In June 2009, Booz Allen Hamilton (“BAH”) was awarded the Open Enterprise 2009 Innovation Award for its groundbreaking Enterprise 2.0 portal, appropriately named “Hello”. Booz Allen won the award in large part for because as Oliver Mark’s described it: “<BAH is> truly transforming their organization at its core through deep, enterprise-wide adoption.” ,Bill Ives wrote a fantastic series on the first generation Hello. It’s well worth the read.
Today, we’re pleased to announce that MindTouch and Microsoft are now powering BAH’s next generation hello.bah.com intranet., which went live on May 3, 2010 with only a few glitches (not related to MindTouch, mind you .
Walton Smith who headed up the project for BAH’ disclosed to us that Booz Allen chose MindTouch over their previous solution provider because of our ability to scale and the incredible amount of flexibility MindTouch gives its users. He understands that Hello.Bah can easily be expanded by using the powerful MindTouch architecture to rapidly develop mashups, social applications and custom enterprise solutions. Walton understands and readily embraces the concept of having it “your way”.
Recently, MindTouch sponsored a survey conducted by TechTarget to learn more about best in class Intranets in the SMB space and the Global 3000. We expected most Intranets not to be Enterprise 2.0 enabled, but we wanted to learn first hand the different varieties of Intranets and if they were providing value.
Interesting note: 87% of the respondents had an Intranet while 13% did not.
Who took the Survey?
TechTarget interviewed over 200 companies. Twenty-three percent of them were over $1 billion in revenue while forty-two percent were between $1m and $50m. A good mix of respondents.
What were the main reasons for choosing MindTouch?
Open Source
Ease of use
Extensible / Ease of Integration
How did you hear about MindTouch
32% Search engine
17% Word of mouth (friend, co-worker, twitter)
10.19% Blogs/Forums
…
2% Advertisement (2nd to last)
This is one of the most fascinating bits of information I gleaned from the survey. MindTouch is spread almost entirely by word of mouth. One could argue blogs and forums are a form of word of mouth too, which would put the total word of mouth at 28%. Another option was news articles and this ranked fourth. This obviously is relevant and must be attributed to MindTouch having an open source strategy and because we have been successful in creating a culture of engagement with our users and customers. I write about this more in another blog post.
We have received a number of requests recently from companies looking for hard ROI data on our Intranet Collaborative Network so that they can sell our solution internally. The issue that immediately comes to mind is that each company uses their intranet differently so that quantifying ROI is a subjective exercise. In other words, every company will realize benefits and ROI differently depending on how they use their Intranet. I am confident however that a large number of positive benefits can be realized and measured by focusing on specific business needs that address cost savings, revenue gains, or cost avoidance.
A few areas that have proven to yield hard ROI benefits using MindTouch:
If the world didn’t change business would be easy. Nothing ever stays the same and certainly not in today’s business environment. The need for speed and adaptation has never been more pressing but still most medium and large companies are very slow to adapt to changing business conditions. Most Executives get this and are exploring solutions that bring agility and flexibility into their organizations.
Meanwhile, today’s corporations are built to have a single view of their customers. Segmented data resides in individual departments and is not easily federated across the organization. There are too many unconnected systems, silo databases and laborious processes with countless parochial interests and needs. This predicament slows decision making and project execution while rarely providing management with lessons learned to course correct in the future.
In general, when Executives want performance figures on each of the lines of business it’s typically done haphazardly or by asking for specific reports which take weeks to create. This is analogous to the 18th century naval voyages where discovery was taking place but expedition reports didn’t come back for months. In today’s economic environment where acquiring, servicing and retaining customers is paramount, you are at a competitive disadvantage if you don’t have a real-time federated view of the enterprise.
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In This Issue
MindTouch Launches Attack on Stagnant Corporate Intranets
Latest MindTouch Community News
Introducing Zenoss + MindTouch Integration
Letter from the CEO: The Future of Collaborative Networks
Introducing Enterprise Collaborative Networking
This week we announced the immediate availability of the first of three turnkey collaborative network solutions we intend to launch over the next six months. The MindTouch Collaborative Intranet, built on our popular MindTouch 2009 open source collaboration platform, addresses the failure of current corporate portals and enterprise social networks to deliver value to business users, while simultaneously transforming a company’s IT staff into an army of application developers.
This video highlights the functionality of MindTouch as a corporate intranet
We are now launching an attack on stagnant corporate Intranets!
By deploying MindTouch Collaborative Intranet, you can now federate content from across the data and application silos your employees use each day — ERP, CRM, file servers, email, databases, web-services infrastructures, social networks — to create a vibrant real time information fabric. MindTouch Collaborative Intranet connects the legacy business systems your company uses every day and pulls data from each individual silo into a single, common and unified Web interface. Unlike more traditional approaches to data federation — such as static portals or plug-in-dependent wikis — MindTouch Collaborative Intranet presents the data in a format that is interactive, collaborative and scalable. And with operational excellence near the top of every manager’s performance objectives this year, MindTouch Collaborative Intranet becomes a highly-valuable tool to drive greater visibility and transparency across an organization’s business.
June has been a great month. Community members like yourself have been very active in the forums and the wiki, fleshing out existing documentation, adding new one, and even contributing new extensions and code. In case you missed it, read all about it in our biweekly community news posts here and here. On behalf of the entire community I want to thank bizzz, blakeh, btnelson, crb, flash39, ivan.zderadicka, justinvp, kenfortune, langke, methius, neilw, nickd, pasukaru, polo, rberinger, sean, tcplomp, and everyone else for your time and effort in helping others get the most out of MindTouch!
If you haven’t gotten involved yet, it’s easy super easy! See a mistake on a page, edit it! Have a cool script to share, post it! See a question you know the answer to, answer it! Speak another language, help us translate to it! Found a bug, report it!
Zenoss is an open source monitoring application used to monitor the health and performance of your IT
infrastructure. Monitoring infrastructure is only half the battle. Having a collaborative network to store
troubleshooting procedures and passwords is also necessary for many of these users. One solution is to mash-up the monitoring capabilities of Zenoss Core with Mindtouch’s collaborative network of knowledge-sharing and collaboration capabilities. As a MindTouch user we thought you might benefit from the synergy between both of these platforms. You can read about the MindTouch/Zenoss mash-up on the Zenoss blog or find out more about Zenoss solutions here.
Letter from the CEO: The Future of Collaborative Networks
I recently wrote at Ostatic about The Future of Collaborative Networks. It is an important post that I’ll be building on in the coming months. This first post introduces Collaborative Networks and explains the differences between these and social software and social networks. I encourage you to read the full post. It provides insight into how we think about enterprise collaboration here at MindTouch and it also makes it clear where we will continue to steer the product.
“Rather than focusing on socialization, one to one interactions and individual enrichment, businesses must be concerned with creating an information fabric within their organizations. This information fabric is a federation of content from the multiplicity of data and application silos utilized on a daily basis; such as, ERP, CRM, file servers, email, databases, web-services infrastructures, etc. When you make this information fabric easy to edit between groups of individuals in a dynamic, secure, governed and real-time manner, it creates a Collaborative Network.
[...]
This is very different from social networks or social software, which is focused entirely on enabling conversations. Collaborative Networks are focused on groups accessing and organizing data into actionable formats that enable decision making, collaboration and reuse. Collaborative Networks will increasingly be critically important to business and organizations by helping to establish a culture of innovation and by delivering operational excellence.” Continue to the Entire Article.
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