Welcome! - I'm the founder of CustomWare Asia Pacific. I started CustomWare after working for a period of time in the US after seeing the need for increasing business velocity by focussing on solutions that connect systems and people (integration and collaboration). Read more about our vision on our main site.
I live and spend most of my time in Sydney, Australia, but also spend some time in our office in Kuala Lumpur, periodically escape from daily routine to visit customers around the region and travel to the Bay Area regularly. Right now I am in the Bay Area for a few months doing the relevant research to get our presence in the USA to the next level.
It sometimes seems wierd posting about wiki's and Enterprise 2.0 as for our team it has been a natural way to work since the early days of our company. Right after accounting systems, issue tracking and source control, the wiki was one of our first major systems in our company and truly the first system that touched every team member and partner that we worked with - it crossed boundaries.
At that stage, it was interesting employing staff and team members that had never used a wiki before - it was certainly interesting watching those familiar with older more rigid and closed systems learn how to adapt to being open and transparent. Back then, it was us that was different.
Nowadays things have changed, and over time not being open, collaborative and transparent is seen as different. I remember being an early subscriber of using LinkedIn and being told that it was a silly idea - fast forward back to today and it is common practice to use LinkedIn not only to recruit, but also check references of a future possible employee. A phrase from speaking to a colleague in London who was hiring a few months back comes to mind - "If the candidate is not on LinkedIn, you really have to ask yourself, why not? Are they not connected, or is there something they don't want everyone to know". The truth is that you can't assume just because someone is private that they are bad - but you have to accept that the perception will change over time.
Enterprises now need to accept that Enterprise 2.0 is here and mainstream. Here's a nice video just released by Robert Mahowald, Research Director, IDC titled "IDC Video Podcast:: It's Time to Get Serious About Enterprise 2.0". Granted, it is not the most exciting video to watch, but has some great points and a prediction that within 5 years social collaboration tools will be an inseperable part of the enterprise collaboration environment.
Integration and Collaboration - the two ingredients that enable an organisation to increase business velocity.
In a refreshing change of news, Mike, Scott and the team at Atlassian have observed, planned and delivered to the market a unique offering.
For 5 days, you can buy a Atlassian software (Confluence and JIRA) 5 user licenses for only $5 http://www.atlassian.com/starter/. The proceeds of which, go to Room to Read
(http://www.roomtoread.org/), a charity aimed at assisting rural children around the world to read. The target is to hit 25k worth of sales, I think they will blitz this.
Not only is this a refreshing change for corporate social responsibility, and a nice warm feeling of giving to charity. It is also a leg up to those startup companies that can now afford to use best-in-class software.
This move will no doubt bring attention to Atlassian in the short term, but I think the benefits will be in the long term, as these small startup companies grow into larger ones - no doubt there will be some loyalty carry through.
Hat's off to the Atlassian team, and a challenge issued to the rest of the enterprise software community. Today Oracle bought Sun, but Atlassian also made a mark in their own unique way.
Great to be spending some time in the Bay Area again, I can now see a real hunger and buzz for Enterprise 2.0 - it is exciting to see the analysts and everyone really pushing the case, there is a real need and hunger for change - and my gut feel is that this "revolution" will be one of the biggest engines to push the world through (and out of) the current global recession.
The big thought in my mind at the moment is brushing through the hype and looking at what it really means for an organisation. Installing a wiki, starting a blog and getting social isn't going to happen over night. Just like business partnerships and even social relationships - these build over time and need to filter through an organisation. A good read from Bertrand Duperrin on how long adoption may take is at his blog.
Being an entrepreneur and running my company on a wiki since 2003 across 4 countries - we have been through many challenges attempting to instill a culture of transparency and openness. In such an environment, where I am CEO and have the leadership and influential role, it can still be extremely challenging to make this happen - the same issues apply as in Bertrands post but there are also many walls, challenges and roadblocks that will appear after the initial novelty wears off, and it comes to quarterly bonus KPI time. We also have a relatively young demographic, which should also remove some barriers for adoption - but it is still challenging! I can imagine what the government folks are going to have to go through to get someone who has been working for many decades in the same job to now work differently. Not my cup of tea.
Bottom line is that Enterprise 2.0 technologies are just a form of communication, they by themselves do not transform a business and increase the velocity of a business. A leader blogging, or using a wiki because they "have to" or because it is fashionable will not blog with their heart and soul. None of us can follow a leader that doesn't lead with vision, heart and passion.
There are many roadblocks that get in the way of business velocity - some of them are technical systems integration problems (right data in the right place at the right time), some of them are collaborative roadblocks (who knows what) and some are social roadblocks (corporate alignment) - you need to handle all of them (and possibly others!) - this is my vision.
Today is my last day for a few months being based in the CustomWare Sydney office. We have a fun team and it is a bit sad to leave working with them each day.
For those that don't know, we're doubling up our efforts in our US office and I'm moving with my wife and kids for a few months.
Many people have asked the question "Why do this in the middle of a recession?" the answer is really simple for us. We currently have over 100 customers in the US that we currently work for remotely, and countless others that would like to deal with us locally. In economic times like this, you have to listen to your customers and the demands that they have and move your company in the best way to meet those needs.
I went to a talk by Brian Tracy a few weeks ago, where he had a gem of a quote:
"Sure, there is a recession on - but we chose not to participate"
I've been reading lots of online articles recently and yes, everyone is well and truly in the clouds. Seeing lots of interesting marketing as well, one that specifically caught my mind is vendors touting that they have a multi-tenanted architecture and that other hosted solutions are ASP model and then going in depth into this. I thought to myself - from a business perspective "who cares"?
If I am a customer paying for a SaaS/Hosted solution, then I dont really care about the details of the implementation do I? What I'm more concerned about is the reliability, credibility and impact that the service is going to have on my business (hopefully positive). When trying to explain the differences to a non-technical person, it is almost the same as trying to explain the differences between object oriented programming and procedural programming - a great discussion but again to a non-techie - who cares?
Like all approaches, each has its strengths and weaknesses, but we should always remember what the business is asking for and ultimately paying for.
Imagine the feeling of receiving a Tweet early one morning from a customer, raising a support question. On stage, in front of the whole world.
I'm glad that we noticed the twitter and could respond
I was even happier that the issue got resolved. You can look it up the details on Twitter.
It got me thinking, again along the lines of Consulting and Professional Services 2.0, what would a "big" outsourcing company have done in this circumstance?
The following thoughts came to mind:
"Sorry sir, Twitter is not a valid channel for you to raise your support calls to us, according to section x y z of the agreement, to match the SLA we need you to fill in a form etc etc"
You can guess the rest of the story (if they actually knew what Twitter was in the first place!).
The natural feel I have is this - my customer is in trouble, he/she has communicated and reached out to me, lets help them.
It's not about putting obstacle courses in front of a customer that needs help, it's about solving their problem. That's like saying, "Sorry sir, you've called me on the phone, I only read faxes"! With Consulting and Professional Services 2.0, we still need to Delight the Customer
OK, so you're probably thinking something along the lines of "That's impossible, how would you maintain an SLA", my answer to that is quite simple and I learnt this lesson in 2001 when I signed my first enterprise customer (Fortune 50). We negotiated a support agreement with SLA's etc. and set out, as soon as he countersigned the agreement he slid open his bottom drawer and placed the agreement in the drawer and said something along the lines of: "Do your best, treat my team and my systems as if they were yours. If you do that, I should never have to look at this agreement. If I ever have to get the agreement out and look at SLA's, it's already too late". Of course, not all customers are the same and some lean on agreements more than others, but in my 8+ years of experience, trust and accessibility means more than an SLA.
A fitting quote from Mahatma Gandhi, sourced of various places on the web.
A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.
I am often asked the question "what is your goal with/for CustomWare?" by customers and staff (both current and prospective) and my answer is as follows.
I'd love for CustomWare to do to the the IT Professional Services industry, what the open source movement did to the software market - and from that, I mean the following: IT Services have typically been (among other things) closed, proprietary, highly priced and non-customer centric. I think a lot of terrible things can and do happen, hidden behind a skilled project manager that can outfox a client. The client and vendor should be focussed on solving the business problem at hand, not on playing political games.
Services should be transparent, open, and aligned with the customer. When going about this task with our team, we looked at how the open source software model worked - the IP was set loose, and it was the service, the "ownership" and thought leadership that held the momentum. So with this, we decided to base our website on a wiki. 5 years later, we have over 1000 members from all over the world. It was wierd for some (and still is) but for us it feels natural. It is also inspiring to see some of the larger consulting firms also move into the "new thinking" direction of transparency.
Underneath what we call our Greenhouse strategy, and aligned with one of our company values - "Share the Knowledge" we maintain public WIKI's of FAQ's based upon some of the products that we work with - (you can find a list of them at http://wiki.customware.net]), we also open source many of the components that we develop, and offer them free of charge.
There is of course challenges in doing this as a services firm. We have many legal agreements with our customers that prevent us from disclosing information, so we have to work within those. So we respect those agreements and ensure that no "knowledge" is inappropriately placed or released.
In the age of "googling" for answers, sharing knowledge is key for Consulting 2.0, it's not about customer retention because you are the only one holding the knowledge - it is about customer retention because you provide the best service!
The best customer service is provided by employees and staff of a company, not sub-contractors. A company that only uses sub-contractors also is not as likely to contribute to the community, because it has to pay.
When picking your vendors, just like it has become standard for software vendors to contribute to community (code and knowledge) what do your services vendor(s) do?
It has been a busy quarter for me, I have spent more days away from home then at home. Looking at my calendar I wouldn't have spent a full calendar week in Sydney since August! I also had a great break in the Philippines with my family as well.
CustomWare has come a long way in the last quarter, and the time I have spent away has been laying the foundations for our next stages of growth. With all of the economic changes in the world at the moment, 2009 certainly will have challenges, but we intend to stay focussed on listening to and delivering on needs of our customers, as they look for ways to become more efficient. I'm also assisting with the running the Global Student Entreprenuer Awards for Sydney in 2009 - which I am looking forward to.
To our customers, partners, suppliers, friends, staff (both current and past) - we wish you a safe and wonderful christmas. I'll paraphrase some quote that I can't quite remember where I stumbled across it - "what memories did you make today"? Have a great break and enjoy your families!
In response to Nate's post at Bearing Point on the using of their wiki, I've posted up some stats on our main instance (we have other separate wiki's, such as our website). (Disclaimer - Nate is also customer of ours.)
We're an early adopter and have approx 80 staff, and grant access to our instance to our customers. We've been running our business on Confluence since version about 0.2 in 2003 (before you could pay for it). 5 years later and I can definately say that we made the right choice. Great job Atlassian (Mike/Charles for Confluence back in those days). I still remember Mike explaining to me what a wiki was, but we quickly moved off another web-based file sharing tool onto it
Ok show me the data!
Basic wiki:
Current Wiki Pages = 21,340
Versions of Current Wiki Pages = 115,819
Pages with Comments = 975 (I think we tend to comment on/in blogs)
Number of Comments = 2,333
Unique Page Authors = 206
Blogs/News
Current News Items (Blog Entries) = 12,983
Versions of Current News Items = 17,115
Comments on News Items = 7,900
Unique News Item Authors = 170
Crowd puts our current active user count at 164. We would have more authors above as some projects end or staff move on and their contributions remain, but accounts are deactivated. the overall count is < 500.
