Understanding how to orchestrate greater value and flexibility from large enterprise backbone applications in conjunction with newer, more agile Enterprise 2.0 processes and technologies to effectively support critical business functions is a major challenge for business leadership.

The '1.0' enterprise software market that powers larger enterprises today has very deep origins and roots in historical core business processes, whose foundations significantly predate computer technologies.

The 'Enterprise 2.0' movement in business breaks out of the restrictive document, postal and telephone workflow paradigms that are now over a century old and were essentially emulated digitally to model '1.0' communications and application technology platforms in the personal computing era.

Enterprise shortcomings today can be characterized by the following realities:

Applications:
Systems of record are set in place but access to data and information remain largely fragmented: the context and engagement that tie both data and collaboration together to support discrete business activities is missing.

Infrastructure:
Broadband, Mobile and Web 2.0 concepts put consumers in the center of their own 'data stream'. In contrast, the enterprise data is centralized. The enterprise has seen advancements in broadband, unified computing and transactional IT, but these applications don't often share context. Access to multiple systems to communicate, collaborate and close business loops is required.

Operations:
Tomorrow's organizations need to leverage the best minds to serve the customer or other end users. Current organizational design and infrastructure are not optimized to leverage the best resources for the job.

Business Process:
'1.0' Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) processes, whilst enforcing process and compliance, do not enable flexible collaboration and require creative problem solving to address unique, non-repeatable requests.

A newer model is required that blends the optimal amount of process and engagement to improve business outcomes at an acceptable cost.

Revenue:
Most organizations have not kept up with the pace of consumer engagement needs. Today's customer is increasingly using participatory media (communities, social networks etc) to rely on each other's judgment and to engage with businesses. Putting forth the best minds and information in front of prospects and customers to build genuine relationships to augment pushed marketing information is necessary.

Collaboration:
The intranets, extranets and portals used to communicate between groups inside organizations can be effective transactional & data exchange platforms, but are typically ill equipped ad hoc support and collaboration.

Businesses that have cumulatively built their collaborative and transactional infrastructure on these technologies have reached a crisis point in information 'findability' and process context.

Click here to download and read more from the whitepaper, "Enterprise 2.0: Accelerating Business Performance," including examples of how to put collaborative technologies to work to drive performance.


Oliver Marks and Sameer Patel are co-founders of the Sovos Group.