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September 23rd, 2010 | Tags: collaboration, google | Category: Enterprise 2.0 |
The large international food retailer Ahold has moved its 55,000 employees to Google Apps. Google itself proudly announces this on their official Google Enterprise Blog. This shows that Google tools are not just for small start-ups with a handful of employees who work out of their local Starbucks. Ahold employees will be having access to a full featured set of enterprise communication software, of course interlaced with Google’s social functions. With Google Apps companies can use all the tools that are available to consumers, but hosted specifically for your company.
There’s Gmail and calendar, but also other tools such as Gtalk for chatting and videoconferencing (Gtalk can automatic translate your messages, so you can chat with someone in another language) and Google Docs for online collaboration in documents. I’m curious to see how many other large scale companies dare to get of the Microsoft corporate bandwagon. If you know of interesting cases please let us know in the comments.
June 30th, 2010 | Tags: nexocial, revolution, thesis | Category: Enterprise 2.0 |
I’ve recently started my internship, for my master in Strategic Management. I’ve always been interested in web 2.0 tools myself and the possibilities they bring for businesses. So doing my research on Enterprise 2.0 was quite an obvious choice.
You could call Enterprise 2.0 the application of Web 2.0 tools (wikis, blogs and social communities like Facebook and Twitter, etc) to the business environment, but then you would do it short. Using these tools in an open, fun and uncontrolled way like on Twitter and Facebook is just different from trying to get an organization to work with them. It is still possible to have the same advantages and ways of using it however, in my opinion. Just don’t expect the adoption process to be like that of Twitter for instance where the system is opened and people just wander in. Also don’t expect everyone in the organization to join in and participate in the same way. Not all people with internet access are using Twitter and not all Twitter users are equally active.
For my research I will try to connect organizational performance with the implementation of an Enterprise 2.0 platform. I am an intern of two companies. One is Nexocial, a software development company which has also built the nPad, an iPad rival for businesses. Their Enterprise 2.0 platform is called Revolution, more on that later in a new post. The other company is a large bank/insurance company, of which I can’t disclose the name. Nexocial will do a pilot of Revolution at the bank. We will have four pilot groups of about 500 people in total. It will be my task and my research objective to determine what strategic organizational goals can be supported by this platform and whether or not it actually does.
During this research I will search for the small but existing body of knowledge on Enterprise 2.0 and add some of my own insights. I will use this blog to share this information with the world but also to ask for input on the best ways to measure success in Enterprise 2.0 implementation and sources of knowledge on this subject. So please comment for to give your input or subscribe to this blog via RSS, Twitter or our Facebook page.
February 11th, 2010 | Tags: diversification | Category: Strategy |
Competing in overcrowded industries is no way to sustain high performance. The real opportunity is to create blue oceans of uncontested marketspace. Managers usually spend their time figuring out how to outfox the competition. Strategic management has its origin in military thinking. The question usually is how to conquer a certain piece of land on our enemies. Also the enemies have to be defeated, we cannot coexist. It’s a zero-sum game. This is old thinking.
 According to W. Chan Kim and Reneé Mauborgne (Amazon Affiliate link), there are two kinds of space. On the one hand there are the contested battlegrounds, the existing cake that needs to be divided. These are called red oceans. Red from the blood of all the fierce competition, as they dramatically state. The other kind are blue oceans. New markets with no competition yet.
When diversifying or starting a new business a manager has the choice between getting back into the fight with existing or new competitors or creating a new space with no competition yet. Obviously the creation of new markets is no new idea. Any radically new idea in our history has created a new market. The terminology of blue versus red oceans is new however and it creates the possibility for manager to make a choice and think outside of their current box.
The creation of new markets has always existed. You may think of the iPhone or personal computer, but new markets have been created since the invention of the wheel. Kim and Mauborgne use the example of Cirque du Soleil. The CEO, Guy Laliberté, could’ve tried to create a regular circus, but with more animals, more impressive juggling acts and even funnier clowns. With higher costs he would’ve created a little higher value. But he didn’t.
By creating a new space he avoided the cost/value connection. With lower costs (no animals for instance) he created a lot more value. He combined parts of the circus, parts of theater and ballet and created something totally new. Something uncontested.
When competing in red oceans you are trying to beat or match the competitors who is currently performing best. This means that even when you match them you will only become just as good as someone else. This is the same flaw that exists with benchmarking. A firm that is lead by benchmarking of competitors will only try to achieve to be just as good in a couple of years as the competitors are now. Not only is there no incentive to surpass a competitor on a certain road, firms will also not follow a whole new road altogether.
There is no doubt that there are many potential gains from creating a new space, free of competition and free of a value/cost trade-off. Then why do most managers spend their time on improving what they where doing yesterday and today? Are you improving little by little what you did yesterday or are you looking to make the leap into the next blue ocean?
January 19th, 2010 | Tags: avatar, movies | Category: innovation |
I finally saw Avatar this week. I thought I’d be one of the last to see it, but after a couple of weeks the huge IMAX theatre was still filled all the way. First about the movie. I’d never seen a movie in IMAX and also not with this kind of 3D technology. I was pretty impressed by it all, but I think the movie itself would have been great without all the effects. In advance I thought it would’ve been more of a tech demo showing off the 3D possibilities, without any real story. While that surely wasn’t true, I’d expect many of the people that were going to see the movie were going for the 3D experience.
And boy, were there many people who went and saw it. It’s a regular box office success. It grossed over $1 billion worldwide in the first month and people have paid $1.6 bln up until today to get in. To put that in perspective, it’s the number two in the list with highest grossing movies ever, behind James Cameron’s previous movie, Titanic, which was released 12 years ago and has turned over $1.8 bln. Another interesting statistic is that the whole of the movie industry has resulted in about $10.5 bln in 2009. So Avatar (released December 19th) makes up almost 10% of that. (source Boxofficemojo)
James Cameron has been developing this movie for 12 years. In this period he has seen the movie industry changing and struggling with internet phenomena such as piracy. The revenues have been steadily rising, but still people worried. Then he and others wondered how to get people away from their computer screens and living rooms, into the movie theatres. 3D movies seemed like the answer and heavy investments were made in developing a whole new way of filming. Would these investments have been made if the threat of people watching movies at home hadn’t existed? I doubt it.
Now of course one of the biggest hits of the Consumer Electronics Show of this January in Las Vegas was the 3D television, so people can watch 3D movies at home. No doubt 3D movies will get pirated. This doesn’t mean this development has been for nothing. It’s just another step in innovative progress.
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