, dnzSEO, etc.).  If you're looking for freelance work DoNanza is a must use tool.

Tags: freelance, virtual workforce, unemployment, contractor, jobs, social web

Network Driven Co-Innovation and SAP's New Premier Customer Network

Co-innovation is a hot topic in social CRM circles these days and rightly so, one of the characteristics of the social customer is this drive to participate as a part of brand engagement. In other words if you care about a brand, something that is clearly desirable from a companies perspective, you want to help the brand create products that, in your opinion, be more successful or meet your needs more closely. That's co-innovation in the consumer or B to C market and spawned ideasourcing applications that help brands engage with and collect ideas from its customers. The pic at the left is one example from Starbucks and was created using salesforce.com Ideas platform on MyStarbucksIdeas.com. There are quite a few more examples available and several software vendors that have products in the ideasourcing market including BrightIdea, Spigit and Uservoice.

That's in the B to C space but what about B to B, couldn't co-innovation, or the process of synergistic development of innovative ideas and products in cooperative environments or ecosystems prove to be a business advantage to businesses that choose to participate? To be fair there have been many initiatives by companies that try to foster co-innovative environments, but in software this has primarily been on the partner side of the business, not vendor facilitating customers' co-innovation. SAP, for example, has a history around co-innovation, launching Co-Innovation Labs in 2007, but while customers have certainly been involved in these labs, most of the activity has been partner (system integrator, ISV, etc.) driven. Enabling business network transformation has been a SAP message for a few years now, and other vendors have also had initiatives to get partners to work together to provide complete solutions; Microsoft, IBM and Oracle all have programs designed to foster peer to peer networking and cooperation.

Today I had the opportunity to talk to a group in SAP that has been chartered with building a program around SAP's top customers to create a productive and active customer network. The program, called The SAP Premier Customer Network (PCN), is built to provide 5 unique benefits: 1. Co-innovation, 2. Value Management, 3. Collaboration, 4. Thought Leadership and 5. Governance and Roadmapping. This network is not focused on IT improvement but on the broader concept of facilitating customer interaction in a "safe" environment to connect, learn, share and in general expand and grow your peer and professional networks. With SAP's broad customer base I think the co-innovation strategy as a part of a formal network program has some real promise. Here's a slide that the group is using to explain the concept:

The PCN has a long list of benefits:

• Resource Gateway - a portal for accessing the PCN and interacting on the network that will include blogs, vlogs, webinars and other social business tools
• Ambassador Program - A dedicated team from SAP that represents in PCN inside SAP
• Planning and Roadmaps - Formal opportunity to influence SAP's product and solution direction along with other network members
• The Cone of Silence - (this is one of my favorite ideas in the program) A "firewalled" ability to share and validate business initiatives and best practices with selected peers in collaborative and co-innovative environment
• Invention and Innovation - Cross-enterprise, network sourced innovation

The PCN is fairly new and is available in North America but is a global program with other regions working on programs as well. Here's a slide that shows the PCN in context to the SAP ecosystem:

Co-innovation is becoming a business imperative in the emerging social business era. This is a thought leading proposition from SAP and I believe that you will see more efforts from software vendors to create co-innovation ecosystems due to their unique position to facilitate trusted networks because of their reach and strategic importance to their customers.

Going Paperless

I was pleasantly surprised on Sunday when I checked in online for my Delta Airlines flight from Atlanta to San Francisco and was offered the option of sending my boarding pass to my mobile instead of printing it out. I had heard about the concept but this was my first experience with it so of course I used the option. You have the choice of having the boarding pass emailed or sent via SMS...I chose SMS and promptly received a barcode tagged boarding pass in my inbox.

At the airport I was very interested to see how (and frankly if) this would work. As I approached the baggage check counter I told the clerk that I had gone paperless and he reached out for my phone, looked at the SMS and scanned the barcode on a special reader. With the exception of trying to figure out where to put the baggage claim ticket (why not go paperless with them as well??), after all there's no cute little folder in which to affix the ticket (I guess I could have stuck it to the back of my phone), things went smoothly. Now off to the security line, where I certainly expected some friction from my paperless ticket. Much to my surprise the TSA agent pointed me to a special station with the same barcode reader and with one simple scan I was off (I couldn't resist making the bad joke of where do they scribble in colored pen). I also wondered how I would hold up my ticket when passing through the metal detector but in Atlanta at least, that process is gone, presumably to accommodate us paperless ticket holders. At the gate once again it was frictionless, a simple scan from the same style barcode reader and I was heading down the ramp.

I've tried to go paperless for the last three years, partly for green reasons and partly to get better organized but unfortunately not everyone I deal with is helping my efforts. Boarding passes have been one of the areas that prevented me from  avoiding the printer up until now, hopefully more airlines will follow Delta's example. In some areas of my business and personal life the transition has been fairly easy. I started reading books in eBook form with the Amazon Kindle about two years ago and have since moved to using my iPad as my primary reading device. I also use my Android phone and iPod Touch with Kindle app, all nicely in sync across all devices. In my backpack / briefcase the only paper you will find is my business card, and even there I've tried to use mobile apps like Bump to replace them (it just isn't culturally possible yet). You will never find a book or a notebook. For note taking I rely on Evernote, again across all my devices, MacBook Pro, Android phone, iPad, iPod Touch, all in sync. I do have a paid premium account, even though I really don't exceed the requirements for the free version (with the exception of a few additional supported file types), as much as I rely on the app I want them to be a successful business (if it went away I would have a significant problem). For storing records I have a nice Canon Canoscan and am converting all my records over to digital as I get a few minutes. Business cards aer scanned with my Cardscan scanner and software (which syncs with my Mac address book, an online backup service called atyourservice that is provided by Cardscan and I upload all my contacts to my Google contacts which syncs with my Android phone). For sheet music, although I still have a lot of paper books (the only ones I'm keeping on my shelves), I have started getting new music on my iPad through Musicnotes, with the added benefit that turning pages while playing or singing is a quick touch instead of a struggle with paper pages. All in all I'm making good progress.

Still I do have some reasons to stay with paper in a few instances. One is caused by a very outdated expense system at work that still requires hard copy expense reports and receipts be snail mailed across the country instead of the electronic report and scanned receipts (I know, hard to believe). The other paper train comes from my vendor clients (software vendors remember). They still provide a lot of paper for my convenience (and I guess some of my colleagues probably would complain if they didn't). This paper takes the form of agendas, conference materials, schedules, and even Powerpoint slides. A few vendors have made some good paperless progress over the last year or so. More and more I'm being offered a flash drive with Powerpoints and materials over paper (although often the paper is still available for those who can't deal with electronic copies). At one event the vendor provided a device that served as name badge and had my schedule embedded in electronic form (a good effort even if the device looked like it was the best of show in 1988 and weighed about 10 lbs). One vendor even offered its entire conference materials, presentations, etc. on kiosks where you could download what you needed on a flash drive, choice and paperless combined, a great solution.

So I'll continue to fight against paper and try to get / keep everything in electronic form. From an organization standpoint it has improved my ability to find and keep things orderly. Now if I could only figure out how to completely stop snail mail in all its ridiculous forms...

Jive Software Closes Series C Round of Funding

I had a chance this morning to catch up with the Jive team and learn some background details on their announcement this evening of closing a new round of funding yesterday. The $30M round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (KPCB), a new addition to the Jive family and included previous investor Sequoia Capital. The $30M brings Jive's total funding to $57M.  As a part of the round KPCB managing partner Ted Schlein will join Jive's board. These two firms are certainly top shelf VC's and it's always encouraging when the round includes a previous investor. If memory serves these two firms haven't done a join deal in a while, and the one joint funding deal that stands out was in 1999 when the two VC's funded a growing start up by the name of Google to the tune of $25M, which bought the two firms a 20% stake in a company that has a market cap today of $153.31B.

I recently posted a look at Jive's current strategy and recent announcements so I won't rehash that post today. Instead let's focus on what Jive plans to do with the new funding. Jive is in a solid position in the emerging social business software market and the new $ will help them drive visibility and awareness for the company and the social business market itself. Many of the Fortune 5000 companies are starting to look at social software and social business initiatives so now is the time for the leaders in this market to push hard. The funding will help Jive expand it's marketing efforts,  direct sales force, partnerships and perhaps more importantly, start to develop an indirect sales channel. The indirect channel is critical for accelerating growth, international reach and to reach companies in the mid-market. 

Jive, with over 3000 current customers that include names like Intel, Nike, SAP, Avon, Netflix, RJ Reynolds, JPMorganChase, Shell, Honeywell and Yale University, has seen rapid growth over the last year, even in the down economy. With several new partnerships with ISV's, SI's and VAR's the company is starting to build an ecosystem and leverage the successful business model of an add-on application marketplace. CEO Tony Zingale has hinted that the company plans an IPO within the next 12 months. Zingale, a Mercury Interactive veteran, has built a strong management team, several of whom he has worked with before at Mercury, and has positioned the company very effectively to leverage the rapidly expanding market for social software solutions.

Tags: social business, jive software, social web, software, enterprise, VC, funding

The Shift to Android, a Few Months Later

I'm a few months in to my experiment of shifting from 3 generations of iPhones to a new Android mobile device. I admit it felt a little odd when the iPhone 4 came out to not be racing to the nearest Apple store to get my hands on the latest version but after all of the follow on issues with both hardware and software, I guess I'm feeling less left out and maybe a little relieved. I'm a gadget addict and as anyone who knows me would attest very fond of Apple devices (although not as thrilled about Apple's culture of uber-control, censorship, and arrogance) so moving away from the iPhone was no small decision. In fact I've endured progressively worse service from the AT&T monopoly much longer than I should have just because I loved the iPhone as a mobile computing platform. But no more AT&T bashing in this post, I've done that enough already and its starting to feel like playing tee ball, it's just to easy a target to make it worth the effort, the network is terrible, they have coverage without band-width and are useless to make voice calls or get data services in any major US market, and that's that.

Switching to an Android device was much easier than I thought it might be and I had a couple of safety nets in place to get my Apple app fix, a wifi iPad and an iPod Touch. Those two devices combined with my Verizon Mifi card have actually ended up being much more useful to me than the iPhone was anyway...all the apps and none of the network problems. I use lots of iPhone apps, that's one of the things I loved about it so having a way to use them going forward was an important thing.

I was worried that the Android platform wouldn't have enough apps to meet my mobile needs. I've been pleasantly surprised though by the breadth of apps and the depth of functionality available. I will admit that in some cases the iPhone app is a bit more elegant but in most cases the issue was that the app UI is different between the two platforms, not the functionality itself. After some experimentation I'm using many Android apps interchangeably with the apps on my iPod or iPad. My favorite Android apps include: Facebook, Seesmic, Evernote (which I use across all my platforms, iPad, MacBook, iPod Touch and Android), Foursquare, Kindle (again, suncs across iPad, iPod and Android), K-9 Mail, Fandango, Skype, IM+, Remember the Milk (syncs across all devices too), Advanced Task Killer Free (a must for preserving battery life), IMDb, Taxi Magic, Yelp and an assortment of public transportation apps by city (San Francisco, Boston, NYC - I was concerned on this one but have been in great shape, I use these apps almost daily when I'm in San Francisco). The one missing app for me is Newsgator's Netnewswire, I miss having a good RSS reader that syncs across all my devices (I use it on MacBook, iPad and iPod but there's not an Android app). If I could find a replacement cross platform app with good Twitter integration I'd switch but for now I haven't found it.

I am on the HTC Incredible platform by the way, and am overall very happy with it. I did have one problem that took some investigation to work out, I had to hard boot the phone twice, which means that I had to re-set up the phone, not a fun experience although the Google integration with contacts and mail along with the Facebook integration made it much easier. The problem manifest itself as a low storage alert that eventually gets so bad you can't send text or email. It's an incorrect alert, I had plenty of space on both the phone and the SD card so was very perplexed. Eventually the phone locked up and would not complete a boot cycle. I had no choice but to do the hard boot procedure and start over. I did it the first time but unfortunately the same problem came back after a few weeks. I did some online research and found that the HTC mail app that comes with the phone has a issue (maybe a memory leak?) and that if you don't use the app the problem goes away. I tried it and not only has the problem not manifest itself again but my battery life has increased by 2-3X. I'm using Google's Gmail app for my Gmail account and K-9 for my MobileMe email now and don't miss the HTC app at all.

As far as other features I find the Incredible very usable. The touch keyboard is fine, I'm not using a 3rd party keyboard app. I do like the ability to load widgets and app shortcuts on the multiple "home" screens and flip between them. The multi-tasking is very useful although you do have to manage it to keep battery life optimized. Having constantly updating widgets for Facebook, Twitter, weather, calendar, Remember the Milk to do list, and Foursquare is an improvement over the iPhone. The notifications are also much less intrusive but no less useful on the Incredible.

So overall I'm very happy. The Incredible combined with Verizon's excellent network is a very good phone and Android has evolved into a viable competitor to the iPhone as a mobile computing platform. Both the iPhone and the Android OS have good and bad points, as should be expected, but they both provide an excellent mobile experience. Add to that the ability to make high quality voice calls and get data services almost anywhere and I'd say the Android phones on Verizon have an edge at this point from sheer usability. Would I say that if I didn't have an iPad and iPod Touch, I'm not sure? I do just carry the Incredible at times but mostly have one of the other devices handy with my mifi card. Part of that stems from the RSS reader issue, something I use every day and mostly all day long (after all, a part of my value as an analyst is to stay well informed and I depend on my RSS feeds to do that).  Anyway, that's the update, I'd love to hear some stories from others who have switched...

  

Google Moves Toward Web 3.0, Acquires Metaweb

The basic fiber of the operation of the Web today is based on pages (and metadata that defines pages) and hyperlinks. To find "things" we go to one of several search sites, most notably Google, Bing and Yahoo. These search engines crawl the web automatically producing an index of the words, pages and links that make up the web. Google's rise to dominance was a combination of the strength of its algorithms and the concept of "pagerank" that was used to rank order web pages based on an interative algorithm that looks at pages in relation to other pages (and votes up pages with more links, type of links, trust, etc.). PageRank has become a very important part of marketing optimization of web pages and helped create Google's dominance in search advertising based on context. Here's a graph that shows Google's current position among the top 5 search engines from Statcounter.com:

The web has evolved though and there are new ways of organizing that are developing. Facebook's recent move to shift from a hyperlinked organization scheme to a people-centric approach through creating the open graph is one such attempt. I wrote about it here. The paradigm of a socially connected web could lead to new ways of finding "things".

The web continues to evolve of course and for several years there has been discussion, research and development towards Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web. Here's a simplified diagram of the stages of the web:

Finding things on the web however is anything but easy, whether we're using words, phrases or social connections. Using search engines and hyperlinks is often something of an exercise in attention deficit disorder thinking (and I should know). Now maybe I'm part of the problem in this, since my ADD brain does love chasing shiny objects, but I often start looking for something on the web to end up hours later with a pile of unrelated information and absolutely nothing about the original subject. The problem is the underlying structure, it's just to easy to not find what you're looking for because words are not precise and unique. Think about it, what happens when you search on something simple like "train"? You get Amtrak, multiple city transit web sites, train history, train videos, train pics and finally the band train (which was what you were looking for in the first place). People names are even worse (unless you're luck and have a unique name). That's one of the basic things that the semantic web is supposed to solve. In the simplest form the semantic web is supposed to create uniqueness of things so that they can be found and used in a much more efficient and effective way. The idea is to create methods and technology to enable computers to "understand" the meaning of words. That's what Metaweb and its Freebase entity database is designed to do, provide order and uniqueness.

Freebase provides an open database of information about all sorts of things ranging from music to movies. The idea is to open source the collection of relevant data tied to unique entities that reside in an open format that can be accessed and used by web sites, people, etc. The massive scale database increases in impact based on its rapidly increasing size. Google already uses Freebase's information in Google News searches so the acquisition is a natural fit. Here's a video from Metaweb that gives an excellent overview of Freebase:

This acquisition is a strong move for Google and for the general semantic web movement. It will be interesting to see how Google integrates Freebase into it's offerings.

Culture Drives Innovation

I have an ongoing interest in innovation and the culture around it. I guess that stems from my many years in the software industry. In software, innovation is the life blood of the business. I've written about innovation a few times but as reminder I believe that there are two types of innovation in software, continuous and discontinuous. Continuous innovation is the process that feeds the maintenance stream of traditional software companies. It could also be argued that it feeds the ongoing customer commitment to a subscription based or SaaS software product. Discontinuous innovation is the process by which a "category killer" or disruptive product gets to market. This type of innovation results in a giant leap forward in technology and often has a transformational impact on business. For example, Apple's iTunes software (and marketplace) changed the way people consume music and movies and pushed the person MP3 player into the mainstream. Platform as a service (PaaS) offerings like salesforce.com's Force.com and Netsuite's SuiteCloud could be changing the way companies develop and deploy applications (that remains to be seen). On a broader scale Client / Server disrupted the mainframe, the Internet disrupted client / server and the social web is disrupting relationships and business. Continuous innovation is important as a business sustainer but discontinuous innovation is important as a way for companies to leap frog competitors and rapidly gain marketshare and walletshare.   

Alright, so why am I rambling on about innovation again. Recently I ran across a great example of the culture of innovation (or to be precise the impact of culture in a negative way on innovation). I recently transitioned from AT&T / iPhone for my family mobile ser vice to Verizon (not the subject of this post, but a very good transition). As a part of that shift my two daughters (11 and 14 yrs old) had the chance to pick new phones. They were moving from a Nokia slider (the 11 yr old, the slider replaced the 1st gen hand-me-down iPhone by her choice btw) and an iPhone 3G. I allowed them to pick whatever they wanted from the current Verizon phone portfolio (including the HTC Incredible) and they both picked the new Microsoft Kin although different models, the 11 yr old took the Kin One and the 14 yr old took the Kin Two. Their only real complaint was the lack of apps but the social integration of the OS more than made up for that shortfall (and my older daughter has an iPod Touch so she didn't really miss the iPhone at all). They both required full data plans but then both had already been on full data plans on AT&T so I didn't really think about it.

The Kin has been much maligned in the blogsphere in recent weeks. Microsoft discontinued the phone a couple of weeks ago after a really poor showing with something less than 10K sold. I've heard and read lot's of stories about why the phone wasn't popular but my own experience leads me to believe that the phone did in fact have the potential as a disrupter, but fell short on two fronts...the lack of an apps store and the requirement of a full data plan (so pretty expensive for a phone targeted at teens). Now the funny thing is that both of these issues were created when the phone fell victim to some internal politics at Microsoft. The original Kin (or Project Pink as it was known internally at Microsoft) the brainchild of J Allard and with technology from the 2008 acquisition of Danger was something of a darling project and operated independently of the Windows Mobile OS division led by SVP Andy Lees. The project was on a short timeline for delivery in 2009 and included an apps store concept. Verizon won the bids to carry the phone and had promised a lower price data plan to make the phone attractive to teens (and parents). Allard, who is also credited with the Zune, used bits from Danger and from Zune but did not include the legacy Win Mobile platform (which was later scrapped and rebuilt as the Win 7 mobile platform). Not to go through this whole debacle play by play, you can do that here in this Engadget Post, but the problem was politics. Lees wanted control of this rogue project and eventually got control. Thus begins the end of innovation, the project was re-scoped, the apps store was out as were other innovations and the delivery date was slipped. Verizon, faced with the new longer timeline reneged on its promise of lower pricing and the phone was released to its now predefined failure.

From the reaction I've seen the phone had potential but politics and the desire for control smashed the innovation and set it on a path of sure failure. This is to me, a great example of what happens in companies when they value the organizational structure and power over innovation. It also points to the evolution of a company and its ability to innovate. Culture is one of the most critical elements that allow people to develop and launch innovative ideas. Microsoft, and executives like Lees, do not foster innovation if it threatens their political power and control. Often we see larger software companies in the continuous innovation camp, but rarely as creators of discontinuous innovation. The open culture that is required to create disruptive products is much more prevalent in start ups. Not that larger software companies can't create disruptive technologies, but often those technologies come through acquisition, not internal development. Politics make it very difficult for the culture of innovation to thrive.

Tags: mobile, microsoft, Kin, innovation      

Pressure for Change

If you listen to any of the current group of analysts and social business thought leaders it won't take you long to hear that the transformation to a social business is more about changing corporate culture than anything else. I was thinking about this idea that change is necessary and it reminded me of some lessons I learned (mostly the hard way) in a former life as an enterprise software engagement manager. Fundamentally change management follows a basic pattern that is "tried and true". From my experience these basic fundamentals don't really change from project to project or company to company.

Before we talk about change management and what that really means to a company I think it is useful to think about the reasons for change. Today's companies and executives are under tremendous pressure from the economy, from customers, from new and unpredictable competitors and from their own employees.  This pressure is directly related to an urgency created by each of these factors independently and intensified as the factors collide to create a new business environment.

The economy and the increase of global competition, often with creative / innovative business models that leverage the hyper-connectivity of the web, alone is driving the need for a new approach to business strategy, what I call the flexible enterprise, where a company can adjust strategy and underlying systems on an as needed basis (which could be daily or even minute by minute in some industries).  The "old days" of a strategic plan in a binder on a shelf that was revised every 3-5 years are dead. In a world where a new competitor can emerge overnight with the global reach, greater innovation and increased efficiency to immediately threaten your business base inflexibility is not an option. Current IT infrastructures often don't support this new flexible strategy and are feeling this business pressure directly.

The social web (or web 2.0 if you prefer) has had a tremendous and lasting impact on people's perceptions of interactions, influence, connectivity and relationships. The new use paradigms have also changed expectations for technology most noticeably the expectation of a modern and social user experience from software tools and a culture of transparency and openness. This has led to what some people call the consumerization of IT, or what I like to call the "bring your own" (BYO) workplace where employees feel empowered to use the tools that get their jobs done efficiently and effectively whether they're provided by corporate IT or not. As customer's these new social people also carry very different expectations and behaviors. Often the trusted source for information about a company is the social customer's network, not the corporation. With all of the social media channels available the social customer has a voice and influence in new and powerful ways. The social employee and the social customer are driving the need for change and creating even greater urgency for companies to move toward a social business model or fail.

That's the "why we're having this conversation", now on to the how does a company manage change? Change management sits at the intersection of people, process and culture in an organization, often built on a technology foundation. Something like this:

Change management has a few basic underlying principals:

• Understand where your organization is currently.
• Clearly define the end objectives of a change management project.
• Define roadblocks, both internal and external, that could influence the project.
• Involve the stakeholders in the project from the outset. (This is the most critical tenet). Empower the team and remove roadblocks.
• Define and get agreement on the methods that will be used to get to the end objectives.
• Create urgency that reflects the business value and importance of the project.
• Define benchmarks that will measure the progress and end success (or failure) of the project.
• Break the project into manageable and measurable steps and group the steps in manageable phases.
• Manage to short term successes and publicize those success.
• Create advocates of the small successes. Engage influential stakeholders (often not management, but the "go to" people) and get their support.
• Communicate! Transparency is critical in this process.
• Make it stick. The change has to become part of the ongoing culture. Reward ongoing support, hire and promote advocates.

Change isn't a one time event, it's an ongoing process and managing that change requires effort and investment.

Tags: social business, change management, change, social customer, social employee

At the recent e2.0 event in Boston I was able to sit down with LeapFILE Founder and CEO Peter Chang to talk about his latest venture, Oxygen Cloud. Oxygen Cloud takes LeapFILE's basic concepts of extremely simple, secure file transfer for the enterprise and applies them to cloud storage. With LeapFILE's pedigree, a profitable company that Chang bootstrapped, Oxygen Cloud launches with strong foundations (beta available this month).

So what's the problem that Oxygen Cloud solves? Collaboration over shared files has never been easy and in our current business environment, as data and information explode, the problem gets even bigger. I want to make a clear distinction here though, I think there are at least 2 major problems that collaboration systems need to address (not necessarily that every system will address both though), file-centric collaboration and people-centric collaboration. File-centric systems are not new, and employees have used a wide variety of ways to share and work together on files ranging from email systems to content management systems. People-centric collaboration is a relatively new concept and can be seen in systems like Novell Pulse, salesforce.com Chatter and SociaCast. Oxygen Cloud is focused on file-centric collaboration and cloud storage.

There are a lot of file-centric collaboration solutions so why do I think Oxygen Cloud is interesting? It's the application of the underlying principles from LeapFILE to the collaboration and cloud storage problems, as well as the concept of combining the two into one solution that could propel Oxygen Cloud ahead of the pack. According to Chang people don't do work in the cloud, they work on their desktop. I suppose I mostly agree to that, with a few exceptions like Google Docs or MS Office Online. One of LeapFILE's biggest advantages is that it takes a process that can seem rather complex (using FTP sites, for example) and makes them flat out simple and natural by performing the complex "under the covers". Oxygen Cloud promised to do the same for file-centric collaboration and cloud storage through a seamless desktop app / cloud storage solution.

Oxygen Cloud does one more important function though, it is storage provider agnostic. This means that it turns into a sort of storage broker for the enterprise, allowing IT to connect to their cloud storage solution of choice, public or private. This added flexibility of choice is extremely important in the enterprise, where IT organizations are struggling to balance end user ease of use and experience with growing concerns over security and IP protection. On the public cloud IT could use any storage provider including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and IronMountain or opt to create their own private cloud. To help facilitate this process Oxygen Cloud has partnered with Data Robotics.

The product is scheduled to be available in beta this July so I haven't actually seen or used it. If Chang's team can simplify aggregated file-centric collaboration and cloud storage into a positive desktop experience that makes the process natural and intuitive then I'd say they have another winner.

Tags: collaboration, storage, cloud, software, technology, e2.0, social business