I haven't seen much mention on the Enterpise 2.0 blogs of the R word. Is that because Enterprise 2.0 evangelists are in denial, or are they just such eternal optimists that they shrug such matters off as trivialities?
Anyhow, I've been wondering what, specifically, might be the selling points for an Enterprise 2.0 programme during an economic downturn. Here are my 'top 5' suggestions. I'd like to know what you think - are these right, are there others?
1. In a tough business climate, you need all the tools you can lay your hands on to make yourself more effective. Especially if they are cheap. E2.0 tools are effective and cheap.
2. You'll save cash when you migrate to SaaS from home-grown LANs, data centres, client apps etc. Most E2.0 tools are available as SaaS (and possibly only so).
3. You'll save time and thus money by using email less, and blogs, wikis, RSS etc more. This is because you'll reduce information 'noise' and thus time lost looking for the 'signal'.
4. If it comes to lay-offs, you'll communicate well with your staff about the need for them, and about the process, because you know that everyone in the organisation will know if you don't - and if you do. No more 'disappearances'.
5. You might find that staff come up with creative ways of helping the business ride the trough of the wave.
Showing posts with label Saas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Saas. Show all posts
Monday, 21 July 2008
Tuesday, 24 June 2008
Enterprise 2.0 tools for projects
I originally posted this as a comment on one of Andrew McAfee's blog posts, then realised I should be putting it on here, too.
I've been trying to get a project team to use E2.0 tools recently. It's been harder work than I expected. We've been using Google docs to hold project documentation. This includes a spreadsheet that is the project plan. I had to switch to Zoho for the plan, because it became too big to upload to Google Docs. So that made 2 places to look, and 2 applications to learn. I thought both Google Docs and Zoho would be 'no-brainers' to get the hang of, but some people found it difficult. And we've had glitches, both human (eg my forgetting to give the right people access to a document) and technical (a bug in Google preventing editing of access permissions).
However, despite all these issues I think we've begun to see some benefits, and no-one has refused to play ball out of our small team of half a dozen or so. It's also been interesting that, some sensitive customer data apart (which was kept off the system) there has not been too much concern about putting the project data onto third party servers.
Incidentally, the team comprises the customer for a system, the supplier, and myself as an independent project manager. The fact that we're from three different organisations made it beneficial to use SaaS platforms (no access problems), but it also meant I didn't have the power to make the choice of tools and methods a matter of diktat.
I've been trying to get a project team to use E2.0 tools recently. It's been harder work than I expected. We've been using Google docs to hold project documentation. This includes a spreadsheet that is the project plan. I had to switch to Zoho for the plan, because it became too big to upload to Google Docs. So that made 2 places to look, and 2 applications to learn. I thought both Google Docs and Zoho would be 'no-brainers' to get the hang of, but some people found it difficult. And we've had glitches, both human (eg my forgetting to give the right people access to a document) and technical (a bug in Google preventing editing of access permissions).
However, despite all these issues I think we've begun to see some benefits, and no-one has refused to play ball out of our small team of half a dozen or so. It's also been interesting that, some sensitive customer data apart (which was kept off the system) there has not been too much concern about putting the project data onto third party servers.
Incidentally, the team comprises the customer for a system, the supplier, and myself as an independent project manager. The fact that we're from three different organisations made it beneficial to use SaaS platforms (no access problems), but it also meant I didn't have the power to make the choice of tools and methods a matter of diktat.
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