Utilizing Enterprise 2.0 for high performance workflow

Enterprise 2.0 technologies like Microsoft Sharepoint provide a toolset and platform for enabling high performance systems and team work.

Key impact areas include:

• Faster and higher quality projects
• Improved sharing of SME – Subject matter expertise

This is achieved through integrating knowledge, process and communications, driven by users expertise.

Open Government

 ”Open Government” best practices can feature a range of possible topics. For example it could include the policy aspects, such as the Barak Obama initiative:

“Open government is the political doctrine which holds that the business of government and state administration should be opened at all levels to effective public scrutiny and oversight.” 

Transforming government process through EIM

IM (Information Management) is often associated mostly with only the passive record-keeping aspects of IT systems, it’s based on standards like ARMA and ISO, but actually it is also an ideal framework for business analyst consulting in general, as well as a driver of significant IT change and business process improvement.

For example in Newfoundland the Office of the Auditor General conducted an ‘IMCAT‘, a risk and capacity assessment of the IM abilities of an organization, and as a result began a number of new IT investment programs to implement a comprehensive records and IM system.

This includes a new Case Management system, upgrading their email from Groupwise to Microsoft Exchange and hiring new IM Technician staff.

EIM - Enterprise IM, is the combination of applications like document management (e.g. Documentum) as well as content management ones like Sharepoint, that are ‘programmed’ with these IM regulations so that compliance with these laws is achieved.

By using tools like Sharepoint this means it can be combined with ‘Enterprise 2.0‘ best practices too.

Applying open innovation for social change

We like to try and find ways to combine entrepreneurial business development with voluntary social organizations, to help apply commercial innovation to a broader local community agenda.

This can include:

• Skills and career program development – For example how can we help more young people join and flourish in industries like IT?
• Business plan competitions – Fun stuff with incentives to submit new ideas.

Social Enterprise

Cailin enjoying a Canadian autumn

One of our expertise areas is ‘Social Enterprise‘.

The best way to describe our love for the subject is that we’re beneficiaries of it as well as professionals in the industry.

Our beloved daughter Cailin is headed off for strabismus corrective surgery next week to Nova Scotia, courtesy of Hope Air.

It is at a time that we cannot afford to pay for it ourselves, so they literally “do what they say on the tin”.

People who provide real hope are angels, and any one can do it.

Here is Cailin enjoying her first Canadian autumn, last year in Wolfville.

Technologies for highly secure collaboration

In the Aberdeen report ”Securing Unstructured Data” (33 page PDF) the author describes how tools like Sharepoint and email have proliferated raw content files like Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations.

This is a key alert area for IM (Information Management) practices, like ensuring compliance with government laws for how data should be stored and retained. Typically security is applied a lot to structured database systems but not to these unstructured areas, but they still can contain the same data needing protected.

To lock up these areas the author recommends a combination of four key technology areas, identified through analyzing the best practices of best-in-class organizations.

• Enterprise Key Management
• Data Loss Prevention
• Endpoint-related Encryption
• Enterprise Rights Management

This combination brings together PKI with capabilities like ‘Enterprise Rights Management‘, such that files are encrypted at all points in their use and access to them regulated according to business policy.

Enterprise 2.0 – Harnessing the long tail of enterprise collaboration

Microsoft Sharepoint is an ideal toolset for building collaborative workspace frameworks, using social media for new ‘Enterprise 2.0′ working patterns.

This simply means web sites that can offer teams various features for helping organize their projects and business processes, ranging from a simple “ideas exchange” to a fully loaded project and document management environment.

‘Enterprise 2.0′ is the term coined by MIT professor Andrew McAfee, referring to the use of social media aka ‘Web 2.0′ for business purposes. This includes using blogs, wikis, indexing and rss feeds and other ‘Cloud’ technologies for improving internal communications and collaboration.

Sharepoint includes these features and in general with a modular code base and big vendor community can pretty much be tailored for any function. For example features like Twitter style messaging can be easily innovated and plugged in.

It can also be linked to an underlying UC platform, so that desktop collaboration via VoIP, Instant Message and PC video which can greatly enhance peer to peer working can also be embedded into these new ways of working.

Solution Selling

Solution Selling is a methodology for managing ‘complex’ sales processes, meaning the high value deals that typically are negotiated over many months, rather than part of the day to day sales of all FMCG.