
Webciety and Enterprise 2.0: A snapshot of today’s social computing conversations
Though smaller than in year’s past, Germany’s CeBIT trade show in Hanover this week remains one of the giants of the industry and is a must-attend event for much of Europe’s technology leaders. For the last two years, I have been participating in Webciety, a show within a show that explores the emerging 21st century digital lifestyle.
Here is a breakdown of how Europe is looking at Enterprise 2.0 adoption and how it affects us as well.

The Facebook imperative for enterprise software
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, the well-known CRM and cloud computing company (and now soon-to-be social software vendor) wrote a guest post on TechCrunch late last week making the case for “why enterprise software should take its cues from Facebook and become more social.”
What then does this mean for the future of IT and what impacts will social computing ultimately have on the enterprise.

Making government more open and social
Can social tools and community-based approaches truly help our government function better and operate more efficiently? Will open access to government data create important new opportunities for citizens and increase transparency? As we’ll see, these two questions are currently top-of-mind in many public sector policy discussions this year. The questions also herald underlying forces at work in the government landscape in many countries around the world, including the United states.
Here are some of the initiatives that are taking place this year and what’s happening with Government 2.0 as 2010 begins to heat up.

SAP’s 12Sprints joins the social enterprise bandwagon
I spent some time this morning working with SAP’s new 12Sprints collaboration service, which was announced earlier this week. Available free in open beta immediately, it’s a cloud-based service that’s a cross between Basecamp and Google Wave and is ostensibly designed for team collaboration. Not incidentally, 12Sprints is also clearly a social application and it includes viral invitation, extensive commenting and discussion capabilities, and interesting new twists on measuring community opinion such as real time consensus tracking. Here’s my analysis and breakdown.

Social CRM: Ground zero for Enterprise 2.0 in 2010
There’s been some debate recently on whether Social CRM is part of the broader Enterprise 2.0 story. I try to answer the question and explore some of the latest thinking on social business and how it can help transform the customer relationship for real competitive advantage.

A New Vision for SOA Governance: A Focus on the Social Aspect
It almost a truism that cultural and organizational factors — these include politics, information silos, “tribal” interests, and effective change management — generally determine the success or failure of a major IT initiative in most organizations today. While “big bang” strategic projects and infrastructure upgrades are notoriously fraught with peril, particularly when it comes to […]

ZDNet’s Enterprise Web 2.0: The top 10 posts of 2009
As we get ready to enter the final year of the decade, here’s a round-up of what you found interesting here on Enterprise Web 2.0 based on actual readership. We’ll see what the new year brings us but 2009 was full of notable developments that will have a lasting impact to way we using technology […]

What will power next-generation businesses?
The ongoing and seemingly inexorable decline of traditional media continues to be the canonical example of what happens when the ground rules get changed in an industry that is fundamentally unable to adapt to new market conditions. A great analysis recently posted by Umair Haque at Harvard Business underscores the point: The so-called new normal is starting to seem more and more foreign the deeper we go into the 21st century than most organizations may yet be willing to believe.
Here’s an exploration of what will likely drive forward next-generation businesses in the 21st century.

Amplifying ‘weak signals’ for IT success
Every executive knows that gaining detailed and accurate information about his or her organization’s activities is a challenging and ongoing struggle. New techniques that reveal hidden vulnerabilities are now available.

Learning from the weak signals of failure
Many victims of failed projects claim they were blindsided by problems that arose suddenly out of nowhere. In reality, the notion that failures spontaneously arise without warning is nonsense.