Visually representing the E2.0 landscape is a tough and complex work especially when every software vendors wants to become a “social” player.

Andrew McAffee defined E2.0 as: “Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms by organizations in pursuit of their goals.”

E.2.0 could then mean and encompass so many different things.

The notion of “emergency” is of course restricted to a certain timeframe. In five years E2.0 will have nothing “emergent” any more. Or it will become E3.0. We have perhaps already reached such a limit. The “socialization” of established enterprise business applications is ramping. ERP, ECM, WCM, KM, Collaboration Suites are all now trying to integrate key social paradigms and features into their mutual product offerings.

Suddenly the E2.0 software world is becoming much more complex. And this shift tends to rapidly accelerate. There aren’t any more the new fancy Gen Y folks using fun to use Web 2.0 tools and the old crappy managers using their old dusty 5250 terminals: there are just company stakeholders and some social-ready business applications.

On their side “Social Software” (does it still really make sense to have a custom class of product for such tools?) are now also de-siloing themselves and are becoming much more “enterprise-ready” (e.g: the recent Jive announcements to better support and integrate with SAP, SharePoint, third party CMS and perhaps soon a more generic CMIS support). Meanwhile “traditional” enterprise products are catching up with all social-related things.

So how do all these old and new social tools will fit together in the future?

There are already a few couple of interesting blog posts on this topic:

- Classification of E2.0 use cases: http://blog.enterprise2open.com/2009/10/15/classification-of-enterprise-20-use-cases/

- Billy Cripe on Social Collaboration: http://blogs.oracle.com/fusionecm/2009/07/2_types_of_collaboration_10_re.html

- Pretzel Logic blog post: http://www.pretzellogic.org/2009/07/28/why-unlocking-ecm-is-critical-to-your-enterprise-20-execution-plan/

Susan Scrupsky also formalized an interesting illustration in order to demystify E2.0:

E2.0: Your Wisdom Ecosystem

This latest illustration gave me some inspiration to make a revised version out of it. My starting point was to try to reconcile the basic flow of content as it is traditionally envisioned by AIIM and to reconcile it with the E2.0 ecosystem and all the other related enterprise-grade products (generally speaking the Collaboration Suites, ERP, CRM and WCM).

At this point we come to some personal interpretations of how all these tools are related, should be interconnected, could share certain common services and which ones. The market is currently rapidly evolving on a nearly daily basis. So feel free to debate such a vision, there are certainly lots of addendums to bring to it.

A few explanations

As mentioned in a previous blog post, I personally distinct Social Collaboration from Content Delivery throughout Knowledge Networks. The fact that every business software is adding “social” on front of its vertical is self-sufficient to determine that there are some bi-directional levels of interaction coming from all the company’s stakeholders (black arrows pointing to the center).

We can also foresee the return from purgatory of Knowledge Management which was a bit neglected for the last years. Even if KM sounds now a bit outdated this practice has clearly understood and assimilated that people, not processes or documents, should be in the center of any new knowledge initiatives (e.g: this blog entry from Luis Suarez or this recent Gartner post). Knowledge Networks will act as the core kernel around which every exchanged content container will gravitate.

Even if there is a main information stream (usually from Collaboration Tools to Content Delivery software) each one of the related social-ready product offering can also turn into a content provider. This emphasizes the need to rapidly integrate better read-write content interoperability standards among all those platforms which will be key to success for a wider adoption of E2.0 technologies beside departmental or silo’ed approach.

Each content container will then inherit from several capabilities which will go from Information Reuse to Semantic Awareness going through some Social Classifications (and a few others). You can consider them as electrons gravitating and enriching any of your social-enabled content containers.

I deliberately excluded any CMS, Information Infrastructure or Content Platform related terms which relate more to underlying technical mechanisms in order to focus only on business applications and solutions. For example the ECM term is used here from a restricted manner focusing more on the finished applications (e.g: RM, Email Archiving, eDiscovery…) rather than on the promises of a unified content storage mechanism. Indeed all the aformentionned solutions are “content-based” and all rely from one way or another on an underlying content repository (cf: another one of my blog post which tries to better distinct between CCII vs CEVA). From a similar manner Social Collaboration is limited on this graph to extended “Collaboration Suites” and does not integrate all possible social content composites such as a blog or a wiki which could also perfectly be part of a Social CRM, a Social ECM or a Social WCM solution. Finally the WCM term is not scoped to the generation of web pages only but covers all forms of rich, personalized and interactive internet-based content delivery solutions.

Content City, Content Earth, Content Galaxy: Manage your Sims carefully

This 2D representation however fails to truly cover all the aspects of your E2.0 ecosystem. One needs a better 3D mental illustration to think about your overall company content universe.

At the core of your E2.0 system, you will find your federated if omnipresent content management infrastructure which should offer the key underlying services to store and preserve any of your content assets.

On the different intermediate strata you will find a mix of various content interoperability standards, API-to-API bridges, unified or federated search servers or other types of semantic engines that any of your content containers could optional inherit or benefit from.

On top of your “content earth” your employees are working. Each of your company departments, sections or business units (aka your continents, countries, cities in this analogy) have different mission statements and objectives. They also need different solutions which they will try to assemble starting from various “social content composites” in order to best leverage their unique problem (in a E2.0 world: Comments, Polls, Rating, Blogs, Wikis, Bookmarklets, … conversely in our analogy some airports, fire stations, police barracks, highways… kind of infrastructures).

The wide areas taken by our oceans perfectly illustrates the mass of untapped information a company can not capitalize upon for the moment. If roughly 70-80% of the information of a company is still unstructured, unindexed, non transparent,… such a number looks like quite similar to the size of our oceans on earth.

You should then really consider my aforementioned E2.0 map in perspective of a 3D rotating sphere. The recurring rotation should help create a continuous flow of information delivered from a personalized and filtered manner allowing your company to generate new ideas and then new collaboration projects.

   

Click here to download:

E2.0_Reconciled_Unlocking_your.zip (338 KB)

Your company is of course not alone in the universe. Social WCM, Social CRM, Social ERP will act as your Florida or your Russian Baikonur star gates and Social Networks/Social Media (Facebook, Twitter & co)as your orbital stations and as gateways to your exploration of the galaxy.

Retail customers could be considered as an asteroid belt which could be attracted or not by your ecosystem thanks to your gravity.

Finally your company will certainly establish permanent interstellar connections with certain systems (e.g: some of your key suppliers or customers).

(The Star Wars EcoSystem)

And all this relies on the fragile ecology of your federated social-ready and content-enabled ecosystem. Time to sign a Green “content” Deal in your company?

In the hope that this E2.0 map and analogy could help some of you better understand the theory of the social content plate tectonics, their possible convergent or collisional boundaries and other core gravitational or external magnetic forces wich is currently happening.