What is Enterprise 2.0′s measurable value?
The guys at Infovark wrote a highly interesting post about delivering measurable value through Enterprise 2.0. This is one question I have battled with for ages and ages and I have still yet to come up or read about a good solid value proposition regarding Enterprise 2.0.
As the guys at Infovark stated
Enterprise 2.0 claims to improve efficiency by increasing social productivity. The theory is that by making more information available to more people, and allowing them to connect with each other easily, we can collectively get more done. But does this claim hold true? I’m seeing more and more posts from good folks who can’t deal with the overload of this new social graph. The time spent keeping track of all the communications from all of your contacts might actually make you less productive.
There’s no doubt that a more aware and better connected knowledge worker has the potential to be a more productive one. But the social dimension is only one part of the Enterprise 2.0 equation. In a business context, making connections and managing relationships is a means, not an end.
This is the Big Difference between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 needs to deliver measurable value – not just get a bunch of people together to click on advertisements.
I totally agree with the general idea of social networking not being able to deliver measurable value within an enterprise. However, there are some other areas of enterprise 2.0 that could probably deliver measurable value.
1) Mash ups – building of mashups can help deliver faster, timely and more accurate data from a variety of sources. This will reduce the time taken for employees to hunt down these numbers/data from the sources or through some weekly powerpoint/excel status reports. Value can be measured by the reduction of time spent on searching for something. Also if mashup is done externally for your customers, it can deliver measurable value depending on what kind of mashups you build.
2) Enterprise Search – the first letter of “SLATES” or also part of the “FLATNESSES” Model. This is clear, deliver accurate search results from anywhere within the organisation. Reduce time taken to search for stuff on a crappy search engine (which most organisation’s have today). Value can be measured by the reduction of time spent on searching for something.
3) RSS – Information is power. This delivers timely information to employees and would be exceptionally important for people making decisions based on other internal work streams. This reduces the risk of making a wrong decision. Value can be measured by the reduction of errors due to untimely information.
4) Please contribute to this list…
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16 May 2008
4) Added by Aaron (see comments section for the train of thoughts) – “I see this (in E20) as part of building knowledge – lessons learned, best practices, etc. And I believe it is implemented through the W20 tools that of course implies use of tags, mashups, collaboration, linking, “people groups” and so forth. This is my basis for identifying collaboration as working together to create a product, and connectiveness as bringing together the entire body of knowledge.
Measuring value can be difficult, especially if one is looking for tangible returns. Project management can see value thru utilization of lookbacks when starting new projects, when their timelines for preliminary setup and startup times diminish, creating budget benefits. Connectiveness can aid in forming more permanent ties among groups or individuals, can aid in discovery processes to a degree that I don’t believe has been explored well at this point.
Intangible value is relationship building, providing a sense of community within an organization, and to a greater or lesser extent depending on how E20 is implemented, between an organization and its’ support groups (external providers, vendors, etc.)”
Thanks Aaron!
Gordon said,
Hey Sean!
Yep – all good points. There are plenty of areas outside of the “facebook for the enterprise” approach that produce measurable outcomes. I still think that social networks, harnessed properly, can produce real value.
That said, there is the issue of the growing signal to noise problem – unless we’re patently aware of it with the solutions we buy and build, our efforts to make things better could make them worse.
Gordon
Sean Lew said,
Signal to noise problem – great way to describe it. I experienced it first hand and I am super careful now. The only good thing was my little project was just something internal and it was a great learning experience.
Aaron said,
Very good points that have not been well-articulated elsewhere. I would consider adding “connectiveness”, or the ability to pull together disparate pieces of information related to a specific topic (project or whatever) for organizational use. Not to be confused or mixed in with collaboration; this is more related to search, being able to reach out in the intranet space to bring like information together.
Sean said,
@Aaron, Good point on connectiveness. I did think of connectiveness when I was writing the blog but I had a couple of questions I could not answer.
1) how can you implement connectiveness? Would it be through tagging or social graph or something else?
2) How can you measure value from this?
Thanks!
The value of enterprise 2.0 said,
[...] Just an extension of my previous post on What is Enterprise 2.0’s measurable value? [...]
Aaron said,
Good question on connectiveness – not sure I can give a coherent response, but…
I see this (in E20) as part of building knowledge – lessons learned, best practices, etc. And I believe it is implemented through the W20 tools that of course implies use of tags, mashups, collaboration, linking, “people groups” and so forth. This is my basis for identifying collaboration as working together to create a product, and connectiveness as bringing together the entire body of knowledge.
Measuring value can be difficult, especially if one is looking for tangible returns. Project management can see value thru utilization of lookbacks when starting new projects, when their timelines for preliminary setup and startup times diminish, creating budget benefits. Connectiveness can aid in forming more permanent ties among groups or individuals, can aid in discovery processes to a degree that I don’t believe has been explored well at this point.
Intangible value is relationship building, providing a sense of community within an organization, and to a greater or lesser extent depending on how E20 is implemented, between an organization and its’ support groups (external providers, vendors, etc.)
I’m sure I have missed many points, but at least a thread of my thoughts.
Aaron said,
There are also some attempts out on the social networking side to provide means to wade through the noise – samples of sites include FriendFeed, Iminta, Plaxo, Readr, Mugshot.
Basically, they are a way for the individual to control and direct what they are receiving, almost as filters to allow content from specific sources to come through, and be gathered in one place. I haven’t tried them out yet, but am curious to see the applicability within E20 – funneling info from specified groups into a “team space”, perhaps.
Sean Lew said,
Aaron, as usual, great comments! I totally understand your connectiveness point and I just added your comment to the post. Thanks mate!
Alex Lew said,
Hey tell me more abt Mash ups?
Sean said,
Sure. Lets have a chat about this later today
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