AIIM has recently published a study on Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0. It provides more encouraging news for enterprise 2.0. It finds that business take up of enterprise 2.0 has doubled in the last year. This supports the study from Toby Ward I recently posted on (see New Study Finds Social Media Becoming Mainstream on Corporate Intranet). According to this AIIM report, there has been a significant increase in the understanding of how Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, forums, and social networks can be used to improve business collaboration and knowledge sharing.

The survey was taken by 789 AIIM members between May 11 and May 26, 2009. Over half of organizations studied are now considering enterprise 2.0 to be “important” or “very important” to their business goals and success. Only 17% admitted that they have no idea what it is, compared to 40% at the start of 2008. However, only 25% of organizations are actually doing anything about it – but that is up from 12% in the previous survey. The numbers are lower than the Toby Ward study but the trend is the same.

This study found that Knowledge-sharing, collaboration and responsiveness are considered the biggest drivers. Lack of understanding, corporate culture and cost are the biggest impediments. IT departments are by far the strongest users, with 68% using Enterprise 2.0. In contrast, only 6% of organizations are using it throughout the business. This is interesting as the Toby Ward study that IT was one of the biggest obstacles. It might reflect a different audience mix with the organization in the two studies.

I was interested to find that 71% agree that it’s easier to locate “knowledge” on the Web than it is to find it on internal systems. This is actually a big improvement over what I found in the past few years. Taking a cue from Andrew McAfee I would ask every audience that I presented to on enterprise 2.0 this question. Would all those who find it easier to find information on their corporate intranet than the Web raise their hand. No one every did this for me and Andy reported the same results at the time.

More work needs to be done in the governance area as only 30% of companies have policies on blogs, forums and social networks, compared to 88% who have policies for email. I think that such policies are useful. On the other hand, the study found that while almost all companies would not dream of sending out un-approved press releases or web pages, less than 1 in 5 have any sign-off procedures for blogs and forums. I think these sign-off policies are counter-productive and good general policy guidelines reduce the need for any sign-offs.

There is much more including a lot of detail on personal use of social media by the participants. I recommend looking at the complete study. It adds to the growing body of research supporting the emergence of enterprise 2.0, at least in terms of tool adoption.

Jakob Nielsen’s recently posted an extensive piece on Social Networking on Intranets that addressed adoption issues for enterprise 2.0. It is a summary of the key findings from a study of 14 companies in a much larger 168 page report. It begins with the subtitle, Ready or Not, Here Comes Enterprise 2.0, which sort of captures his approach. Jakob portrays enterprise 2.0 as something that younger workers are pushing on enterprises. If you go to0 slow you will lose good younger workers and if you go too fast you will run risks to overall corporate culture.

While I think there are many more reasons to implementing enterprise 2.0 than appeasing younger workers, Jakob provides some very useful findings and suggestions. For starters, he says that companies must cede power to the people. Actually that was my paraphrase of what he said but he did say that command and control no longer works for corporate messaging. He added that, “enterprise 2.0’s power is not about tools, it’s about the communication shift that those tools enable.” I would agree.

Jakob also found that frontline workers are driving the vision in the companies he studied. While I think a bottom up approach is quite good and aligns with the power to the people philosophy, companies should be more proactive to combine bottom up with some strategic top down direction. A thousand points of light might be going in diverse directions. To back this up, Jakob said, “a uniform finding across all of our case studies is that organizations are successful with social media and collaboration technologies only when the tools are designed to solve an identified business need.” Some top down strategic direction might provide a focus on the critical business needs. Having said that, I would not suppress the bottom up guidance, just blend the two.

I really liked this suggestion, “While some users will eagerly adopt community features for their own sake, others will be skeptical and need guidance. One successful approach is to avoid advertising the new tools as new tools. Instead, simply integrate them into the existing intranet, so that users encounter them naturally.” This exactly what we did in 2004 when we swapped Word docs attached to emails for a blog to support an executive task force at a large hospital. The docs were not told it was a blog, but rather simply a new tool to support their sessions. This stealth approach was especially important in 2004 when blogs were seen as the domain of teenagers and geeks. The docs were won over by the increased functionality the blog offered (see Collaborate for Success: Great Resource for Physician-Hospital Collaboration).

Another useful suggestion is to “avoid burdening users with double work. Don’t, for example, force users to update their profile or photo in both the traditional employee directory and a Facebook-like social connection tool.” This should not be hard to do with most tools but it can be overlooked. He also said it is “important to budget something for community management — not to control the conversation, but rather to guide it. Designated community managers should serve as facilitators and moderators.” This is an old knowledge management best practice that is even more important today (see KM Stories: Part Four – Gaining Support at All Levels).

Jakob concludes with the caution, “when you consider that successful adaptation of Enterprise 2.0 tools requires the organization to change its ways, it becomes clear why these projects don’t happen overnight.” He adds that it seems to take three to five years for “social intranet projects” to take hold. There is much more in the summary. I am sure the 168 page version offers even more insight. Thanks to J.B.Holston at Newsgator for pointing out this post to me.

Here is a recent classic from Dion Hinchcliffe, 12 Rules For Bringing ‘Social’ To Your Business, that applies to enterprise 2.0 as much as Web 2.0.  He set the stages for his twelve points by defining what this transition to social business is about, “It’s how those companies are going to make the transition from traditional 1-to-1 relationships with their partners and customers to a one-to-many community relationship where the company is only another member of an endless ongoing conversation. This conversation will be the very lifeblood of companies in the future and consist of all the ideas, concerns, solutions, news, learning, product development, sales, marketing, customer service (i.e. the fundamental fabric of the organization) taking place between anyone, anywhere who feels they have a stake. He adds that we have a long way to go to get there but there have been some starts.

I am not going to repeat all twelve points here as you should read Dion’s original work. I will just cherry pick a few for additional comments.  He states that while he does like to talk about technology too early, the new technologies have been helped enable this transformation. I agree on both points.  Many of the ideas of enterprise 2.0 were around in the early days of knowledge management but the right tools were not there to enable the full vision. To compound this the some of the software vendors high jacked the movement and led it astray.

We need to avoid the same things happening with enterprise 2.0. This should not be a vendor led movement. A panel member at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference Session on Does Social Media in Matter in Marketing advised us to not focus on one tool as another will come along and replace it or go in a new direction. Used to be how to use technology. Now you can build your own technology. The greatest technology does not seem like technology. A good example is the iPhone.

I would add that Twitter is another but I think within the enterprise it works best as feature in suite rather than as a standalone tool. In the same vein, some of the best features of enterprise 2.0 tools is their behind the scenes activity to create a searchable archive of social interactions as a byproduct of their use.  We need to keep this simplicity in the tools. Many enterprise 2.0 tools allow you to fit them around the work process rather than the reverse, another way the technology is less oppressive as in the past. So take advantage of this and pick the business process then choose what tool to wrap around it.  If the tool does not fit, change the tool and not the process.

In another step, Dion writes that censorship kills participation. This is actually why you need guidelines to make the rules explicit (see recent post on Social Media Policy Guidelines Can Encourage Use Outside Enterprise and Adoption Within). The rules need to be open ended and enable and encourage people to participate.  Without clear policy people may be reluctant and think that the old ways on top down enforcement still apply. However, if your rules enforce the old ways, do not bother with social media tools. It is a waste of time.

I will pick one more. Dion writes that you should add a social dimension to your business processes. Enterprise 2.0 increasing productivity by increasing accountability.  This was one of the concepts that first got me excited about it (long with the creation of searchable knowledge as part of using the tools I mentioned earlier). I have seen many examples of this such as Al; Essa 2004 work at MIT (An Enterprise 2.0 Poster Child in the IT Department) where Al, the CIO, got 60% of his day back by having all project use a blog dashboard for transparency. Another is Changing Organization Behavior at XM Radio through Enterprise 2.0 and QuickBase where XM Radio had its first profitable project because of the new transparency of the work processes.

This is enough for now. Go read the rest of what Dion wrote. 

As the use of social media grows within the enterprise and on the Web, the need for policies and guidelines to govern employee behavior becomes more essential. Effective use of social media requires that employees can act on their own to produce content without review by Corporate Communications or other groups.  I remember in my past life with a large consulting firm and prior to the rise of social media every time I talked with the media, a PR person had to be on the call.  Now customer and market communication is more and more handed over to individual employees.

However, to avoid violations of company security and such things as government regulations for publically traded companies, some guidance is necessary.  I remember in the early days of blogging IBM relied on its standard rules of business conduct. Then in the spring of 2005, IBM used a wiki to create a set of blogging guidelines.  Here is the latest version: IBM Social Computing Guidelines. It begins with the following.

“These guidelines aimed to provide helpful, practical advice, and also to protect both IBM bloggers and IBM itself, as the company sought to embrace the blogosphere. Since then, many new forms of social media have emerged. So we turned to IBMers again to re-examine our guidelines and determine what needed to be modified. The effort has broadened the scope of the existing guidelines to include all forms of social computing.”

You can find the details at the IBM site. Other companies have embraced this concept. Sun was another of the early adopters. Sun’s policy begins with this statement, “Many of us at Sun are doing work that could change the world. Contributing to online communities by blogging, wiki posting, participating in forums, etc., is a good way to do this. You are encouraged to tell the world about your work, without asking permission first, but we expect you to read and follow the advice in this note.” I think this captures the right spirit for these efforts.

Intel has released new social media guidelines. It has also created a Social Media department and offers training for employees who are interested in blogging and participating in online forums and other social media venues where they represent Intel  (see Intel publishes social media guidelines for its employees). I like the addition of training. 

These guidelines are not limited to the large players. RightNow provides a suite of CRM tools that I have covered on a number of occasions. The RightNow guidelines state that, “RightNow has an open participation policy for all employees. The choice to participate in social media is yours. If you decide to participate, you are making a commitment to following these guidelines.” I was told that RightNow’s guidelines were influenced by the work of Intel, IBM and Sun.

Social media guidelines should not be limited to market facing channels. Use inside the enterprise raises many adoption issues and they are no less important here. Some employee concerns can be clarified by a good set of guidelines. If done right these policies can actually encourage participation as employees are likely to feel more comfortable that their actions are sanctioned. They will also feel like they know the rules. I would be very interested in any other social media guidelines that you think are useful, especially those for activity within the enterprise. 

As I have written here on several occasions the US Federal Government is providing leadership in moving to the cloud (e.g., What will be the Business Model for the Cloud as Data and Content Storage Becomes a Utility? and MIT Sloan CIO Symposium: Part Two: CIO Leadership and the Bottom Line). Recently, I spoke with Kevin Paschuck, VP Public Sector for RightNow and their CIO, Laef Olson.

RightNow provides a cloud-based CRM solution that I have covered before (see for example, RightNow Nov 08 Release Focuses on Call Center Agent Support and Barack Obama’s Answer Center – Campaign CRM from RightNow). They do a lot of work for a number of US Government agencies, with over 155 public sector clients.

In April they released a new, highly secure, defense-ready hosting solution designed to support both the Department of Defense (DoD) and other civilian government and intelligence agencies that require stringent, evolving levels of compliance and security. Because the DoD requires a strict level of security, RightNow’s new hosting capabilities use DITSCAP/DIACAP to ensure compliance with DoD Instruction 8500.2, meet US Federal security standard FISMA (NIST 800-53) and include a 24×7 dedicated security and information assurance team.

We spoke on how they are helping the government move further into the cloud with this offering. Kevin said that 70 percent of their government clients are using a cloud solution and this percentage is increasing. In contrast, all of their private sector clients are using a cloud solution. Now RightNow is working with their government clients to take the remaining 30 percent into the cloud.

There are several obstacles to overcome. First, a number of their government clients are military agencies and sensitive military data needs to run on the military network with a .mil extension. To do this the data must be hosted on a military base or you need to get a waiver. Second, there is the general government reluctance to go to the cloud for security reasons.

I asked Kevin how the current 70 percent of government clients are able to use the cloud. He said that many of these are for less sensitive data such as HR self-service of pubic information systems such as the AKO Army Knowledge Online site shown below.

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Many federal CIOs are anxious to get to the cloud to save money and get more flexibility. I observed this myself at the MIT Sloan where Elizabeth Hight, Rear Admiral, Vice Director Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), said she was a supporter of the cloud and virtualization to save both time and money. Kevin mentioned that RightNow is teaming with Elizabeth and DISA to host RightNow applications in their hosting center so they meet government regulations. This is one way they can meet the .mil requirement. Here is another RightNow application for the US Army Human Resources Command.

They have also covered 90 to 95 percent of the certification requirements that run across agencies so it takes less time to customize the application to meet the specifics of each agencies certification requirements. The government is also trying to standardize cloud issues. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a non-regulatory arm of the US Commerce Department, has helped by developing a draft definition for federal use of cloud computing. They may be a bit ahead of the private sector here. Here is a non-military RightNow application for the Social Security Agency.

In another example, the U.S. Air Force Personnel Center (AFPC) is moving its on premise RightNow solution to the new highly-secure, Department of Defense (DoD) SaaS solution.  With the new RightNow cloud-based application, more than 100 AFPC agents can provide accurate, up-to-date information across multiple touchpoints to military and civilian employees of the U.S. Air Force.

The system also provides the AFPC website with a self-learning knowledge foundation. In addition, it monitors constituent feedback, disseminates consistent information, and easily updates content to ensure relevancy. The application has reduced inbound email by guiding constituents to submit questions via the web, where it is converted into an incident that AFPC can track and respond to.

I am pleased to see greater government uptake on the opportunities the cloud brings. There seems to be a genuine drive to balance security requirements with flexibility, cost savings and reduce unnecessary red tape with standardization.

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.

That is the return on investment in interaction.

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While selecting the right tools for the job can certainly prove a barrier to adoption for some organizations, even after they select the right tools they are always faced with the more formidable barrier to adoption – one based on social, cultural and business process issues. How to let people organize themselves in those environments? How to integrate the use of the tools with various business processes and in some cases allow those business processes to transform themselves? How to let go of control and allow some form of self-organization? How to reconcile existing workplace policies with those new virtual environments?

There are many publications and blogs that focus on that first barrier, the tools, and we’re going to leave that to them. Going forward we’ll be single-mindedly focused on the second and the questions above are the critical ones we’ll be focused on. We’ll be telling stories, reporting successes and failures, offering commentary and counsel on what works and what doesn’t, and weighing in on which models or practices should be emulated or avoided. We hope that you’ll take the opportunity to share your learnings with us and and in turn our community of readers, many of whom are wrestling with similar challenges and struggles. Sound like a useful refinement of purpose? As always, we’re interested in your feedback and thoughts.

I attended the Mike Gotta session on Enterprise Social Networking at the Boston Enterprise 2.0 conference. I have been following Mike’s Collaborative Thinking blog for some time as I was pleased to be able to see him in person for the first time to hear him talk about adoption issues. Mike said he is going to provide information from actual cases from project teams that he has interviewed. I am doing these notes real time so please forgive any typos and missing words.

There is a history of software and communities. Many tools have come and gone since the 80s. So what is new? The consumer Web tools helped to great more awareness. Now we have evolved from social networking sites to services to platforms. They are no set answers yet. Platforms for the enterprise can use profiles, social graphs, relationship controls (for people and admin), social presence, participation tools, and application services.

He showed an example of a social network site from Booz Allen that they built themselves. It showed the total social context of an individual within the organization.

Mike offered a graph of the market space. The domain specific vendors include: Jive, Telligent, Newsgator and others. The three platform vendors include IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. He also showed transformational vendors (Facebook, Twitter, Google and others) and emerging vendors (Drupal, Cubetree and others). He moved to another slide before I could get the rest.

Mike related a field study he conducted. Interviewed 21 organizations, interviewed 65 people, got 45 hours of conversation, and looked at 1,700 data points. Rather than guide the conversation with a lot of questions, he set a framework and let people talk and tell their stories. Good idea.

Mike made a good point up front. It is all about adoption not deployment. Major findings include the fact that everyone thought they were behind, even if they were not. Everyone is at the starting point. Few organizations have made a organization-wide decision on social networking. They are still trying to figure it out. Even organizations that have a strategic vision are in the proof-of concept stage. It is not about the tools that is the critical factors. It is overcoming the cultural issues. Social networks do enable more adaptive organizations. This make intuitive sense so it is nice to see some validation.

They found three approaches – people to people, people to work, and people to organization but its work best when these three integrate. They found two main gaps. People have not focused on social network and identity and search was not considered. This was surprising to Mike. He feels that their should be a lot of synergy between social networking and search strategy.

One of the first issues that project teams faced was properly identifying what social networking means for the enterprise. There is a lot of confusion here. Analogies to the consumer web such as Facebook were often not successful, as people did not want Facebook in the enterprise. Most teams ended up with the term collaboration and not anything social. This is exactly consistent with Dion Hinchcliffe in the morning session. I certainly agree with both of them

Found innovation best from bottom up from people closest to the work. So give them a voice and a way to collaborate. I found this over and over again in the old knowledge management days. In those days you needed to do anthropology on the jobs to uncover best practices.

Mike he found other issues such as the above and that these are not new issues. What did I just say? Shifting generations play several roles in adoption. Need to be able to appeal to all generations and allow for greater integration across generations. Older workers can be social networking leaders to share their expertise and provide status to them for retention. Also look for emerging experience that is developing in the younger workers. A culture of participation will identify good skills in ways that might not come out otherwise.

Social networks are also ways for people to organize and create their own training to meet their individual needs. Informal learning can complement formal learning. Also, social networking is great for on-boarding. They offer the back channel for what is really going on and who to interact with.

The business side often has pain points but do not link them to a business requirement when they talk with IT. They also sometimes come to IT with a tool request not linked with a business requirement. In both cases IT needs to not dismiss but explore to uncover real business requirement. It is usually there if you ask questions.

There was a lot of debate on ROI. It was hard to make very concrete. There is no agreement here. Some people said it was the wrong question and others said it was important. It is essential infrastructure or can it be an intervention with a concrete ROI linked to work process improvement. Often ROI was found after deployment but hard to predict specifics. Most pilots did find business value once they started.

Some project teams worked behind the scenes to get supporters in decision roles, often younger people. Others went out to get support form the field. Stories can be the best ROI, especially for potential of approach to get pilots going. Gaining approval and ROI is more art than science. I would agree here. This is bringing back early days of knowledge management when it was all fresh. Again, I think this similarity just validates the issues.

Mike next addressed the issue of how to balance business and culture or how to defeat the enemy within. Organizational structures cam impede social networking. Middle management can be threatened and try to sabotage efforts. They were used to controlling what went up the reporting chain. Now the lower level employees can talk directly to senior management. The top and bottom of the organization liked this but the middle did not. Managers would tell workers to not put stuff in a blog but send to them in email.

Sometimes there are social caste systems. People at high levels do not talk with people in junior levels. This can carry over to social software. Workers feel senior management would “never take an idea from me.” This is a red flag that the culture can be a barrier. Another company that had a good culture and questions and suggestions were answered quickly. They made over $500k in savings from the system.

There is no clear answer as to whether you must change culture first before implementing social networks or you can use social networks to change culture. Regardless you must address the cultural issues in the implementation. Culture can trump almost everything. Trust is important here. One guy said he did not want to fill out his profile because it would make it easier to find him and lay him off. How do you cross culture boundaries in social software that are not crossed in person on the job? This needs to be figured out.

There was mixed opinion on whether to bring legal, HR, and security into the project pre or post pilot. There was agreement that they need to get involved. Pre-pilot course would say that you know what to avoid. Post would say that you do not yet know what you need to get by-in for.

Other issues that came up include the role of social business activity in annual reviews. There were all sides on this. Do not want to drive gaming the system but you also want to recognize good corporate citizen behavior. Also, what about consequences for negative behavior? Should people be concerned about career limiting moments? There needs to be policies on this so issues are clear. Some companies have terms of service before you start to use the social networking site. I think this could be okay but only if what really happens. I had something similar on an email system with a past employer but everyone ignored it. It said you cold only use it for business uses but everyone used it for personal uses. Finally, the company recognized the folly of their requirement and removed it. If you get too controlling no one will come.

I had to duck out a bit early so welcome anyone filling in what I missed. I liked the fact that this session came from actual research with real stories and was not simply platitudes. It was also better as stories than stats.

This is part two of Dion Hinchcliffe’s workshop on implementing enterprise 2.0 at the Boston enterprise 2.0 conference. Dion brought up a guest speaker David Stephenson who he said is the “world’s leader in democratizing data.” This was the tile of his discussion, the concept of democratizing data: the data-centric organization. This makes it automatically available to those who need it based on roles and responsibilities while maximizing security. He said that data democratization can actually increase security. I agree here.

Having data at the heart of all actions is an attitudinal shift. You need to provide metadata so you can make sense of it and RSS feeds to reach user. You need to think of every worker as a knowledge worker. Giving more authority to people who fill potholes by providing them with all the data on their daily assignments increases morale and productivity as they will know the best way to complete the tasks. David said that the Netherlands government saves over 25% of reporting costs by standardizing and making data more transparent.

Dion came back and picked up on this theme. Government is picking up on the data democratization theme with the new administration. For example, wikis are being used for dealing with crisis issues for more transparency than email.

Dion reviewed enterprise 2.0 platforms; wikis, blogs, microblogging, mashups, online communities, social bookmarking, social networking and them went over the vendor space with examples of each category. There is currently no one stop shop for all tool categories but there are suites. Online communities include: Joomla, Drupal, Zikula, PHP/Nuke SharePoint, Lithium, Telligent, DotNetNuke, KickApps, Jive. Dion said these are the top ones based on usage. SharePoint is already available in many organizations that want to start enterprise 2.0. It has many necessary capabilities. It can also be adapted to implement many of the social emergent tools but usually requires some work.

Dion put up an enterprise 2.0 ecosystem chart. You have traditional enterprise systems and enterprise 2.0 systems. These can be connected through mashups and data can be found through federated search. He went on to cover some other platforms being used: Igloo, Facebook private groups (it is open source). Serena software uses Facebook (see my post – Serena has Adopted Facebook as their Intranet).

Mashups are being used and Serena, Jackbe, IBM (Lotus Mashups), Microsoft (Popfly) have tools. One creative example, Chicago did a mashup of crime data with Google Maps that is updated real time and can be sorted by time of day.

Crowdsourcing is another application. One gold company put their survey data out and invited anyone to tell them where the gold was. They had great success and paid a large sum in bounties. This can be done internally or externally. (see Innovating Through Market Games with Spigit.)

Dion then switched to best practices. Successful adoption strategies include: gain and enlist top down support, overcome turf issues in advance, align applications to key business processes, align enterprise 2.0 strategy to business strategy, develop a clear simple business case, provide strong leadership, design measure aligned to business processes. I could not agree more. These were also all the key adoption strategies for knowledge management in the early 90s. This does not take away from them. I think it just reinforces them. Dion said these factors came from actual case studies.

He added more adoption strategies: listen to users, simply the access and production of knowledge, develop a clear communication plan to promote the effort, involve all key stakeholers (but go slow on this), integrate all forms of communication, develop a clear motivation plan. Again these are all best practices from knowledge management in the early 90 but I see this as a further validation. I found that legal often got overlooked and this can come back to bite you so do not leave them out.

Dion went on to discuss the need to aggregate social data and not have silos. This is critical. Enterprise 2.0 suites are adding this. Also, social analytics is being implemented to take advantage of the transparency and make sense of it. He gave an example of Facebooks’ FriendWheel as a consumer version. In line with this you need to cultivate weak ties, as well as strong ties, and enterprise 2.0 enables this. These weak ties are often the source of new insights vs. the people you talk to all the time.

Reputation systems are another way to make use of the social data and rather input. Sezwho is one tool that works across platforms. Expertise location is an overlapping capability.

Dion offered a breakdown of effort: tools, 15%, integration, 25%, community management 25%, IT support, 15% change management 20%. These make intuitive sense. Do not short change the people issues. The quality of the community management team is a critical success factor. Community Manager is one of the roles in the enterprise.

You need to allow time for people to learn the tools and methods. Social tools are the new productivity tools like word processing and spreadsheets before so everyone needs to learn how to use them. As Dion said earlier, the more people use the tools the greater the value. There are three levels of community in the enterprise and you need to deal with each one: team level, community level, and entire network.

I found this workshop to be a useful overview of enterprise 2.0 adoption issues.

Dion Hinchcliffe is leading an opening workshop on Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at the Boston Enterprise 2.0 conference. I have long been an admirer of his work and was pleased to see this session. The subtitle is: Exploring the Tools and Techniques of Emergent Change.  Dion said the concept of emergent and social is critical. I like the fact that many stories will be offered as I agree that they offer more than “factual” information. I am doing this real time so apologies for any typos. 

Dion said that many companies do not like the word, social. so he uses enterprise 2.0. Again, I agree here. I wish the Wikipedia did. Three years ago only a few in his session had access to blogs at work. Last year it was half. This year it was almost everyone. Enterprise 2.0 is more about social tools for collaboration than in the consumer space. Most organization have these tools but it is every uneven.

 Consumer and enterprise is blurring. Employees now put contact information in social tools outside the enterprise as something they own and can take with them. People are willing to pay for these tools themselves but most are free.  We had to move to a much bigger room as there were a lot of people here. I could have predicted that. I look around and still see people standing.

In 2004 Web 2.0 tools began to be used at work. This is when I learned about them and got excited about their impact on knowledge management. Middle of last year global surveys in developed nations found about a third of all companies had the enterprise tools. Now it is a bit over half.  Dion mentioned that knowledge management was an early use. Now Twitter is on the rise. It is social messaging as opposed to instant messaging. There is little interest in IM now as it does not build value because it operates in silos. I never liked IM and would sometimes copy and paste IM messages in Word before they went away. Now Twitter needs to get its archiving working better but at least there is some.

There are hundreds of enterprise 2.0 pilot projects underway. Mid to small businesses are most successful because they are nimble. Big software players are getting into it. Google Wave is designed to serve in this space. There are dozens of startups. Traditional tools like Documentum are adding enterprise 2.0 features. I did a review of this in AppGap (see EMC Documentum Makes a Series of Moves into Enterprise 2.0).

The big money principle of Enterprise 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence. Tools have been poor for this before. He has seen 400 page Word docs with best practices. Tim O’Reilly definition, “Network applications that explicitly leverage network effects.” This is the social side of information. It is not just making connections but making use of it. Network effect occurs when the more people who use it, the better it is. YouTube is an example.  Gave example of enterprise use of taking a free wiki tool inside informally at AOL. It spread virally until the entire organization uses it instead of traditional document management system.  The wiki was optimizes for network effect. The traditional document management system was not optimized for this and lost out.

Andy McAffee put forth three pillars of enterprise 2.0: emergent, freeform, social. They are primarily to address collaboration challenge. Capture institutional knowledge and make it discoverable. It is globally visible, persistent collaboration that has very low barrier to entry. Like open source, anyone can improve knowledge.  Workers are put into the central place for contribution. Tools adapt to environment rather than the reverse. In studies of early adopters social tools get much greater use for knowledge management than traditional tools. There is also less duplication of effort, increased transparency, and higher levels of productivity.

Dion used stales acronym – search, links, authorship, tags, extensions, signals – as critical components.  Tags provide emergent structure and standard use of terms. I found that the users of taxonomy are the best at creating it. Now we have the way for this to happen. These tools will interrupt workflow less. Dion said this is a critical point and I agree. The other is that the content can be  leveraged as the content is persistent and discoverable.  I see this as knowledge management as a byproduct of work and not a separate activity. This is what got me excited about Web 2.0 for business in 2004. Knowledge work is the fasting growing jobs and part of jobs. Enterprise 2.0 addresses this so their is great opportunity to provide software support where it has gone well before. 

Now we have a break so I will post this first part. More later if the wifi holds.