Issues that can be anticipated when using a Web 2.0/social media platform in the Enterprise?

To name a few issues that you would face if you do not enforce policies to control the use of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise:

• Very difficult for all the systems to interoperate, users may never adopt them - in the real world we have the average teenager using Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Digg.com, Del.icio.us, MySpace, and other tools. These all need to interconnect to make it successful. Take a look at Facebook's ability to have applications talk to it. For example, Twitter can update Facebook's status, and you can show your diggs in your Facebook profile.
• People get bored of them easily - the fad runs away sooner or later, and MySpace gets displaced by Facebook. Blogs get displaced by Twitter. You may experience a boom of one tool that fades away in a few months.
• Employees leaving the company can't take their networks with them - like a computer backup, you'd like to take your social networks with you, outside of your job, and this needs to be simple and possible
• Employees leaving the company can take confidential information - if you make it easy for employees to fully personalize their web 2.0 environment outside of the company, they may take and share internal information
• Since people like to keep pleasure and work separate, employees may not adopt these technologies in favor of leaving them for personal use - if, for example, you were to use Facebook or MySpace for inside of the company, few employees would like to have their bosses as friends in Facebook.
  

Now, here's my disclaimer. I don't favor policing and strictly enforcing control over Web 2.0 deployments for company use. Quite the opposite, I favor the full freedom for employees to utilize these tools as they see best fit. Also, they should be open to the public; not only for internal use, so that productivity may be expanded in all directions: customers, partners, coworkers, managers, friends, and family.

Cisco Live Summary and Highlights

Last week I spent 4 days at Cisco Live 2008, Cisco System's technical conference. In general, this was a great conference about all Cisco-related industries and markets; e.g. Networking, Collaboration, Unified Communications, Service Providers, Wireless, Data Center…

The main topic for the conference was Collaboration. This, of course, translates into ways to increase employee productivity and reduce operational costs, such as travel, by engaging in collaboration practices. WebEx was a big name and the product spotlight was the Webex Connect suite. I personally was very impressed, and can't wait to start testing it. This is a collaboration client for staying connected with coworkers, friends, and customers from a single place. It is the result of mixing the following ingredients: Skype, AOL IM, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and WebEx's online meetings. It offers a space with Instant Messaging, Presence, WebEx Meetings, Personal Dashboard, Team Spaces, and Business Widgets. This was demoed by John Chambers during the conference; check out how it integrates with the iPhone here.

Almost all Keynote speakers addressed the topics of how obvious it is that to increase productivity you have to collaborate in the Web 2.0 era, and to reduce operational cost you have to go green by collaborating more online and virtualizing the workplace. For example, if you know the presence information of a person you need to talk to, you can be more effective at how to reach him. Say you need to speak to Jim about last week's report. If you know that Jim is at a meeting, you avoid calling his desk or cell phone and use IM or Email instead. That's what a collaboration client can do for improving that.

The entire conference applied the collaboration and going green theme. First, this year they did not provide with printed copies of the technical training sessions, but gave out USB thumb drives with 1GB worth of presentations. Second, and more importantly, they incorporated a virtual component to the conference by having sessions at Second Life and a full blown virtual version of the conference called Cisco Live Virtual.

When it comes to the expo, it was called World of Solutions Expo. Big partners had great booths. In my opinion, the best ones were Intel, WebEx, Lancope, and Nokia. Intel showed their advances in Wireless (WiMax and 802.11n) and their 10Gbps interface for servers. Lancope had a great security appliance for MPLS type of networks, and Nokia had the latest mobile phones. Actually, thanks to my Nokia E61i I was able to log on to the conference site, check my calendar of events, reply to surveys, and Twitt my update in real-time (see my posting with my Twitter Timeline)

Finally, some relevant links for further getting what you missed if you did not attend:

• Official Cisco Live 2008 Site
  
• CISCOPR Channel on YouTube
  
• My Twitter Timeline with my real-time update (Blog Summary Version)

How to read a business book

Great blog post with three specific things to do, when reading a business book:

1. Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Find those in the reading.

2. Make it productive. Use a postit to write what to change.

3. Share what you learn. Teaching someone else, helps you learn too.



read more | digg story

One OS or several OSs across your product line? – Which is better

After a long time since my last post; a comment by Juniper's founder about Cisco having too many operating system versions sparked my interest for the subject. I decided to do some research and thought, and came to the following conclusion:

"A single OS across multiple platforms shortens the product lifecycle of the entire product portfolio and is inversely proportional to it in adverse levels"

What this means is that as the product portfolio grows, having one Operating System is unfavorable for the customer who has to upgrade more frequently if he/she wants to stay current. That is, because the product lifecycle gets shorter and shorter as new products affect them. For example, if you have two products with one OS, then it is beneficial: it brings consistency, and helps to solve problems for both products at the same time. When you introduce a third and a forth product, that incorporates more variables that are prone to bugs; therefore new code needs to come more frequently. That is for the entire product portfolio because they are all running the same code. When you have one hundred products, all running the same code, a bug or issue found on one of those 100 product causes the other 99 to get a new OS as well, leaving your customer to update the OS more frequently.

In other words, it simply does not scale. You have to find the balance of how many versions you can have, to satisfy a reasonable update cycle for your customer.

Amazon’s online forum could be a great tool (part 2)

Last time I posted about how valuable a web 2.0 tool can be for almost any business. In particular, I gave the example of Amazon's Forum, and praised how it brings customers and company closer by giving a more human service. In specific, I tell the story of how an unreleased product that I ordered early December has been pushed several times while an Amazon employee keeps us all eager buyers updated in the forum.

Well, the story got so much more interesting in the last couple of days. One morning, all posts of such Amazon employee where removed from the forum. At that point, we all started speculating on whether the employee was real (I got a comment on my post to prove it) or if he got in trouble for telling us that the product was going to be released in late February. Some aggravated customers went ahead and wrote letters to the manufacturer directly, while others wrote about the most effective way to file a complaint with Amazon Customer Service. A great one came from a user called "M. Halstead". He posted a summary of all the posts that were deleted from the Amazon employee (I guess he looked in his archive and put it all together for everybody to read). On my end, I decided to post on the blog again and let my readers and everybody know.

The bottom line is that, today, everybody is upset with Amazon and the manufacturer. Some people blame the manufacturer for taking too long; others defend it because they want to release a quality product. I take the side that puts the blame on Amazon.

An online forum is a great way to keep your customers close and have a friendly tone with them. Especially Amazon, a famous-for-supply-chain store can benefit greatly from it. Myself and others are still hanging in there and approving the pushed forward dates, mainly because there is quite an amount of activity in the forum and R.C., the Amazon employee in trouble, was updating us on the process and his/her talks with the manufacturer. We, as customers, deserve to be informed by Amazon, the intermediary between consumer and manufacturer, on the status of our orders. Instead, we've been getting automated emails of "click here to approve a delay in your shipment"… I wonder why the company decided to put a web 2.0 tool in place, and not use it appropriately…

My next step: a letter to Amazon's customer service, and a template of it to share with the forum. It's worth telling Amazon how to use a forum most effectively.

Amazon’s Forum – A personalized service

As I was reviewing a delayed purchased from Amazon, I decided to do some research as to why my order got delayed for the third time in the last two months. At first, I thought that Amazon was pushing back out of stock products on their highly automated systems. Then I thought that the manufacturer delayed the release of the product (in case you care here's the product I'm buying). Therefore I decided to Google delays related to the product. To my surprise, the first link that pops up is the very same Amazon product page. I click there and notice, at the bottom of it, a forum post about delays in the release of this product. That's right, Amazon offers a forum service, and several angry buyers like me were expressing their frustrations on it.

What a great form of "service personalization"! Amazon, and other online stores and service providers, are using forums, chat-with-a-representative and other web 2.0 services to be more human. In particular, in this forum post, an Amazon representative is keeping everybody up to date with the timings of the release of the product. He is even going the extra mile and asking for feedback about offering free one-day shipping to everybody. For the last weeks, hundreds of eager buyers like me, have been chatting directly and expressing our concerns with a real Amazon sales person (or supply chain manager, who knows the exact title). The fact is that we all feel much better about it than just getting automated emails.

Definitely technology advances like collaboration services (e.g. forums, blogs, twitter, and Facebook) as well as Unified Communication applications (e.g. Chat with a representative, call-me back buttons, and Web-based support systems) are getting business the competitive advantage of becoming more personalized, human and quicker to react.

The best business application of Web 2.0

A post on Twitter's blog reveal what I consider the most useful application of Twitter for businesses: keep track of customers complains on twitter, and fix it quickly.

Of course, ideally you should also keep track of all complains in Web 2.0: Facebook, MySpace, public blogs, digg, rss, etc. Wherever there's a public space where people can complain, they will leave an online footprint. That gives you the opportunity to quickly react and address the problem as soon as you can to increase customer sat.

In my humble opinion, this the best business application of Web 2.0 that I've found of so far.

read more | digg story

When recession strikes, who wins?

The media is exaggerating the coverage on two topics these days: Presidential candidates and a possible economic recession in the US. After almost two weeks of silence, I've been pretty busy with interesting projects, it is time to speak my two cents on the second topic. As usual, I will be brief, and will not go deep on whether we are heading into a recession or not. Instead, let's talk about how to act and who gets affected.

When a recession comes, who does it affect mostly?

First, it will initially impact the smallest and reactive businesses and then large and slow corporations. This is because even though small companies can usually react quickly, they are affected by a small change in the economic environment more profoundly. The good news is that by the nature of start-ups and small businesses, these companies can adapt on the spot and change direction to survive the storm. This is something that large companies can't usually do: they set up yearly budgets, and then have committees to make decisions on what to do about it. If you can quickly make decisions, then you can quickly swim to shore.

The other type of company that would be affected the most is point-product sales oriented companies. That is companies that sell only physical goods. If the main stream of revenue comes from sales of a specific physical good, people will just stop buying it and look for ways to avoid that cost. On the other hand, if the most profit comes from the sale of a service, customers will typically seek more of that. In particular, if t is something that will help them save money. That is why is so important to have a solutions based approached of selling, and have your services more profitable than then product.

Lastly, companies with a value proposition of cost savings will prevail. Usually cost savings is the second or third thing that a customer looks at, and it is a very difficult message to sell. However, when recession strikes, everybody will look for ways to save money, streamline process and drop cost. After all, everybody wants to save money, right?

If the 90’s were the Telecom years, the 00’s are the Marketing years

I am an Electrical Engineer by education. Did my studies during the 90's and that means I was in the sweet spot: Telecommunication. The 90's was all about it because of several things. If you are unfamiliar with it, do a little research online about the Telecom bubble.

Basically, companies saw the Internet as a magnificent thing, better than it really is, and invested a lot in the physical conduit for the Internet, among other things. That said, the telecom industry experience a great time: new companies came afloat, the FCC was at its peak, the Telecom Act of 1996 was passed, and even in the emerging economies the radio electric spectrum went out for bids everywhere in the world.

We all know how it ended: market crashed, people got fired, companies went broke… and new technologies came up! The industry is fine today, though.

The Internet did not die, we were just a little bit more cautious. In the 00's, the Internet is it. Yahoo and Amazon are still around, MySpace and Facebook came to life, and Google became a colossus. All this because of the faithful revenue stream that remains constant: Online Advertisement.

Low cost of distribution of information has brought limitless benefits to Marketing. It has actually made marketing popular again. Everybody with a Google Adsense account and a small website can make money with it. Will this still be the case in 5 years? We can't really tell, but what we can tell is that Marketing definitely needs to adapt; and it has been doing so nicely.

A successful Internet Marketing campaign (and this applies to anything that is displayed over an IP network including Digital Signage, Email, and Internet Browsing) must not be annoying. In other words, (1) must not try to trick you to click things, (2) must not be disruptive of a real activity, (3) must not be offensive, (4) and must be related to things that I like.

Just take a look around next time you go online. Even Television ads have adapted to the TiVo and DVR years.

Cleantech Blog Post: Flexible Workforce

A well written article on what companies are doing and should be doing to reduce the carbon footprint... run down topic, but worth reading because of the literary quality of it.

read more | digg story

Six online tools to communicate with customers

As most of my readers know me, I work as a Sales Engineer for a large Networking Company. I support sales efforts in my region. That means recommendations on ways to increase productivity, streamline their business, simplify management, and reduce cost, all from a technical perspective. What that means too is that I need to be in constant communication with my customers, in order to be effective. As of this year I have successfully started using innovative ways to stay in touch and be able to offer a better and faster service. So far, I have received great feedback, and my personal productivity has definitely increased. Some of these are:

• Webex – to deliver rich media online trainings and meetings that can be recorded and played back by attendees whenever they want. No need to travel or spend hours in traffic.
  
• Del.icio.us – to have a public source of bookmarks and relevant links for my customers. They can go to my del.icio.us page and get the link for downloading files, whitepapers, and information on a specific product.
  
• Confluence (my blog) – Started it a long time ago, and not only publish articles like this one, but also relevant news, interesting findings, and upcoming products and benefits.
  
• Yahoo Messenger – sometimes it is better than a phone call; especially for those quick questions. I also use Meebo, sometimes, to access messenger from any computer.
  
• Twitter – To communicate my presence information and micro-blog posts on interesting things that I am dealing with. I tend to include links to the stuff I am doing, such as the new router I am playing with in the lab, or that presentation on WAN optimization
  
• RSS – to syndicate my blog posts, presence information, and social bookmarks so I don't flood their mailboxes with emails.