Today, no company can be immune to the current economic situation. So it is the time for many businesses to analyze their business model and risk profile.

Economics experts join their voices stating that the best thing you can do to withstand the crisis is to improve your customer service and be attentive to customer needs.  Terry Leahy, the head of TESCO, a British-based international grocery and general merchandising retail chain, noted in one of his recent interviews that staying close to customers is the key to surviving the current, difficult economic conditions. “We learned some lessons, and the message is simple – stay with your customers. Listen to your customers.”

For project managers, it’s important that you treat your customers as stakeholders.  John Mackey (CEO of Whole Foods) and Kip Tindell (CEO of The Container Store), who drove their companies with a constant growth over good and bad times, explain their take on stakeholders in this very interesting interview. It’s a must-read for executives in the current economic conditions.


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Financial crisis is all over the news today. Some analysts are trying to predict the future of the national and global economy. Others are offering tips on how to survive in the situation of economic turmoil. Yet almost all the analysts agree that it is no time to panic; rather, you should rethink your strategies.


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This year's Office 2.0 Conference is coming soon. I'll be part of a Project Management 2.0 panel, so if you want to ask questions in real time, you are very welcome to join the conference. Other panels and sessions also promise to be interesting.


If you have some stories to share for the panel, leave a comment here with your contact information. I may get some discounted tickets from organizers for visitors who can bring the value to the panel.



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The project management community is lucky to have many people who are passionate about innovations in management. If you work in software project management, you might be interested in attending The APLN (Agile Project Leadership Network) Leadership Summit. It will be held in Seattle from July 17 - 18. The Summit promises to be an interactive event, with topics including Scrum, agile program management, collaboration games and many others.


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The Enterprise 2.0 Conference is coming. No doubt it will be the most exiting conference of the year in the industry. This not-to-be-missed event is organized for those who are interested in making their business more productive and competitive with the new technologies, and you have a chance to attend the conference for free!


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Recently I came across an article about how hard it can be to introduce new enterprise business intelligence technologies to a company. This article reflects an important corporate phenomenon: “mandating and forcing users to adopt a standard practice or technology will often create resistance and political backlash.” The author underlines that transforming and changing the way people do business is never easy, and she advises the heads of IT departments on the best ways to implement the changes.

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The growth of popularity of Enterprise 2.0 on-demand software is remarkable. This growth is not gradual.  The pace of on-demand software adoption grows each month and equals 150 % year-over-year, according to Saugatuck Technology research.

On-demand software, or software delivered to the customer via the Internet as a service, turned out to be a revolutionary concept in the late 1990’s. Back then, it seemed unbelievable to replace the traditional on-premise software, which you have to buy and install on your computer, with a service. The situation has now changed as businesses and the software vendors serving them are serious about on-demand software delivery.

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Enterprise 2.0 technologies make companies stronger. This is what we read in almost every analytical blog and in many business publications. More and more companies are announcing the introduction of Enterprise 2.0 technologies to their business. One of the recent examples is IBM’s Lotus Connections. It’s an enterprise-wide IT controlled social networking package, which was presented earlier this year. The company representatives called it one of the features designed to take advantage of "real-time presence and communications capabilities."

Well, even technological giants are opening up to Enterprise 2.0, having realized that it will drive corporate innovation and facilitate communication from the boardroom to employees and back. Previously closed corporations turn open with the help of new-generation software. But what are the advantages of being open? To answer this question it would be useful to examine the key differences of open and closed organizations.

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Surfing the Web, I come across different interpretations of the notion of Enterprise 2.0. Since the initial term of Web 2.0 refers to a perceived, not a defined, second generation of Web-based communities, there is no strict, common definition of Enterprise 2.0. So it’s not surprising that many people get confused and mix up Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. So I decided to sum up my thoughts on this topic here to make the matter clearer.

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Organizational change experts stress the need to develop agile companies. Major Enterprise 2.0 theorists say that new-generation technologies can turn inflexible companies into agile and efficient organizations. They praise social software for optimizing management and overall company activity.

To start with, why is the word “agility” so popular in management nowadays? Every year, new technologies, markets and competitors emerge at a rapidly ascending pace. Future threats and opportunities become harder to predict, and emerging challenges include increasingly novel elements. Today’s businesses are affected by globalization processes, and enterprises often become bigger, therefore more inflexible and bureaucratic. As organizations grow into huge corporations, it gets more difficult for them to react to constant market changes fast enough. This results in an ongoing agility gap. 

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