One area where Enterprise 2.0 technology makes dramatic inroads is Project Management tools. There are many web based Project Management and Time and Activity Management software based on “social software” technologies available now. Personally I have always maintained that there is no need to manage competent professionals, they can use thought leadership, support, sounding board for discussion, but not management. Therefore I had to maintain time lines and budgets for the projects, largely by “keeping a ear to the ground” and using anything from spreadsheets to MS Project for management reporting and accounting.

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The problem with consultants is similar to the problem with politicians - both are largely useless and extremely expensive, unless they are deployed properly and managed closely. Now to be fair, most consultants, unlike politicians, are quite knowledgeable and capable, but because they are pawns in a corporate political game, they are largely ineffective.

Ben Worthen of Wall Street Journal Blog on Technology quotes “big brains” from Deloitte Consulting:

The ailing economy has many businesses trying to cut costs. But most are going about it wrong. That’s according to the big brains at Deloitte Consulting. The company, which presumably would be happy to help your business go about doing it right, interviewed execs at 70 Fortune-500 companies, more than two-thirds of which have cost-cutting measures in place. But 64% of these companies are cutting costs through incremental steps like layoffs or shrinking travel and training budgets. These efforts only make a superficial difference and are harder to sustain, Omar Aguilar, a principal at Deloitte, tells the Business Technology Blog.

These are statements which are very hard to disagree with and even harder to make any use of. Let’s try to select the area from this quote - “travel and training budgets” and look at it from a fundamental economic perspective:

1. The usual knee-jerk reaction of management at the time of economic slow downs, is to cut down on these budgets incrementally and temporarily, and then relax limitations when acceleration returns. I wonder if anybody has measured the resulting financial effects of these temporary measures over all business performance?
2. Given that globalization activity will not likely stop, people do need to work with each other across geographies. Does management expect oil prices will collapse any time soon? Given the propensity of our politicians to look for someone to blame, rather than develop a sound energy strategy, I would seriously discount that possibility.
3. The travel cost, particularly airfare and food, has nowhere to go but up to reflect inflationary pressures of fuel and agricultural commodities. Demographics of the world spells out that these changes will stay with us for a while. Airlines are already cutting the number of flights and will raise their prices.
4. Considering the cost of travel, and lost productivity while traveling, the “tele presence” conferencing technology, even at a relatively high level of investment, starts to look quite attractive. Building cost/benefit analysis model for evaluation is very easy.

I have seen reports in WSJ Technology Blog and other publications, but cannot find the links now, about Cisco and Siemens offerings, which provide high quality meeting conferencing over VOIP at the range from $5K to $25K per location set-up. Cisco predicts that the technology will really take off by 2012, but I think it is quite conservative of an estimate, barring oil price collapse. There are people who complain that “tele presence” cannot replace the quality of cooperation that personal meetings provide. I would agree that hand written books are also much more “precious”, but we have learned to “suffer” with printed and even electronic media’s shortcomings.

Corporate consultants need to learn and re-engineer “best practices” from one of the oldest and still most successful industry - the industry of religion. If the tele-evangelical mega-churches figured out how to provide a human experience over the television, which is “warm” enough to collect billions of dollars, why do Global Corporations that are rearmed with “tele presence” and Web 2.0 collaboration software tools fail to learn how to be more productive?

I have been reading lately a lot about “social software” and its impact on businesses large and small. It appears to me, and I am definitely not an expert, that the term’s definitions, which are many, boils down to three product groups:

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Much has been written lately about traditional enterprise applications essentially being data entry “forms” and reporting structures, which are implemented to support desirable business processes and practices. It is surely a very complex set of structures, and it takes a very large number of professionals to design, maintain and upgrade these structures to ensure proper functionality, security, availability and performance for a very large number of customers. The most important reason for the rise of the Enterprise Application Software industry was economy of scale. Only 30 years ago all business applications were internally developed by a company’s IT organizations or contractors, with one exception of a General Ledger application available from McCormick & Dodge. The supply of qualified professionals was outstripped by the demand for software by a very wide margin.

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I was writing before here and here about the Contact Management challenges to overall SFA user adoption. There are some exciting news which could help to deal with this challenge.

Jigsaw, a business information provider that relies on a user-generated content model to keep its database of corporate and individual contact information up to date, today announced plans to offer its corporate data free of charge.

“In essence, we’re open sourcing our corporate data,” said CEO Jim Fowler. “Corporate data is close to becoming a commodity. We’re going to make it a complete commodity.”

Designed as an alternative to companies like Hoovers, Jigsaw offers both corporate data, like headquarters, industry and contact information, and contact data, such as direct phone numbers, email and titles for individuals.

Jigsaw users can pay for the contact information via a subscription service and earn additional points for updating records with up-to-date information.

Dubbed the “Open Data Initiative,” Jigsaw is partnering with leading on-demand CRM vendors to bring its corporate data to their CRM systems. Entellium, Landslide, Maximizer, NetSuite, Oracle, Sage and SugarCRM are all making it possible for customers to download Jigsaw’s data via CSV files into their on-demand applications. Microsoft’s CRM online is not part of the program.

Unfortunately it still seem to require some IT tinkering to facilitate proper import of data and subsequent scheduled update in a context of internal Account Management, but it surely is a big step in a right direction.

… very good adoption experience when it was possible to add (mash) external information about Customers and Contacts automatically fed from on-line subscription services. That could be huge value added for salespeople, who otherwise would need to spend hours researching or fly blind without CRM system.

The “mashing” approach implemented in InsideView, I have written about here, is even more attractive and very well worth considering as an important part of CRM implementation strategy.