Finally, The Internet As Intended.

A week ago when ActiveCollab got dugg, I posted that Jason Freid and the 37Signals boys should release an open version BaseCamp to keep hosted ActiveCollabs out of their market. They didn’t. But today Ross Mayfield and SocialText have done just that - released an Open Source version of their popular wiki collaboration software.  As I’ve said before, this is a smart move for any any SaaS company whose product is built on tools that small development teams or enthusiastic do-gooding programmers can effectively mimic. Here’s two reasons why:

1. It creates a pipeline of open-to-paid converts that would otherwise just walk away. What do you think big company developers do all day? They download trial and open source versions of things they feel may have value. SugarCRM knows this well. When they need real support and SLA’s, and are ready to give up the headaches of managing their own install -they become paying customers.


2. It protects their SaaS market. If someone were to release an open source mimic of SocialText (which isn’t that unlikely, look what ActiveCollab just did to basecamp), the window would be open for others to compete directly with SocialText at reduced cost by providing the OS clone as a hosted service. By releasing as OS version, the effectively close that door - who would take and use a mimic OS version when you can download the real deal?

If your organization is like most the web has invaded your orgaizational structure. You have some projects in IT, some in communications, some in development, some in HR - they are everywhere, and yet owned nowhere. How do you align your web efforts with the goals of your organization? Its a question that every modern organization needs to address right now. How do you take advantage of the innovation happening within departments and still centrally evaluate your progress against bigger corporate goals? How do you set up the right governance structures to insure you are spending wisely?

Most organizations respond by treating the web like a series of projects - we need a more professional web presence, we need better web-based customer support, we need better internal business-process effeciency. But is your organization structured to take real advantage of the web over the long haul? How do you create a business unit within your existing structure that effeciently manages the day-to-day operations of your multiple web efforts? How do you make sure they are aligned to bring sustainable value to your organization - not just create stand-alone projects that are not integrated into your long-term organization management structure?

I’ve been having conversations with Lisa Welchman about this topic, and believe that most organizations recognize the benefit that web technologies offer their businesses, yet very few take the time to structure the people, processeses, tools, and content to leverage the web as an ongoing concern that requires dedicated management to be a strategic asset to the company. So how do you make that happen?

It can be different for every organization, but it is grounded in an understanding of a few principles, and its an evolving practice that could mean the difference between your organization establishing and maintaining a competitive advantage, or being eaten by a competitor that gets it.

 Information drives today’s marketplace, and your organization needs to operationalize its investment in technologies that drive its information production, dissimination, and management. Today, that means creating a web operations unit that consolidates your web efforts and forces them to produce meainginful results. It means institutionalizing processes that reward innovation without creating information silos. It means staying flexibible enough to allow adoption of new tools like blogs, wikis, and rss, and being organized enough to know when to spin those initiatives into enterprise value centers. And most importantly it means being structured so that you can proactively take advantage of the best efforts and turn them to the benefit of the organization.

 Organization’s use of the web is growing up. It’s time that organizational structures grew up too. Chances are your organization has a publications unit that operates with a high degree of effeciency, reports against standard metrics, and has its operational budget justified by the value it brings your company. It’s time you treat your web efforts with the same rigour. It’s time you start paying attention to Web Operations Management. This will define the next generation of organizational adoption of technology - because technology tomorrow will always touch the web and its information management capabilities.  If your CIO isn’t worried about Web Operations Management today, he will be tomorrow. Take a peek at Lisa’s Web Operations Management Primer, and see if what she’s saying doesn’t resonate. This is an unsexy but critical issue faced by every modern business and federal agency.