Disqus - Latest Comments for jnestour

Re: “Enterprise 2.0″ is about organizational performance, not just t****!

jnestour — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 05:14:26 -0000

Hi Lee -

Yes, I am also speaking specifically of E2.0 in counterpoint to social business design and the equivalent terms that start to be used. BTW, I am excited to see what you all can do with the Dachis Group as a vehicle for all this talent :)

If you can share any projects where the focal point is more on the performance gains and interactions efficiency than on E2.0 tools, that would be fantastic and very, very useful for both realigning the community and establishing the credibility of DG :)

Re: Friday Morning Awesomeness

jnestour — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:46:27 -0000

Awesomness... Now I need to put it in my spell checker! ;) http://bit.ly/43Q9V3

Re: Uservoice fails to seize the internal enterprise market (or “consuprise” take 3)

jnestour — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 11:18:25 -0000

*delete*

Re: “Features” has now become a useless concept when evaluating IT projects

jnestour — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:39:16 -0000

Hi Lee -
Thanks for the kind words and for stopping by here ;)

IT departments have a long way to go before using ROA...

Re: “Features” has now become a useless concept when evaluating IT projects

jnestour — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:37:09 -0000

Wow, Susan. Many thanks for the comments :-)

Re: What’s Coming Out of the Wall?

jnestour — Sun, 24 May 2009 13:07:41 -0000

Hi Andrew -

Long-time reader, first-time commenter.

I'm in charge of IT Innovation for a large group. I'm using the following metaphor (Harrods with some very specific twists) to illustrate the changes implied by the various technologies under the "Cloud Computing" umbrella. I would be interested in any comment as well (here or on the original post, url: http://www.macroprinciples.com/2009/05/in-searc... ):

"In the world you operate today, imagine that literally all business managers, from CEOs of public companies to sole business owners, including would-be business creators, have a huge supermarket just round their corner. A special supermarket in fact. It sells a tremendous array of products and services, for every industry, need, or activity. It is also ever expanding: if you make two trips at just 1 hour interval, new products will have already been stocked and available for sale, in addition to the old ones and on new shelves constantly being added. On top of that, the price of each product is incredibly cheap: new cars for example, are selling for 1/1000 of their normal price, or even cheaper.

The last characteristic of this store: you don’t own what you buy, you just lease it. It can be a one-time fee, regular payments, or any other scheme, you lease it. What’s more, if for any reason the provider of your product disappears, then your product disappears as well. Let’s illustrate this with the car example: you can lease a car for, say $30 a month, and use it as you own it. You would then leave your “stuff” inside the car: some books, some papers, perhaps a watch, etc. If the producer or your car disappears, your car vanishes as well, with your stuff inside.

The trade-off begins to appear: $30 a month for a car is a really good price, but you are at risk of this disappearance. You can mitigate it however: choose a well-known and established vendor, or just leave only non valuable “stuff” inside. Many parallels can be made with this metaphor.It is for example really difficult to find your way in an ever-expanding, huge store, and find the exact product that would fit your needs. Then, how do you know if its producer is not on the verge of disappearing? You can stick to the big names only, but what this product taht would really fit your needs, would you try it?

You can also see why small and large companies would react differently, with different risk aversion. Large companies would prefer to buy their cars, for example, and benefit from the certainty. Small businesses would buy the $30 a month car, and if it disappears, just buy another with a little it of trouble. You can already see how competitive dynamics would evolve, with small early-adopters buying everything at these stores and competing on equal standing with large companies, while having a risk profile much higher as well.

In the IT area, Cloud Computing represent such a shift: each business, no matter how small or remote, now has access to such a supermarket instantly. Now, think about your business, and examine how your competitive advantage(s) would be sustainable in this scenario. Some won’t resist.

At its core, Cloud Computing is nothing more than an irresistible way of enabling distributed economics of scale, that benefit organizations of all size. A second order consequence is a spur in innovative products and services that executives can take advantage of. Conceiving it as a huge, ever-expanding supermarket across all areas can help frame this new context."

- Julien

Re: Engaging students with online technology

jnestour — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:04:34 -0000

Hi guys -

Not sure it is actually wanted but I get your feed with extracts only. Just a heads-up :-)

- Julien

Re: A few thoughts on Yammer, a twitter-like for organizations

jnestour — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:31:43 -0000

Hi David -
Yes, I'm following up to get more details on the Active Directory
integration, looking forward to it.

The best model depends of the size and business of the company I think. For
large companies or companies in sensitive industries, the claiming model you
have and Present.ly adopted is a negative. For small and medium businesses,
it can be - wrongly in my opinion - appealing. So in the end, what matters
for the start-ups in this space are the respective market size of the 2
markets.

I actually agree 100% with your last point, especially for social enterprise
software. Without directory integration, my reasoning is: employees can't
talk about business critical issues and if Yammer just used for casual
points, not much more value than twitter.

We agree on the fact that employees should be the ones adopting an
application. IT functions need to give them the means to do it.

To facilitate this process, I think adopting the right pricing model is
critical. I have described one possible model here:
http://www.macroprinciples.com/2009/02/how-to-p...

I would be really interested in your feedback on this point...

Many thanks for the stimulating points!

Best regards,
- Julien

Re: A few thoughts on Yammer, a twitter-like for organizations

David Sacks — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 13:04:42 -0000

Julien-

Yammer now offers directory integration / SSO. We are piloting it with some early customers and then it will become part of our basic admin tools package on the website.

Since your original article, Present.ly copied our approach of letting employees sign up with a company email address first, before the company claims the network. Obviously they did not believe that their model was the superior one.

Seriously, what's the harm in letting employees test drive a product before the company buys it? Isn't that better than the alternative? How many times has IT purchased expensive software only to see no one adopt it? Yammer lets the employees prove the need before the company buys it.

Regards,

David

PS: I like your idea of an enterprise TweetDeck. We will support it.

Re: How to price Enterprise Social Computing offerings?

jnestour — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:55:20 -0000

Hi Jon, many thanks for the already insightful comment, eager to read more :-)

Yes, ROI is no longer a meaningful metric. What amazes me now is how many people are judging a tool based on its "features", which is an even less relevant concept to judge IT offerings.

Re: Consuprise 2: Combine consumer and entreprise markets to multiply network effects

jnestour — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:05:12 -0000

Hi Taylor -

Getting buy-in from the top is necessary, for sure. It's up to the CIO and her/his team to do this. The vendor can provide ammo, but the top is usually not able to spend enough time to actually understand the benefits of a new offering, so the IT function have to make the choice of what and when to present at the top to get buy-in.

Don't think selling at the top is even possible for companies in the consumer side as well.

And yes, I agree with you that it should be planned from the beginning. From my experience, consumer companies are not interested in the enterprise market until they run out of cash. And they usually can't rearchitect to support it in a cost-effective way.

Best regards,
- Julien

Re: How to price Enterprise Social Computing offerings?

jnestour — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 07:21:09 -0000

Hi Arnaud -

Thanks for your comments. I am not blogging as an employee here so I will be in touch privately. Don't want to create any ambiguity ;-)

Best regards,
- Julien

Re: A few thoughts on Yammer, a twitter-like for organizations

jnestour — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 06:26:09 -0000

Yes, it does.

I have sent them an email to get more details on the specifics, as they do have an history of inflating their claims, but it looks certainly much better than before.

Re: The Blogroll I Want For AVC

jnestour — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 07:21:31 -0000

Fred -

Blogrolls have often as much or even more value than the blog content itself for readers. What I really want is to get an aggregated blogroll based on the readings of my network.

For example, I'm reading your blog, Howard Lindzon's, Roger Erhenberg's, etc. blogs. To find other good blogs, you look through the individual blogrolls, it they exist. But what I really want is an aggregated one, with weightings based on the frequency within my network. If you all read one blog, I want to know and have a look at it. Chances are I will want to read it too.

Individual blogrolls can be manually or dynamically created as you suggest. But then we need an application to collect the blogrolls of my network, and present me with MY master one, ranked by frequency.

Articulating a business model should not be simple, but the value created by such a service would be high and tangible. They can provide all the infrastructure (create individual blogrolls automatically, display them as widgets, enable aggregated ones) or just a piece of it (for example, just crawl the blogs I read for blogrolls and work with this).

The value of an always up-to-date reading list of feeds based on the content creators I read, now and trust, would be really high.

And you can think of an infinity of bells and whistles to add such as tagging the links and filtering, graphical display, etc.

Up to date blogrolls are one of the rare valuable knowledge pools that has not yet been tapped. Anyone interested?

Re: Uservoice improves its pricing structure, yet keeps negative thresholds effects

jnestour — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 11:34:01 -0000

Usage tiers with rollover describes it very nicely indeed.

Clients with a good level of maturity won't mind and will even seek true utility-pricing based on what they use, even if the amounts charged will vary.

Usage tiers with rollover provide clients who seek certainty more than true optimization with the benefits of reducing the uncertainty on their side.

The strategy for vendors is to absorb more of the uncertainty and get in return a bigger pipeline of clients who gradually increase their consumption of the service.

Re: When Talking About Business Models, Remember That Profits Equal Revenues Minus Costs

jnestour — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 14:59:12 -0000

Hi Fred, for me, a lot of business models could be improved by using smartly the enterprise market in conjunction with the consumer market. Even, if not mainly, for consumer web startups. Here's what I've written following your post:

"While anyone has ideas on what business models could work for a number of websites, the enterprise market is almost never part of the answer. Yet, using it in combination with the consumer market rather than as two separate silos can yield startups dramatic improvements on both sides of the profit equation. "Consuprise" plays should be surprisingly powerful.

If you are a start-up with a pure consumer play web application enabling one activity in a simple and elegant way, then you might want to exploit the enterprise market. Strategically, it can be used with different angles, but we'll focus on the simplest in this post: take one offering focused on the consumer side and developing a new revenue stream on the enterprise side.

Consumer applications have unique competitive advantages for the enterprise market

Google Apps for large enterprises is an example of a consumer product being scaled in the enterprise market. The largest deployments need a specific sales force and system integrators involvement. But the mid companies market does not add any costs to Google, with self-service online subscriptions.

Most web applications will be served as a service, thus lowering the costs for enterprises. But they have other and unique competitive advantages. Their usability level and User Interface design are generally of much better quality, because they competed for individual consumers before enterprise buyers. While the former are their own decision-makers, based heavily on design and usability, enterprise decision-makers are not the end users and focus on enterprise infrastructure aspects. This is critical in terms of user adoption and time to proficiency for new tools rolled out by the corporate IT function.

Change Management processes are an order of magnitude easier with a web application which has earned its reputation in the consumer market. This competitive advantage is growing more acute as a larger base of employees are exposed and using to standard "web 2.0" applications. Although not entirely fitting our starting definition, Gmail is a perfect example: give a young employee Gmail, and it will be business as usual. Give her Outlook, and you will wait for a long time before she is fully confident with it.

Economies of scale in the enterprise market

Network and viral economies of scale are mostly thought of as attributes of the consumer market. But the enterprise market is not made of individual clients without any relationships with each other. The interweb of personal relationships and professional associations make it possible to achieve such economies of scale on the enterprise market as well. Not using the exact same dynamics, but achieving the same effects. The scale is smaller, but each head is a paying customer.

True, organizational contingencies and political agendas add overhead to any sales, making it scary for consumer companies. But if you develop a large base of opportunities at a low enough cost, you can let those opportunities mature and evolve at their own pace. You do not have to increase your burn rate other than marginally to achieve this.

You don't have to customize

The main objection to this line of thinking is: "When entering the enterprise market, each company will request some customization, and that will increase our costs proportionately with any additional revenue." Indeed, it makes no sense strategically to customize your offering, as this will lower your profit margin drastically. But you don't have to customize to win in the enterprise market.

True, companies will often request customization. Just state your position and refuse to do it. You will be surprised how quickly they will accept to use your standard offering. Of course, this is not valid for all consumer web applications. But if your product:

caters to a standard need which is the same in all large organizations
enables an isolated workflow
needs little to no data integration
...then customization is not a requirement.
If you are concerned about the customization requirements or simply want to improve your competitive positioning, offering a public API or becoming a platform hosting plug-ins, applications or widgets will work positively just as well as in the consumer market.

I'm convinced, any practical advice ?

Of course, there's still work to do, but the ROI should be worth it.

Authentication and account provisioning: you need to provide integration with the systems used by your clients, such as LDAP or Active Directory. You need to (re)-architecture your application to support easily these systems. Even if such systems are quite standard, for each new client, you will have to do some quick manual work. My advice: set expected revenue limits to avoid a barrage from small clients, charge it at cost (enterprise are used to this) or waive it for larger clients. This is the single most important point as the main danger is unauthorized access from a former employee to the application. If your "enterprise" is expected to become large, hire a specialist that will whip through the manual phases without problems.
SSO: nice to have, but not 100% required. Employees are used to their credentials by heart and if the cost to input them outweigh the benefits of the application, the problem is much bigger.
Web security: must have of course. Enterprises will want to make sure your application, accessible from the internet and hosting their data, cannot be hacked easily. Those audits are fairly standard as well, and after 2-3 large clients, you will probably have to provide the results from past audits, not perform new ones.
Data segregation and security: of course, you will have to come clean on those points. Segregation is your responsibility, as well as choosing a hosting provider you can trust.
Note that these points do scale: once in place, there will be little costs to add more corporate clients. They also benefit the consumer side of your business.

Accelerate and reduce the cost of Product Development

If you focus on a standard enterprise need, take advantage of an early partnership with 2 or 3 representative clients. Most will welcome the opportunity to provide you with their needs and requests, even if the product is still being developed. That will cut your development time as well as improve your product. And chances are your consumer side will benefit from the same improvements.

Enterprise plays provide a unique opportunity to refine your product safely, even before you take it to the consumer market in fact: large organizations avoid litigation risks by all means. So you can be sure your IP is in safe hands, they won't take any risks. Such partnerships are beneficial for both partners.

So if your a large organization: are you organized to take advantage of this new wave of offering? And if you are a consumer web startup: how can you leverage the enterprise market to improve your profit margin and your competitive position on your core consumer play?"

Full post here

Re: Pilots are not for profit-making. And we’re not playing games.

Lee Bryant — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 10:08:17 -0000

BTW - I would like to add that I find your blog intelligent and stimulating, so please keep it up!

Re: A Schumpeterian moment, but not just for retailing

jnestour — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 03:51:09 -0000

Howard, thanks for reading and taking the time for the kind words. Hope to have the chance to meet the man behind the blog and twitter one day :-)

Re: Pilots are not for profit-making. And we’re not playing games.

jnestour — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 11:54:47 -0000

Hi Lee -

Thanks for commenting. I'm coming from the strategy side and still new to IT: the value of being open about my expectations and openly discussing where we see value hugely outweigh any (if any...) drawbacks.

Regarding solution providers, the same logic can be applied with the trio clients / vendors / solution providers (SP). SP could work with vendors along the logic outlined in the post, and agree beforehand how they will handle pilots. It should be easy to obtain pilot licenses for free from the vendors.

SPs would then provide the solution to their own clients, for some of the costs associated to building the solution. For clients, if the pricing is done well, there should not be a major difference between offsetting the costs of vendors and those of the SP.

Of course, solutions will vary along the fully custom / "productized" axis, with costs varying accordingly. But this should also be for SP an investment. As outlined in the post, once large companies embark on a pilot, it's usually to make it work, not merely to taste the waters. So SP and its client should be well aligned in making the pilot a success and turning it into a full deployment.

I believe solutions providers have in fact a very important brokerage role to play. I'll go deeper on that aspect in another point, with Sharepoint considerations. I agree with the dynamics you observe, but for me they stem mainly from an immature pricing and segmentation strategy from vendors.

Thanks again for your comments!

Re: A few thoughts on Yammer, a twitter-like for organizations

jnestour — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 16:04:12 -0000

David -

For former employees, SSO is the only viable option, and as you said you
don't provide it, yet you claim you provide a space only accessible to
current employees. This is just not true. All other options involve a manual
step by either admins or employees which renders them unusable when you have
more than a few hundreds users: you can't ask IT functions to manually
manage this, and if you do, you will have mistakes. And yes, all large
companies have experience of this type of mistakes in the past.

IP filtering: some remote access solutions cannot be allowed with this. This
is not the most important point however: a large part of the value derived
from Twitter-like applications stems from their accessibility via SMS, from
any computer, etc. I don't see the point of deploying this if it can only be
used from the company's network or assets. Do I want to open my company
laptop and connect via VPN each time I want to update my status? Not at all.
This workaround limits too much the value of the application, especially as
a mobile application accessible on the go.

So, no, until you offer SSO, Yammer doesn't handle former employees well. In
fact, claiming that is misleading because former employees can easily slip
through the manual monitoring and remain on the network for quite some time.

Regarding the value of Yammer for security reasons over email, again this is
misleading, since you encourage the employees to create content that
companies will want to control, and you make companies pay afterwards. I
could go on and on. As Stowe Boyd found out as well, Present.ly is a much more attractive Twitter-like application for companies, with a much cleaner business model.

Adopting an aggressive tone by arguing my "slandering of Yammer is
preposterous" won't change the fact that your business model is essentially
based on a new twist of racketing companies to take back the control over an
unsecured discussion space.

PS: And when you will have SSO, you will again make companies pay for the
privilege to have SSO implemented on their network. I stand by my position,
and would advise anyone to ban access to Yammer from the corporate network,
make it against policy to contribute to it, while at the same time implement
an alternative like Present.ly where price and control can be managed
properly.

PPS: Reminder of my disclaimer: as anything on this website, this is my
personal opinion, not a professional one nor is it related in any way to the
positions or actions of my employer.

Re: QikCom: Not Ready For Enterprise Microstreaming Use

jnestour — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:39:54 -0000

Yes, Yammer is no-go for me, you can see my thoughts on this post (finished up today, thanks for the push ;-) ). One feature important for me for any twitter-like in the enterprise is the ability to cross post easily to Twitter.

Re: QikCom: Not Ready For Enterprise Microstreaming Use

stoweboyd — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 11:06:28 -0000

I had tried Yammer (which I have not yet written up) but looked at QikCom because it allows inclusion of users with external emails, which is a great convenience. I am going to take another look at Yammer now, since they have groups and other features.

Re: QikCom: Not Ready For Enterprise Microstreaming Use

jnestour — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 08:51:36 -0000

Hi Stowe -

Just curious why you chose QikCom and not one of the others available out there. My first choice wouldn't be with this, but rather with another one (mentioned in Laura's report).

Other tools seem much more ready for an enterprise Twitter-like app.

Best,
- Julien

Re: Dopplr vs. Tripit: they should merge or integrate

jnestour — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:58:28 -0000

Hi Evan, looking forward to the next post that goes deeper. I haven't had the time to update my blog in a long time and won't until some time, but did these posts on Dopplr / Tripit strategy earlier this year:
http://www.macroprinciples.com/2008/02/dopplr-a...
http://www.macroprinciples.com/2008/02/dopplr-a...

Would be interested by your thoughts :-)
- Julien

Re: Dopplr and Tripit: next-gen strategies ? Part 2

jnestour — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 04:59:04 -0000

Glad you liked it :-) We're striving to find a means to make this a
reality...