Archive for User Revolution
by Jon Husband
September 10, 2009 at 1:00 pm · Filed under
Collaboration, Connected Enterprise, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Organizational Design, Social Computing, User Revolution, Wisdom of Crowds
McKinsey, a leading organizational consulting firm, has just released its most recent study regarding the usage of Web 2.0.
From a read of the announcement, it appears that collectively we are still on the path towards social computing becoming a fixture in the knowledge-based workplace … hardly a surprise.
I (and many others) have said here, and elsewhere, that the ubiquitous presence of the Web, the growing ease-of-use of tools and services, and the growing understanding of productivity in a networked era, are leading inexorably to a fundamental re-think of the way(s) knowledge work is carried out and the type(s) of organizational culture necessary to support that productivity.
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Across all categories, the use of Web 2.0 technologies by employees for internal purposes has increased from 53% in 2007 to 65% of respondents in 2009.
The largest components of growth have come from using Web 2.0 to develop new products / services internally, to manage internal knowledge and to reinforce the company culture via tools such as internal social networking applications.
The companies who have embedded these tools in their day-to-day activities and processes have seen the largest impact by improving communication across silos to reduce duplicate work and leverage experts in other areas.
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The report notes that enterprise use of Web 2.0 technologies to connect and interact with business partners and suppliers has slowed down or stagnated … again, not much of a surprise given the often transactional nature of those relationships and the fact that electronic connections between those parties have existed in one form or another for quite some time now.
The final statement of this most recent McKinsey report offers, in my opinion, some clear writing on a big wall … “expertise in the use of Web 2.0 technologies is becoming a required skill for all enterprises.”
When will your organization adopt, or grow its capabilities and culture with respect to, collaboration platforms and Enterprise 2.0 expertise and dynamics ?
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The momentum we see in the growth of Web 2.0 technologies implies we will see higher penetration in 2010 for using these technologies for employees to collaborate and to facilitate interactions with customers.
To drive increased usage for managing interactions with suppliers and partners, companies will need to find ways use these technologies to augment the formal relationships between business entities and not substitute formal interactions with more ad hoc ones.
Nonetheless, it is clear that expertise in the use of Web 2.0 technologies is becoming a required skill for all enterprises.
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by Joe McKendrick
September 2, 2009 at 5:33 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, User Revolution
McKinsey has just published the results of a survey of nearly 1,700 executives from around the world which paints a highly positive picture of the business returns being seen from Web 2.0 deployments.
Close to seven out of ten respondents (69%) report that their companies “have gained measurable business benefits [italics mine], including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues.”
This is probably the most significant set of survey findings I have seen yet that document actual benefits being seen from Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 deployments. There has been quite a stir in the blogosphere lately about the lack of actual results being seen from these new methodologies (check out Dennis Howlett’s latest post on the topic, along with my colleague Paula Thornton’s observations).
What kinds of benefits, exactly, does McKinsey see coming out of Web 2.0 sites? In the survey, half of respondents report that Web 2.0 technologies have fostered in-company interactions across geographic borders, 45 percent cite interactions across functions, and 39 percent across business units.
The measurable benefits cited span both knowledge management and simple cost-cutting:
Increasing speed of access to knowledge 68%
Reducing communication costs 54%
Increasing effectiveness of marketing 52%
Increasing speed of access to internal experts 43%
Increasing customer satisfaction 43%
Decreasing travel costs 40%
Increasing employee satisfaction 35%
With the growing availability of services over the network, you can see how there will be increased velocity of knowledge and improved communications. It would be interesting to see how employee satisfaction, cited by more than a third, is measured.
Interestingly, the highest-rated Web 2.0 technologies/services in terms of business benefits delivery among companies are video sharing and blogging.
The top-rated technologies in terms of internal use include the following:
Video sharing 48%
Blogs 47%
RSS 42%
Social networking 42%
For external use, such as connecting with partners and suppliers, the following technologies delivered the most benefits:
Blogs 51%
Video sharing 50%
Social networking 49%
RSS 45%
The more the technologies are used, the more benefits seen, the survey also shows. As McKinsey puts it:
“Web 2.0 delivers benefits by multiplying the opportunities for collaboration and by allowing knowledge to spread more effectively…. Among respondents who report seeing benefits within their companies, many cite blogs, RSS, and social networks as important means of exchanging knowledge. These networks often help companies coalesce affinity groups internally. Finally, respondents report using Web videos more frequently since the previous survey; technology improvements have made videos easier to produce and disseminate within organizations.”
McKinsey also observes that more than half of the companies in the survey plan to increase their investments in Web 2.0 technologies, while another quarter don’t expect their level of spending to change. The study also suggests that the turbulent economy may have increased interest in Web 2.0 technologies.
Of course, there are still about a third of respondents that absolutely have not yet seen any business benefits from Web 2.0. What is not clear is whether employees at these companies are using Web 2.0 under the radar, and thus progress cannot yet be measured.
by Jon Husband
September 2, 2009 at 5:23 pm · Filed under
2.0 Business Model, 2.0 Design Thinking, Jevon MacDonald, Organizational Design, Social Computing, User Revolution
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… on what he calls “the most exciting day in his professional life“, as the Dachis Group announces that it will work with Headshift to grow its capabilities in bringing social business design and implementation to the business world.
Here and elsewhere I’ve often written about the growing evidence that social computing will become the core foundation of knowledge work … the major vendors are all focused on social-media centred enterprise collaboration and productivity platforms as a major line of business, and there is a growing realization that the participative dynamics of the pervasive hyperlinked web environment are here to stay. Today’s work needs to be, and will be designed in and for social networks
The Dachis Group has re-visited the whole-systems thinking / cybernetics arena of 25 – 30 years ago and updated it to present a holistic value proposition for today’s interlinked and participative era, and are calling it “social business”.
I think I’d argue that business has always been a social undertaking, but that we passed through a period of management philosophy cum reductionism (through the prism of “management science”) whereby enormous gains were obtained over more than a half a century through a relentless focus on efficiency and redundancy.
Now we are in (back to, some would say) an era where information is passed around and shaped into knowledge through interaction with others, it just happens faster by many orders of magnitude. And so, it ups the ante for understanding how to operate effectively in the fast-flowing communications networks that characterize the environment.
I suspect that soon all or most of the major consulting firms will be headlining their social media consulting practices (now that working with all these tools and web services has become too important to be left to amateurs 
Amongst all the offerings we are sure to see, clearly the Dachis Group is bringing a systems perspective to their three-pillared vision (business partner optimization, workforce collaboration and customer participation). In presenting the model, they state that the way(s) work and business are done are in the midst of massive transformational change.
Interconnected ecosystems of interest, efficiency and purpose are clearly central to today’s and tomorrow’s organizational effectiveness. Focusing on the right levers has always been the essential value in and by strategic consulting, and these are bright and experienced people. I am sure they will add an useful perspective to understanding how “social” and “business” will co-exist as we all learn how to operate in tomorrow’s postindustrial societies.
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We are growing: Dachis Group expands with Headshift
We believe that organizations across the globe will begin to view “social media” as social business and when this happens, integration, scale and adoption will become complex issues which will only be solved through a purposeful act of coordinated activities built upon a solid strategic foundation. Enter social business design as a systematic comprehensive approach that orchestrates social business across three core areas: business partner optimization, workforce collaboration and customer participation.
These three areas of business possess ripe opportunities for the emergence of improved outcomes ranging from cost savings to new product/service innovations and increased revenue streams.
These are outcomes which happen when organizations connect and expand their ecosystems, evolve toward a more open culture and empower employees, business partners and customers to actively participate in their business.
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by Jon Husband
June 16, 2009 at 2:09 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Emergent, Interaction, Network Effect, Platforms, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, User Revolution, Wisdom of Crowds
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“.
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Twitter Will Be Obsolete In a Year
[ Snip ... ]
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.”
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I’d love to learn what you think.
by Joe McKendrick
June 11, 2009 at 9:53 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, User Revolution
Enterprise 2.0 adoption is on the rise, with a majority of companies in a new survey planning to increase their funding of E2.0 projects. These are the results of a survey conducted by organizers of the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. (Details provided in a white paper available at the E2.0 site.)
The survey also found organizations are slow to change to E2.0-style thinking. The leading impediments to E2.0 include the following:
| Resistance to change |
52% |
| Difficulty in measuring ROI |
42% |
| Integrating with existing technologies . |
41% |
| Security concerns |
32% |
| Budget |
25% |
| Product knowledge |
23% |
| Tools not enterprise ready |
22% |
Note that two out of five respondents are concerned about measuring return on investment. This is a matter that’s being hotly debated amomg E2.0 proponents.
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