While I believe that for many people today learning is work, and work is learning, I have edited this version to reflect the Enterprise 2.0 context as opposed to a learning context.
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Today’s networked era requires a new way to make investment decisions that incorporates intangible assets and more accurately depicts how value is created.
The industrial age has run out of steam. Look at General Motors. Look at Chrysler. We are witnessing the death throes of management models that have outlived their usefulness.
The network era now replacing the industrial age holds great promise. Networked organizations are reaping rewards for connecting people, know-how and ideas at an ever-faster pace, and increasingly value creation has migrated from what we can see (physical assets) to intangibles (ideas that define products or services).
Understandably, seasoned executives are having a devil of a time shifting from the industrial age mindset of logic, certainty and bounded constraints to the network gestalt of interaction, self-organization, unpredictability and fewer limits to potential. The pressure is constantly on to meet quarter-to-quarter revenue and earnings targets, which accentuates the need to take decisions that support achieving those targets. At the same time, we are shifting into an era in which knowledge work and learning occur at the point where re-engineered business processes collide with a participative and interactive ecology of information flows.
One cherished industrial age concept that is proving particularly difficult to let go of is return on investment (ROI). But like Pontiacs and Oldsmobiles, old-school ROI’s day in the sun is waning. In an environment of continuous flow and interaction, there’s a need to consider an emerging metric: return on investment in interaction (ROII). The working definition of ROII is the observable development of capacity and capability to create economic values out of intangibles.
Of course, if you want to sell a big project internally, you’ve got to talk ROI. It’s the language senior managers understand. Being fluent in ROI talk addresses the “hard” tangible returns stemming from an investment in a specific project or capacity. It gets you to the inner circle of those who control budget dollars. So, let’s look at what ROI was, how it needs to be changed and how to recapture its original intent for application in the network era, in which continuous learning and knowledge work are becoming inseparable.
Traditional ROI
ROI is an accounting and financial management concept businesses use to decide where to make investments and to assess the success of investment decisions after the fact. ROI reduces both return — R, what you expect back — and investment — I, what you expect to put in to numbers — making it possible to compare one investment opportunity to another. The numbers tie back to categories on the balance sheet and income statement, (i.e. tangible assets and hard-dollar returns).
ROI is what you get for your money, divided by what you spent to get it. It’s R/I expressed as a percentage. In a business culture that is skeptical of non-numerical reasoning, ROI implies disciplined, mathematical rigor. It ties actions to intended results. It shows the logic of how results will be achieved. And, it’s also useful to note that it traditionally has been applied in stable (and often single-purpose) use cases.
Companies set up ROI hurdle rates to gauge whether there will be sufficient payback over a reasonable and defined period of time to justify the capital invested to acquire additional capacity or produce a defined result. Companies also use ROI to evaluate past performance. In retrospect, what was spent and what benefits were received? This simplifies making the case for similar projects in the future.
What You Can’t See
However, in the network era, often things you can’t see are more valuable than things you can. Thomas Stewart sounded a clarion call in his book The Wealth of Knowledge with his exhortation that building the capacity to create economic value through things such as innovating and enhancing brand reputation is as important, or more important, than generating specific results from a specific initiative. Twenty-five years ago, intangibles accounted for less than a third of the value of the S&P 500. Today, intangibles can make up more than 80 percent of that value.
“Intangible assets — a skilled workforce, patents and know-how, software, strong customer relationships, brands, unique organizational designs and processes, and the like — generate most of corporate growth and shareholder value,” wrote NYU Professor Baruch Lev in Harvard Business Review in June 2004.
Corporate decision makers say their goal is to increase shareholder value. In a networked, information-based environment, shareholders value brand, reputation, ideas, relationships and know-how. These assets don’t appear on the balance sheet, but more and more often they provide a corporation’s competitive edge. These most important aspects of the business aren’t recognized by old-school accounting and therefore aren’t factored into ROI calculations.
Organizations that make decisions based solely on things that are sufficiently tangible to be counted directly might as well consult a Ouija board to set their goals. Leaving the most important sources of value out of the ROI equation is not conservative — it’s foolish.
Measuring intangibles involves making judgment calls, so managers often exclude intangibles from their ROI calculations. Several purported authorities on calculating ROI suggest taking intangibles into account by putting them on a list but refusing to estimate their value. This leads you to comparing numbers to words, apples to oranges.
You Must Manage What You Can’t Measure
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” was a mantra of industrial age management. Adopting F.W. Taylor’s brilliant research and models, generations of managers have carried stopwatches and pored over measurements in a continual quest to make things work better. Efficiency was the road to riches in the slower-moving, predictable industrial age, and measurement was the proof. However, it doesn’t apply to making judgment calls, strategic choices or disruptive innovations.
Executives manage immeasurable things all the time. The more powerful the executive, the more likely he or she is involved in effectiveness — doing the right things rather than doing things right. Intuition, judgment and gut feelings guide these more important decisions. As almost everyone will recognize, qualitative assessment often can make up for a concrete numeric result.
Make a hypothesis of cause and effect. Interview a statistically significant sample of the workforce to see if the hypothesis holds up. Often, results obtained from social science research methods will produce more meaningful feedback than solid counts of the wrong thing.
The old “can’t measure, can’t manage” dodge doesn’t free businesspeople from making decisions under conditions of uncertainty, and the network era ushers in uncertainty in spades.
Making Decisions in the Era of Networks
A business network is a group of individuals or organizations that are linked together by factors such as purpose, values, visions, ideas, financial exchange and collaboration to further the ends of the corporation. Business networks share common characteristics with all networks:
• They multiply rapidly because the value of a network increases exponentially with each additional connection.
• They become faster and faster because the denser the interconnections, the faster the cycle time.
• They subvert (unnecessary) hierarchy because previously scarce resources such as information are available to all.
• Network interactions yield volatile results because echo effects amplify signals.
• Networks connect with other networks to form complex adaptive systems whose outcomes are inherently unpredictable.
Intangibles travel via networks, and networks are the infrastructure for doing business in the future. An overarching caveat here: Strategist and practitioner Stuart Henshall said trust is critical. “It’s the one qualitative factor all networks depend upon.” Karen Stephenson of Netform reiterates … “Technology without trust is just traffic”
ROI, the tool we once used to evaluate projects in stable times, clearly is not up to the task. The impacts of collaboration-based knowledge work are accelerating. However, the Western world is lurching from crisis to crisis, and executives are under constant pressure to perform. It’s difficult for them to give up models they understand well.
In the future, organizational effectiveness will be defined by the interaction of workers in a networked environment. Exchanges of information and knowledge are what make peoples’ brains work on a purpose and what gets the imagination going to formulate pertinent responses. However, the return on networked collaboration is less tangible than the results generated from stable and ordered sequential tasks that dominate the efficiency-oriented industrial era.
So we face the problem of convincing managers to adopt new mental models that incorporate the intangibles generated by a whole system, the organization and its interconnected networks. Making a business decision to invest in new ways of working is a complex process involving many factors and intricate tradeoffs, such as:
• Risks must be weighed against rewards.
• Short-term vs. long-term aims.
• Alignment with strategic initiatives.
• Scarce resources call for shrewd horse trading.
Identifying and Measuring ROII
The focus in this new world of work is to do what’s important and involve those who know what’s important, why it’s important and what they know (or know how to find out) about a problem or issue. To begin measuring increases in productivity and value in a networked social computing environment, we propose return on investment in interaction (ROII), derived from the principles of Metcalfe’s law of networks (which is still being debated, by the way).
Some core assumptions about ROII :
• Continuous flows of information are the raw material of an organization’s value creation and overall performance.
• Information flows are carried by links, alerts, RSS feeds, search engines, aggregation and filtering of content.
• All leading vendors’ productivity platforms now feature collaborative social networking and computing as the core of the platform
• These platforms’ architectures facilitate purposeful cross-silo communications and exchange.
In a June 2008 “The Network Thinker” blog post, social networking pioneer Valdis Krebs outlined four generic metrics that are becoming widely accepted as leading to observable, tangible measurable outputs:
• Increase in size of network.
• Increase in internal network connectivity.
• Increase in connection to valuable third parties.
• Increase in number of projects formed from all three factors above.
It’s important to note here that we are not proposing a definitive answer, but rather the need to debate and clarify the issues. Each of the principles outlined above proposed by Krebs addresses the productivity of network activity. Unpacking them can help us understand how to begin to assess ROII.
Increase in Network Size]
If we follow the logic of two heads are better than one, and therefore X heads are better than two, in social- and knowledge-building networks, we can expect to find:
• More engagement with an issue.
• More analysis by more people.
• More input from more people.
• More possibilities that may have been overlooked.
• Quicker and more comprehensive analysis.
CapGemini’s relaunch of its knowledge management initiatives offers a great example.
Its original KM program wasn’t working: 20% year-on-year usage decline, and the average age of documents was 3 1/2 years. It was taking an average of 7 years to refresh current knowledge.
It relaunched informally via word-of-mouth and within 6 months had 27,000 of 83,000 employees using it. They were involved in 900 communities, exchanging information and pertinent knowledge on a daily basis.
All that activity happened without spending a single dollar on formal internal communications or training.
Increase in Internal Network Connectivity
Increases in network connectivity involve the degree, frequency, density and concentration of information flows between nodes in a social network. The organization is able to define better business and market intelligence, more frequent and tangible customer centricity and responsiveness, and clear instances in which cross-silo knowledge exchanges lead to tangible results.
At CapGemini, six months after the informal launch, the 900 communities of practice were using 500 forums, 500 wikis and more than 250 expertise- or project-focused blogs. Business results as defined in the previous paragraph are not long behind.
Increase in Connection to Valuable Third Parties
In today’s increasingly interconnected environment, ignoring external parties that have an interest in products or services is a guarantee for trouble. These interested parties talk about brands or offer up opportunities, and organizations that respond rapidly and effectively to issues gain competitive advantage.
Ford Motor Co. opened up its launch of the new Sync service to customer input and conversation. With 1 million page views in less than 12 months, the company experienced a significant reduction in customer-service support costs as 10,000 customers began to offer each other tips, pointers and answers. Further, it began to receive significant tangible market intelligence as engaged users began to share product integration and compatibility experiences, tips and tricks.
Increase in Number of Projects
ROII is obvious when the scope, degree and intensity of interaction increase due to implementation of the three above principles. An increase in the number of projects creates value as people learn to work together effectively in networks, putting informal learning to work on resolving issues, creating opportunities and generating activity that enhances an organization’s reputation for listening and responding effectively.
Fast Company recently published an article on Cisco Systems’ large-scale adoption of social computing as the main means of working with information and knowledge. CEO John Chambers said that as a result, Cisco has gone from being able to focus on three to five strategic initiatives at a time, to now working on numerous strategic initiatives in parallel.
Informed Judgment
The heart of the matter is providing decision makers with an informed business case that ties investment to the results that it brings. A solid case describes results in business terms, such as increased revenue, better customer service, reduced cost or speedier time to performance.
Network returns are asymmetric, so simplistic count-’em-up approaches are no longer viable. But how can one make a solid network-era case to an executive who is still playing by yesterday’s rules?
The answer is to improve the corporate network as a continuous process, not as a project with a hurdle rate. Improving network performance need not be all-or-nothing. It can be implemented in small stages. Break major decisions into numerous low-risk incremental decisions. Instead of making one major decision a year, CLOs might look at boosting network results as a series of monthly decisions. Continuous monitoring of the statistics of ROII would guide mid-course corrections.
Create a hypothesis and use existing techniques — surveys, focus groups, facilitated brainstorming — to find out what employees and customers are doing and how they want to work together. Then, check it out with a wider sample of the workforce to see if it holds up. It’s clear we are moving rapidly into a networked world in which responsiveness, innovation, gaining competitive advantage through learning faster and embedding knowledge into products and services are all important.
In a world of intangibles, we need to contribute to the productivity, viability and profitability of any given enterprise. We should rethink and expand our methods for making judgments about where, when and how we invest in the ongoing interaction between our employees and customers.
Such judgments lead to and support initiatives where innovation and economic value is being created.
For the most part I have been ambivalent about Twitter for most of the past two years (I’ve used it on and off since November 2006).
I’ve read much of the pros and cons (not all) and understand why some people consider it the best thing since sliced bread, and why others consider it a massive time sink and / or an invitation to get bombarded by unwanted marketing activity.
What seems clear to me is that it can often function as an effective means for searching for pertinent information. To my mind, Twitter replicates the experiences I have often had after blogging for some time … because of my social networks mainly focused on issues, and people who are paying attention to those same issues, there is a regular experience of ”synchronicity”. When something is on my mind and I start searching for information, I mre often than not “stumble upon” it, almost as if by magic (why do you think the web service Stumble Upon came into being ?).
When we use Twitter, we make decisions about who we follow, and so I think we invoke a social-network-of-purpose-driven filter that we apply. Yes, we can follow thousands of people, but by and large we interact most with those concentric rings of trust and connection closest to us. Often, the innermost rings of connection and trust are people that we have already connected with (through blogging or or professional / interest-driven networks), or whom we are learning to trust and to whom we come to pay attention.
This selection of people with whom we interact (the innermost concentric rings of connection) provide context like no algorithm can (I’d love to know what the FAST search experts think of that assertion on my part). The people with whom we interact most frequently on Twitter are paying attention to the same or similar things (and different things) as are we, and we are reciprocating. So, when you push a question out into the twittersphere, those who are paying attention to you or notice your tweeted question may well have something to offer you that may be directly or closely aligned with the search you are carrying out. There is the “ambient intimacy of context” that comes into play.
Now for the “on the other hand” … there’s an awful lot of noise to churn one’s way through to get to the signals. I know that there are various efforts underway to enhance the relevance and pertinence of finding one’s way through the mass of content that’s in the daily twitterstream, but I suspect that there’s a long way to go yet for such efforts to take new Twitter-related capabilities beyond the purview of the early adopters.
I also think that as large masses of people take to the newest socially-connected-streams-of-content to engage in purposeful activities, rather than trying to drive or acquire attention for attention’s sake (or to make money), we will find that Twitter-like capabilities or Twitter clones will be built into most, if not all, social-network platforms and collaborative-work platforms.
I suspect that this emerging concentration of attention and time allocation onto purposeful activities is what is behind the thinking in this extract from a WebGuild piece by Daya Baran titled “Twitter Will Be Obsolete In A Year“.
He says Twitter won’t be as important as some think. He points to Friendster and how it was surpassed by MySpace which in turn was surpassed by Facebook in a shorter time doing the same thing.
He says as with any internet “gold rush,” as soon as others demonstrate success, everyone moves in, and the “next big thing” is born.
“All I have to do is mention QuickBooks, and I have 30 QuickBooks “experts” following me in hopes of getting business. How long will it take to wear people down dealing with these kinds of requests?… I predict Twitter will find its social media and marketing niche, but I cannot see it being nearly as important as some marketers are making it out to be.”
He also points out the retention rate of Twitter is ONLY around 30 percent, which means seven out of 10 people try it out once and don’t come back. So to get users the hype must continue and the process it becomes overhyped.
“Twitter seems to be proud of the fact that it has no profit model. I’m imagining that the company will want to keep the hype building long enough to sell the company for a few billion dollars… I also cannot foresee Twitter’s user base growing too much higher than it is now.
The simple functionality of Twitter will also lead to a glut of competition in the next few months, with companies duking it out for the best implementation of the microblogging model. There’s not enough to Twitter to keep it on the top of the heap. Being first in this case, as we’ve seen, is not a guarantee that you will have longevity.”
The Return on Investment (ROI) with respect to the use of social computing is a hot topic these days, as more and more organizations and business sectors are realizing social media and social computing are here to stay. Indeed, I just finished co-authoring (with Jay Cross) an article for CLO Magazine laying the groundwork for a new approach to making decisions about investing in social computing capability and dynamics in business environments. I’ll share an abbreviated version here in the next several days.
A number of other practitioners and theorists who pay attention to networks and their dynamics (such as FASTForward’s Jevon Macdonald and Joe McKendrick, Dion Hinchcliffe, Valdis Krebs, Matthew Hodgson, Patti Anklam, Jessica Lipnack, and others) have covered the same or similar ground. It is becoming more apparent that the returns from network activities are found in intangibles that do not fit well into the industrial era concept of Return on Investment (an accounting concept used to make investment decisions in stable, time-defined, typically single-purpose use cases). New assumptions and methods for assessing what to do are needed.
So, I’d like to use the reporting in a ZDNet article that caught my eye titled “A Real ROI From Twitter ? The Start of Social Medical Networks“ to discuss several of the key issues about whether or not to use social computing to achieve purposeful goals and objectives..
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There may not be a big enough return on tweeting yet to report it to your CFO. But it won’t be long before there’s a clear, return on tweeting to report it to your doctor.
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At the Autism One Conference in Chicago, a Web-based program for collecting data on individual cases of the brain development disorder will be unveiled. It’s called ChARMTracker and is designed, at the start, to help ease the burdens of each parent trying to keep track of the drugs, nutritional supplements, physical therapies and dietary tacks being taken to treat their sons or daughters. They will also use it to keep track of any observations about their behaviors that might seem pertinent and how their children are performing academically, as a result of the constantly changing constellation of combinations that are being applied to the still-mystic condition.
[ Snip ... ]
Horn has, for instance, collected 60 two-inch thick binders of observations, medical and supplement records about Sophie, over the last 11 years. Those records would be available to Sophie’s doctors and health care aides, in an instant, if ChARMtracker had been around from the start. They would also be part of a growing mound of evidence on how drugs, supplements, therapies and diet affected autistic individuals, as they grew and evolved.
[ Snip .. ]
Pramila has founded another company, MedicalMine Inc., which will take what she has developed and try to extend the approach to other chronic physical conditions and forms of disease management.
If all goes well, parents and patients will not just be collecting and sharing data through sites like this on the Web. They’ll be communicating with doctors and providing real-time evidence of results, through tweets and other instant messaging technologies. In some cases, sensors will provide constant streams of data that will be put into the record and analyzed, for individuals and the group, as a whole.
These social medical networks could wind up being “the most fundamental IT app” that a family or its friends need, when desperately seeking answers about afflictions suffered by anyone they care about.
For that, every data element – and every tweet – will count.
And, over the long haul, produce a calculable return.
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So, to begin measuring increases in effectiveness and value in a networked social computing environment, please consider the concept of Return on Investment in Interaction (ROII), which we have derived from the principles of Metcalfe’s Law of Networks (as have many of the others cited above). Why, you may ask, do the above excerpts portend being able to identify and / or assess Return on Investment in Interaction ?
Identifying and Measuring ROII (Return on Investment in Interaction)
The focus in purposeful networked environments is to do what’s important and involve those who know what’s important, why it’s important and what they know (or know how to find out) about a problem or issue.
Let’s define some core assumptions about ROII :
Continuous flows of information are the raw material of value creation and overall performance,
Information flows are carried by links, alerts, RSS feeds, search engines, aggregation and filtering of content, etc.
All leading social / collaboration platforms now feature social networking, search and computing capabilities,
These platforms’ architectures facilitate purposeful cross-silo communications and exchange.
Increase in number of projects formed from all three factors above
It’s important, we think, to note here that we are not proposing a definitive answer but rather the need to debate and clarify the issue(s). However, an attentive read of the ZDNet article referenced above clearly aligns with Krebs’ four principles:
1. Increase in size of network: As The CHARMTracker database grows and the volume of families’ data it holds increases, it’s utility to doctors, other health care professionals and the families themselves increases. And, as the article points out, if and when the data begins to be (appropriately) used by those networked around the health issues, the value of the interaction will increase in an (likely) exponential fashion.
2. Increase in internal network connectivity: Again, as suggested by the paragraphs excerpted from the ZDNet article, as more and more participants are networked into the CHARMTracker information and begin to use the dynamics of social networks to seek for and circulate pertinent and useful information, each time a piece of information is useful to someone there’s a tangible return on the intangible capacity offered by the flows of information and knowledge.
3. Increase in connection to valuable 3rd parties: As more information fills the CHARMTracker database, and more doctors, health care professional and families use it, the apparent value will become clear to others with expertise or value to provide to the social medical network that will have grown up around autism issues. Expect to see both volunteer and for-profit services to be added to the growing ecosystem of knowledge and attention.
This expected outcome reminds me of the core argument of Shoshan Zuboff’s book “The Support Economy - Why Corporation Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism”, wherein she argues that the complexity surrounding many issues in today’s society are such that all sorts of people (consumers, families, professionals, and so on) will need “support” that can be designed, built and delivered via the digital interlinked infrastructure we know as the Web.
4. Increase in number of projects formed from all three factors above: It’s pretty easy to imagine that as the CHARMTRacker database and its use(s) take root, there will be other clever and useful projects that grow out of the experience and the learning it affords. Doc Searls, of Cluetrain Manifesto and VRM (Vendor Relations Management) fame once sagely noted that one of the critical outcomes of operating in purposeful social networks was the “scaffolding” (building in layer upon layer) of useful knowledge.
That’s how circulating pertinent information and sharing useful knowledge works .. we don’t go backwards, we build on what’s useful and what works. That’s how Return On Investment in Interaction will work and will deliver value to organization and groups who decide to use social networks, linked information and data, and social computing dynamics to accelerate their effectiveness towards achieving their purpose.
In November of 2008, Stowe Boyd and I were invited to speak at the soft launch of blueKiwi 2009, an innovative collaboration platform which is one of the leading European providers of Enterprise 2.0 social computing business software. Stowe began the evening’s presentation with an overview of the high-level impacts of the web on human activities, I brought that down somewhat closer to the ground by providing a perspective on the impacts of interconnection and networks on organizational and management dynamics, and Carlos Diaz, the President and CEO of blueKiwi, gave the audience an excellent overview of blueKiwi’s value proposition and the design and new features offered by the 2009 version.
blueKiwi has now revamped its web site to signal the launch of the bK 2009 version and value proposition, and is “coming out” with bK 2009 at this week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.
Last week I caught up with Carlos and co-founder Christophe Routhieau, CTO and software architect, in order to go into deeper detail as to why blueKiwi promises both innovation and pragmatic value as a social business collaboration platform.
We started off by covering a bit of history about blueKiwi’s roots and how the platform came into being just as the Web began to have major impact on the knowledge-based workplace. Carlos and Christophe were already successful web entrepreneurs in France. Carlos and his brother Manuel co-founded the web agency groupeReflect and Christophe joined the agency in 2000, and the team managed it successfully through several business cycles, eventually selling it to Emakina, an interactive marketing agency. Carlos and Christophe said it was useful and important to the early success of blueKiwi that they are coming to the issues of collaboration and social computing from the web rather than from a starting point in the pre-web information technology world (the traditional software world).
The initial version of blueKiwi was conceived and built prior to the advent of the domain known as Enterprise 2.0 in response to client organizations that wanted to use Web 2.0 capabilities inside their organizations to communicate more spontaneously and efficiently. So they and their early clients understood that people were growing into using the Web, and wanted to use that knowledge and understanding to inform the core design principles, functionality and usability of the first version of blueKiwi, which was built and implemented at one of their key clients, Dassault Systems.
Given that all the serious Enterprise 2.0 platforms claim to focus on the sociality now seen as central to effective responsiveness and organizational agility and effectiveness, I asked them what differentiates bK2009 from some of the other leading Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platforms. For me, this is where things start to get really interesting and what I find exciting about what blueKiwi has to offer. Starting from the vantage point of the Web 2.0-savvy user, they have designed and built blueKiwi to be user-centric whilst responding to the business issues that require the building, distributing and and deploying of business-focused knowledge … the essence of social business computing, in my opinion.
bK2009 is centered on the building, nourishing and sustaining of business-focused relationships - building useful knowledge and getting things done. Carlos and Christophe pointed out that they had learned something important during the 2nd wave of blueKiwi’s adoption by clients … most collaboration systems start from the point of view of technical capabilities and do not make it easy, or overlook, the building and growing of relationships. In the past, users of collaborative platforms had to go about building their business relationships, both internally and externally, outside of the collaboration system / platform. bK2009 is first and foremost a means of building valuable and value-added relationships in the course of doing one’s work … it can enable, contain and manage all the activity in a business ecosystem.
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Digging a bit deeper, I asked them what they thought was unique about blueKiwi. Carlos and Christophe believe that not only is their product design different from competitors, but they are very enthused about breaking new ground with the “economic model” offered by blueKiwi. The feel that with bK 2009 they are breaking new ground in two ways.
First … all collaboration platforms offer spaces where people can connect, gather, share and exchange information. Thus far, the mainstream approach has been to offer spaces where people can connect and gather, and then share content … information about issues, problems, and areas of interest, and as people exchange and collaborate, useful knowledge is built. bK2009 turns this upside down, or around (you choose). It is designed on the principle that the collaborative space is there for content and its distribution, and the individual user then chooses which groups she or he wishes to engage with. Thus, any individual user can be a member of the groups they have chosen to interact with. And of course it has a Twitter clone as one of its features.
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What eventuates is a network of interaction around pertinent content, and thus over time an ecosystem around issues in which engagement is de facto defined by the users’ interest and willingness to engage. This then leads to the ability to watch and quantify the volume of interactions and obtain a better, and visible , understanding of the value that is being created (responsiveness, innovation, deepening understanding and so on).
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There are three key effects stemming from this approach:
1. there is an inherent, and ongoing, flexibility in creating and participating in (”on the fly”, said Carlos) any given group (reminiscent of Clay Shirky’s “ridiculously easy group-forming ) - the individual is always in a sense at the centre of an information ecosystem in which she or he is by definition an integral part,
2. thus, an organization’s productive social networks are developed out of the interactions between individuals (I call this the “natural sociology of knowledge work”), which in effect reproduces the dynamics of blogging or using LinkedIn or Facebook, and
3. bK 2009’s profiles reveal an individual’s contributions in a dynamic and interactive way … an user creates his or her profile, but others can add to it (a la reputation systems) and finally, the bK 2009 platform offers up various analytics on the types and foci of any user’s inter-activities.
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Second … as blueKiwi has evolved through its second wave of client installations, what it learned was the practical logic of Metcalfe’s Law of Networks, whereby the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected members of the network (debate continues, as you will note in the links and citations at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry). To date, the standard model of pricing for social computing / social business platforms involves fees based on the number of seats or users. The more users, the larger the fee, and the fewer the users, the less the fee. So, many organizations begin with pilots, or make decisions about enhancing collaborative capability that involve decisions about the difficulty and costs of customization of their installation of Sharepoint or IBM Lotus Connections.
Back to Metcalfe’s Law … blueKiwi believes that organizations should realize that collaboration in connected networks is the way work will be done all the time in the near future, and so organizations should seek to enroll and engage the entire organization in the use of the collaborative platform. Thus, the fees to use bK2009 are based on the levels of user activity each month. As activity increases the value to the organization increases, and accordingly blueKiwi’s revenues from that client increase. Conversely, if there is no activity, there is no revenue to blueKiwi.
This is essentially like pricing a utility, like paying for electricity or water … so, if eventually all or almost all knowledge work is going to happen on a collaborative platform, it makes sense that the platform and its capabilities be seen as one of the organization’s necessary utilities. As activity increases and the value to the organization increases, so should the price paid for the capabilities that help create the value. Technology is thus not a cost per se, rather the activity the technology enables reflects the price and value of the utility, and the users determine the ROI.
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Regarding its positioning in the Enterprise 2.0 market space, Carlos stated that bK 2009 is coming from the position of having “nothing to defend”. What does he mean ? He means that, for example, Sharepoint or IBM Lotus have fundamental technology assumptions and massive installations to defend, whereas blueKiwi is a new player, one that is coming from origins in / on the web as opposed to previous, pre-web IT design principles and architecture. They (blueKiwi) watched consumer behaviour on the web, Dassault Systems asked them to help build a system for more spontaneous, efficient and effective exchanges of information and knowledge, and the result after several years of intense design, development and deployment is a collaborative platform that in my opinion more closely mirrors the natural sociology of knowledge work than any other platform about which I know. The fundamental design principle stems not from the “technology” that supported existing work processes, whereby the design and architecture of the technology drives the way(s) users operate it (or try to do so), but from how people exchange and use information and knowledge.
bK 2009 is a “social technology” .. a couple of other capabilities reinforce this position. bK 2009 enables users to plug in and use a range of widgets so that they can take advantage of a wide range of pertinent socially-generated information and knowledge (this is closely aligned with some of my previous mutterings about mass customization / mass personalization of knowledge work). As both Carlos and Christophe stated, the ultimate goal is have organizations recognize that bK 2009 is effectively a layer over the organization’s existing IT architecture, and that it can and should operate as a strategic complementarity to existing databases, enterprise search engines, security functions and so on. It’s a social technology, and blueKiwi wants existing and future client organizations to see its design and capabilities as offering a “Social Hub” that complements an organization’s existing industrial-strength information technology architecture and investments.
Over and above the offering for large enterprises considering Enterprise 2.0 possibilities, blueKiwi is also now offering bK2009 Pro Edition for small and medium-sized organizations, for a flat (and affordable) fee. An interesting wrinkle … it allows such organizations to invite external members of its value web to join and interact. So, effectively it is providing these organizations with what they would today seek to accomplish by setting up a Facebook group (effectively side-stepping any potential hassles with Facebook privacy or Facebook owning all the member data). Neat !
I was impressed by this company and its people when I spent time with them, and I remain impressed. Can you tell ?
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UPDATE: If you want to know more about bK2009 or can’t see the detail on the screen shots well enough to understand as well as you’d like to, here are three short, well-produced video clips that help explain how bK2009 helps Foster Conversations, Build Efficient Networks and Bring People Together.
I just ran across an interesting blog post ( SAP missing the boat ? ) by Sam Lawrence, soon-to-be-ex CMO of Jive (enterprise social software). It contains an eye-catching, and interesting graphic that sets into stark relief key elements of the massive transition we are all living through.
Approximately 20 years ago the re-engineering movement was jsust beginning to pick up steam, and it was in full bloom 15 years ago. Ten years ago many larger organizations were somewhere in the middle of their multi-million dollar ERP implementations, pouring the ‘electronic concrete’ of large integrated ERP systems over their newly refined and streamlined business processes. As Sam Lawrence puts it:
The Old Brain
20 years ago, the brain of an organization was at the process level. But now business process is a commodity. Core processes are like the lights on your car. You used to touch them but now they just happen all by themselves. ERP has now moved into being the circulatory system of organizations.
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Twenty years ago the dominant metaphor for most sizeable organizations was an optimized machine. You all know the basic shape:
As IT systems continued to integrate (a generality) and the Web began its steady march to ubiquity thanks to the browser, hyperlinks and HTML (and on and on) we began hearing more and more of organic and biological metaphors for the ways organization (should / could) function. Some of the leading organizational theorists began speaking and writing about learning organizations, living organizations, the nervous system of the organization, brains and bodies, gardens, cultivating and harvesting (and so on).
As we began to experience more and more often the flows of information within and between organizations … first EDI and internal reporting, then more full-blown ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems, and now continuous information flow … the rigidities and deficiencies of the first generation of large-and-expensive ERP systems began to become more and more apparent (ref. the term ‘electronic concrete’ above). The combined pain of the massively expensive and massively cumbersome implementation of such systems led to a phase wherein comments along the lines of one CEO’s (”If one more person suggests anything to do with ERP implementation, I’ll throttle them” ) were increasingly common.
That was then … now, we are moving into the next phase. I suggested earlier today that ERP implementations as we knew them may well be (or have been) a transitional phase, but I think Sam Lawrence puts it better …
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SAP built a multi-billion dollar business building out a process factory. They own the core processes that run business. They will always be there.
But the process system is tapped. Information workers (I call them “social workers”) are now operating farther and father from the processes.
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The next phase. I think, is a full recognition that organizations in today’s information-filled environment DO have an efficiency-engineered body and an awareness-and-response oriented nervous system and brain. Maybe I can even stretch this metaphor further and suggest that organizations with Taylorism-derived industrial-era DNA have a ‘limbic system’ which resists the stretching, listening and concentration (yoga metaphor alert) required to move to a next level of flexibility and responsiveness.
More and more organizations will have to come to terms with the continuing and growing presence of the Web (tools, services and web-luterate younger generations (homo zappiens). The interconnected tendrils and roots are like fast-growing vines that penetrate and surround the aging machine.
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For those organization willing to embark on or already engaged in seeking ways to learn and grow in effectiveness and responsiveness, perhaps they ar evolving from ‘machines’ into organisms as suggested by the image Sam Lawrence uses to make the point that SAP faces an interesting challenge in the years ahead.
While SAP contemplates it’s circulatory system and uses it as the framework to push into extremities and other systems like CRM (sensory system) or SCM (digestive system), it’s hugely missing out on how to capture the new brain.
[ Snip ... ]
So, the $50 Billion question for SAP: Will you aggressively pursue a new growth strategy or stay the course?
In November of 2008 I spent several weeks in Paris, France speaking at a conference and with several Enterprise 2.0 startups, and was pleasantly surprised at some of the sophisticated concepts and capabilities I discovered.
One of the ongoing (and growing) trends in the workplace is the personalization of work … how you, the individual knowledge worker, carry out the work, choose and use the tools with which it is carried out, and fit yourself into the attendant rhythms of collaboration and co-creation built up from processing constant flows of information. I have written about what I call the “mass customization of work” before … I’ll Do It My Way - The Mass Customization of Knowledge Work, and Personalizing Collaborative Work … Individuals and Co-Creation. I am about to add another blog post (this one), which may be the beginning of a series on the personalization-of-work theme.
One of the interesting startups I encountered is PersonAll, being developed by a couple of young French entrepreneurs, Jeremy Grinbaum (President, previously of Google Enterprise search) and Jean-Patrice Glafkides (CTO, previously of HP Software).
PersonAll provides organizations with the means of offering its workers a fully personalized knowledge work portal. It allows each and every employee of an organization to integrate external information (from RSS feeds and other sources) to create always-on sources of information on markets, customers, industries, issues, topics, etc. of interest and utility to the worker, and all pertinent internal information (work team, departmental and organizational objectives, the organization’s news, new policies, access to databases and archives, internal collaboration platforms, etc.). It also enables each and every employee to publish information to destinations where they are involved in the activities of a given community or group.
PersonAll accomplishes this through what Jeremy and Jean-Patrice call a “strategy of constraints”, wherein peoples’ configurations and activities are managed by permissions. Users can access a catalogue of portlets (modular pre-packaged / designed content. There are two types of modules; 1) generic modules which users can customize within certain constraints (such as an RSS reader) and 2) specific modules selected from the previously-mentioned catalogue.
Here’s a quick look at a personalized work screen (though I suspect that the picture is not sufficiently large for you to get a decent sense of the different personalized components of the work screen).
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Effectively, PersonAll lets you, the user, configure the screen you always have in front of your eyes and ears with the combinations and configurations of flows of information and information-processing services that are the most useful to YOU, that help you be your most productive according to your cognitive and collaborative styles.
An extensive use of tags is at the heart of PersonAll’s design and functionality. This serves two key aspects:
1. the classification of “objects” (profiles, articles, modules, etc.), and
2. the management of users’ rights and permissions.
Essentially, this enables the easy and rapid formation, sustenance and (self) management of work communities around topics, subjects and other items of interest and pertinence.
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PersonAll’s business model is aimed at helping organizations reduce costs while improving knowledge worker productivity. This will happen through enhancing effective collaboration and at the same time providing employees with choice when it comes to the the work tools they use. For example, with their own personall-ized work portal, people can migrate easily between projects or between social computing environments.
In principle, the widespread use of PersonAll in an organization also facilitates obtaining values from latent and explicit folksonomies, as PersonAll also offers the organization a range of statistical analysis tools whereby aggregate views of the kinds of exchanges and use of information flows and services can be examined and analyzed, as catalysts for augmenting the organizations ‘collective intelligence’.
In terms of technical design and architecture, PersonAll is based on Java standards, and is optimized for the major browsers like IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome. Of course it is designed to plug into and sit on top of all major / common forms of integrated information systems such as those found in most major enterprises …. the “of course” at the beginning of this sentence refers to the fact that if it weren’t it would not be very useful in PersonAll’s target market, non ? Sacré bleu, zut, alors !
It is also ‘backwards compatible’ with browsers and enterprise platfroms / portals, and completely compatible with what most of us call the “Consumer Web 2.0″. As Jeremy and Jean-Patrice pointed out to me, enterprise social computing can be characterized generally as 2 to 3 years behind the consumer Web in terms of trying, using and adapting to web tools and services, and they are aiming to make it easy to try and adopt … or let’s say minimizing the reasons for any given enterprise to say ‘No’.
PersonAll has some early revenue-generating clients, a good degree of recognition and profile in the Enterprise 2.0 space in France, and some exciting plans up their sleeves for the next year or so.
As some readers may know, I think that the use of social computing tools and services combined with collaborative platforms is THE future of knowledge work and that this major trend will inexorably lead to the re-design of fundamental assumptions about the design of knowledge work.
The personalization of knowledge work and PKM (personal knowledge management) is clearly an established and tangible trend. Given a few breaks and early adoption by a few progressive organizations, I think that this small but smart French start-up has an interesting and exciting future in front of it.
Phweet is a very interesting service on two (or maybe three) levels.
First, if you are a heavy Twitter user, with a little bit of practice you can work it into your Twitter workflow, thereby offering you and followers a means to "escalate" from connecting via a tweet to a more intimate voice conversation.
Second, the same basic technology can be enabled anywhere … for example, on Craigslist or eBay or other community driven sites. In effect, the Phweet capabilities can become part of the Web’s voice communications infrastructure.
And third, although I do not understand well the technical aspects, I think Phweet can become a central part of telephony on the web, doing away with the big telcos stranglehold on the dial tone.
Maybe everyone already knows what the difference is, but just in case …
Referred via Ross Mayfield tweet to Adina Levin’s blog post (both of Socialtext, a leading enterprise collaboration platform) outlining some key differences between the use of social computing in an enterprise and the use of social networks at large.
When people talk about “enterprise social software”, they envision “Facebook for the enterprise” or “Twitter for the enterprise. But creating enterprise social software is a matter of adapting patterns from the public web, not copying identically.
What is “Enterprise Social Networking”
In the public web, social networking software has become embedded in people’s lives, as a way to stay in touch and to coordinate. Similar patterns will bolster collegial connections, expertise discovery, and collaboration. However, there are some significant differences between a social network on the web and a network behind the enterprise firewall.
What is Friending?
In a public web social network, the primary gesture is identifying others as “friends”. The graph of friends delineates the boundaries in which each individual shares information. Contact information is assumed to be private unless shared with a friend.
But in a business social network, the lines of visibility are defined differently. In a plain-vanilla corporate directory, the assumption is that every employee has the right to see contact information for everyone else. You don’t need to mark “Dale” in marketing as a friend in order to see his phone number.
More than that, what on earth is a “friend”? Will people simply go around “friending” high-ranking executives? Should I need to have to specifically mark my colleagues in the product group as “friends”? What does it mean if someone is not my “friend.” The gesture of explicit friending doesn’t have much value, and has plenty of potential annoyance and harm.
In Socialtext, we use the “following” gesture common to Twitter and Friendfeed, and don’t support “friending.”
RECENT WEBCAST: Innovating through the Storm: Insights on the Disruption in the Media Industry
On May 14th, the FASTforward Blog hosted a great discussion between Vivian Schiller, the CEO and president of NPR, and Scott D. Anthony, the president of Innosight and author of the forthcoming book: The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times.
Moderated by Renee Hopkins Callahan and sponsored by Microsoft, the discussion touched on topics ranging from:
* the challenges of today’s news business, NPR’s particular “business” and its need to “be its own disruptor”
* the “misalignment” of business models with real value in some of today’s media companies
* the role of technology in enhancing the user experience
* framing disruption as not just a threat, but also as an opportunity
* the need to experiment *and* be willing to fail often
* the importance of innovation even, sometimes, in the absence of a clear business model
Be sure not to miss our interview series with several dozen attendees of FASTforward'09, including all the contributors to this blog, as well as Clay Shirky, Charlene Li, and many other notable thinkers and doers. The interviews are tagged and can be accessed by topic.
FASTforward Blog Guide to Twitter
Check out the first of a series of guides to the 2.0 world from the contributors of the FASTforward Blog. This and future FASTforward Blog guides aim to deepen understanding about topics we think critical to the future of the enterprise and how people and organizations communicate, collaborate, innovate, and more.
In this guide, Robert Paterson weaves together the many posts that have been written on the FASTforward blog about Twitter, the groundbreaking application that has attracted millions of users and is changing the way they provide, gather, and share information and insights.
Be sure to catch dozens of great interviews from last year's FASTforward. Among the topics discussed between host Jerry Michalski and the speakers, panelists, attendees, and contributors to this blog: enterprise 2.0, search, the user revolution, the future of content, and much, much more.
This site is a companion blog to the FASTforward conference and summit series and is sponsored by FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary. The blog, like the conference series, aims to drive and deepen conversation about how today’s companies can use technology to place users in control of information, and is home to ongoing discussion about the user revolution and Enterprise 2.0 opportunities and challenges. More info here...
