How many of you are using the microblogging tool Yammer in the company? I see more and more companies that are adopting it and the funny thing is: it gets more quickly adoption than their existing company enforced tools and it’s not controlled by their internal IT department. Honestly it’s kind of a nightmare for many CIOs. Yammer is only the top of the iceberg. How many of you are using (of have developed it yourself) little tools that bring a big added value to your daily work but that the internal IT department could not provide you? People are used to getting more and more what they want, you can’t blame them with what they can get on the internet. There are two things you can do as an IT department: resist (and thus losing all control since the users will do it anyway) or act as an enabler by providing them the platform and tools. If internal business units insist on having their own spreadsheets with data from the SAP system or build little applications very quickly and cheaply, why not providing them with a platform that they can easily extend? By doing that, you still have control on who accesses what, you know what is happening in your IT landscape and the end-user will be more happy. There is a big shift going on where the internal IT department acts more and more as an enabler of solutions rather than being the sole solutions provider. Give people Amazon EC2 instances, give people an IBM sMash platform to build quickly enterprise mashups with SAP data, open up internal APIs to access information. Either go with the flow, or see your users (who are in fact the IT department’s customers) go away… --- Lee Provoost is a Cloud Computing Strategist and ERP+ lead at Capgemini. You can follow his ongoing stream of thoughts on Twitter http://twitter.com/leeprovoost.
IT department: from solutions provider to solutions enabler
L. Provoos
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First of all, GIMS (communicator) and Yammer application in a way serves the same purpose. However it is that perception as an employee that Yammer is not an official Capgemini tool that makes it a big hit amongst us. I totally agree that the IT department has to change from being a provider to enabler. At the same time I doubt if we will see more and more people signing up.
The IT department by being an enabler for instance to our application called Yammer, changes the perceptions of the employees from being "the" application to just another corporate application which is top driven.
I think it is more of a perception issue rather than technology related. Just see how many of us in the organization have external blogs and see the number of blogs on KM2.0 where there is no restriction.
The IT department by being an enabler for instance to our application called Yammer, changes the perceptions of the employees from being "the" application to just another corporate application which is top driven.
I think it is more of a perception issue rather than technology related. Just see how many of us in the organization have external blogs and see the number of blogs on KM2.0 where there is no restriction.
Enterprise software has always been bad for end users. It noway compares to what one is used to get on internet. The fundamental problem is that enterprise software is hardly created for users (in mind). IT department has captive users and there is no competing force. As the post below says it so rightly:
"The best you can ever say about enterprise software is when it doesn’t get in the way of the business. At it’s worst, enterprise software creates more work than it automates"
<a href="http://www.experientia.com/blog/why-enterprise-software-is-so-shockingly-bad/" rel="nofollow">http://www.experientia.com/blog/why-enterprise-software-is-so-shockingly-bad/</a>
"The best you can ever say about enterprise software is when it doesn’t get in the way of the business. At it’s worst, enterprise software creates more work than it automates"
<a href="http://www.experientia.com/blog/why-enterprise-software-is-so-shockingly-bad/" rel="nofollow">http://www.experientia.com/blog/why-enterprise-software-is-so-shockingly-bad/</a>
re Kishan's comment (and I have heard the same remark elsewhere) regarding GIMS (Communicator) vs Yammer - these to applications may appear to do similar things, but there is a fundamental difference in how they work. GIMS / Communicator is a real-time chat application, which is Synchronous, and requires participants to be connected to specific "conversations". Once all the participants have logged out, the conversation ends. Yammer, on the other hand, has a persistence, and is Asynchronous. Threads in Yammer can be created at any time by anyone, and replied to at any time. The conversation thread continues to be available (and can be updated) long after the last contributor has logged out.
@kishan very interesting points you raise there.
As Dave points out, Yammer is fundamentally different than GIMS, so it would be very interesting to see if an internal microblogging tool would also get much traction if it would be capgemini hosted. i am not saying that internal tools are not succesful. i think the wiki is a pretty good example at capgemini where internal tools are very succesful. i think for the wiki it is partially due to the fact that the concept is different than what we were used to work with before the wiki was there and it is also more an enabler than a solution. the IT department didn't force us to follow tons of rules. it was merely: "just do it and see how it is useful for you". (and btw it wasn't brought to us by the IT department now that i think about it)
that brings us to an interesting side debate (thanks kishnan!) whether user do have an upfront allergy to tools that are supplied (or pushed in their throat) by the internal IT department, and if so, why is that?
As Dave points out, Yammer is fundamentally different than GIMS, so it would be very interesting to see if an internal microblogging tool would also get much traction if it would be capgemini hosted. i am not saying that internal tools are not succesful. i think the wiki is a pretty good example at capgemini where internal tools are very succesful. i think for the wiki it is partially due to the fact that the concept is different than what we were used to work with before the wiki was there and it is also more an enabler than a solution. the IT department didn't force us to follow tons of rules. it was merely: "just do it and see how it is useful for you". (and btw it wasn't brought to us by the IT department now that i think about it)
that brings us to an interesting side debate (thanks kishnan!) whether user do have an upfront allergy to tools that are supplied (or pushed in their throat) by the internal IT department, and if so, why is that?
Interesting indeed!
I would not totally agree to Kishan; however I am sure some percentage of people do have an allergy for corporate (top down) enterprise apps. But thats not just the issue here, I thinks!
I think its also a lot to do with the kind of tool. For me a tool that has to be successful will be an app that will not request any of my employees to do anything explicitly but at the same time capture the relevant context. If you allow people a platform to do/share/think/say/feel/etc the way they want and have the app do the work of capturing it the way your business needs, then it serves the purpose.
This is where we see groups of people who are comfortable with Microblogging, some with social networking and some with IM or Wiki. The enterprise app needs to be one that gives a platform in all possible formats for an user to express/share and then do the tough job of capturing and presenting it the way your organization can benefit from.
I would not totally agree to Kishan; however I am sure some percentage of people do have an allergy for corporate (top down) enterprise apps. But thats not just the issue here, I thinks!
I think its also a lot to do with the kind of tool. For me a tool that has to be successful will be an app that will not request any of my employees to do anything explicitly but at the same time capture the relevant context. If you allow people a platform to do/share/think/say/feel/etc the way they want and have the app do the work of capturing it the way your business needs, then it serves the purpose.
This is where we see groups of people who are comfortable with Microblogging, some with social networking and some with IM or Wiki. The enterprise app needs to be one that gives a platform in all possible formats for an user to express/share and then do the tough job of capturing and presenting it the way your organization can benefit from.
Very relevant post and some interesting comments too. Here is my 2 cents to it.
Any enterprise app needs to be able to engage employees and promote participation and collaboration. I agree to Dave's point. The purpose of GIMS is different from Yammer. I feel GIMS is more of a one-one chatty mechanism and it is hard to evoke participation from other users. Like Nikhil mentioned, its the kind of tool that matters a lot.
Kishan's point about KM2.0 is relevant, but user experience matters which is why users lean towards trendy tools which are more fun and where user will be heard better.
People are used to cutting edge tools outside of the coporate network, and for the same level of usage, if not more, will need adoption of similar systems.
Check out <a href="http://tinyurl.com/c7wfpb" rel="nofollow">http://tinyurl.com/c7wfpb</a> where it is mentioned that a company called Serena Software embraced Facebook as their intranet.
Any enterprise app needs to be able to engage employees and promote participation and collaboration. I agree to Dave's point. The purpose of GIMS is different from Yammer. I feel GIMS is more of a one-one chatty mechanism and it is hard to evoke participation from other users. Like Nikhil mentioned, its the kind of tool that matters a lot.
Kishan's point about KM2.0 is relevant, but user experience matters which is why users lean towards trendy tools which are more fun and where user will be heard better.
People are used to cutting edge tools outside of the coporate network, and for the same level of usage, if not more, will need adoption of similar systems.
Check out <a href="http://tinyurl.com/c7wfpb" rel="nofollow">http://tinyurl.com/c7wfpb</a> where it is mentioned that a company called Serena Software embraced Facebook as their intranet.
When we say solution provider, it is what we called virtual vendor. In other words, a service provider that handles the needs of a certain client from the main concept up to the installation through support. This process usually involves the client’s current needs, road and rail network, and to meet all the goals of the project. While solution enabler is creating and deploying different solutions in outlying all services with different approach. I basically agree on this article, companies or IT companies must become a solution enabler than becoming a solution provider.
