The Enterprise 2.0 Life-Cycle

This post originally appeared on Andrea Baker – Enterprise 2.0 Evangelist on 4/7/09, it has been reposted here for mass dissemination

Over the past few years I have been collecting knowledge and growing best practices for my business area of Enterprise 2.0. I recently changed my position at Navstar to focus on this exclusively and now I am no longer the Director of Technology, I am the Director of Enterprise 2.0. (new business cards have been ordered).

With that, the past few years I have been growing our Enterprise 2.0 business at Navstar, Inc. This growth comes from my personal experience in managing communities over the past 15 years with the various tools available. As the community grows, technology is growing and evolving with or without it. Some communities embrace change, others do everything they can to resist.

With that, I have developed the Enterprise 2.0 Life-Cycle or ELC2.0

This life-cycle is the stages in which I have seen organizations, communities, and businesses adapt to the changing and available technologies that help their organization grow and thrive. This may ring a little familiar to those who are familiar with the Software Development Life-cycle (SDLC), the long, costly, and project creep way of doing business. In this approach, we do not wish to reinvent the wheel. We firmly believe that there are many excellent open-source solutions that are ideal for business collaboration, communication, networking, and transparency.

* Evaluation – The Enterprise 2.0 team evaluates the customer for their needs, conducting focus groups and attending meetings of those in the target community. A requirements document is developed based on the discussions and presented to management for a proposed solution.

* Enterprise Implementation – All activities and tasks are derived from capabilities, actualized by deliverables, and produced into an implementation document.

* Customization – During the pilot introduction and eventual community roll out, the Enterprise 2.0 works with customers to tweak the enterprise solutions (toolkit), to fit the communities needs. Not just an out of the box solution.

* User Management – An experienced Community Manager will work as a part of the larger community to bridge the technology and cultural gaps, develop guidelines, and tutorials for new users. As well as act as initial Tier 1 support until additional staff has been trained.

* Training – As you introduce new tools to your community they will replace existing business practices. With new technologies and tools, comes a bit of a learning curve for some. This is why we believe training is essential to the deployment of Enterprise solutions.

* Evolution – As the community comes on line with the tools replacing old business practices with new techniques, comes the desire to do more. This becomes the natural cultural evolution of the community.

* Revolution – The cycle continues as the revolution takes over. The community suggests new tools and new technologies on their demand bringing back the circle to evaluation, in which the Community Manager and Enterprise Architect consider the community input to take it to the next level.

Now this is not the entire strategy I am posting, but rather the highlights [excerpts from our Navstar, Inc Whitepaper on Enterprise 2.0 for Business] of the overall implementation of Enterprise 2.0 within a community, be it business in the private sector or the Government. If your business or organization would like to learn more or are looking for a company with Enterprise 2.0 experience and solutions that encompass the entire life-cycle, then feel free to reach me at my work email account [abaker at navstar-inc.com]. I would be happy to listen to your needs and open a dialog for a solution in which Navstar can help you.