Posted by Sean Lew on Tuesday, 14 April, 2009 under Academic, Blue Sky Thinking, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, IT strategy, social media, Statistics |
I have been researching the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 for a while now and there are not alot of statistics out there to show the benefits organisations are achieving. This could be due to a whole myriad of reasons –
1) No two Enterprise 2.0 implementation is the same
2) Enterprise 2.0 is still quite new
3) Lack of understanding of Enterprise 2.0
4) Lack of companies implementing Enterprise 2.0
Having said this, alot of the success stories so far are case studies and not mentioning any names, I must say some of these “success stories” are really not that successful. Its been over hyped.
So which companies have really made Enterprise 2.0 successful and managed to gain competitive advantage, cost savings, innovation and so? There are not many strong Enterprise 2.0 case studies (like P&G’s Connect and Develop and Lego) that really delivered value to the bottom line.
So does Enterprise 2.0 deliver value? I truly believe so. I have experienced the benefits of it before. If this is the case, how can we measure it? I feel that a framework of understanding the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 must be created. Its not as simple as just connecting people together or just posting videos online and sharing it or collaboration with others. It has to be looked at from a holistic angle. This is my study and this is what I hope to achieve.
Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 2 April, 2009 under Academic, Enterprise 2.0, IT strategy |
Technology is complex. Many say its a marriage of People, Process, Technology. I believe its even more than that. It should also include policies, economic structure, environmental factors and people people (and more people).
It takes time for people to explore and understand a technology. Something that is cool might not be economically viable or people friendly. Enterprise 2.0 is the same too. We need to understand from all angles how it will benefit people. More importantly, within an organisation, there are people in different communities across the hierarchy in different geographical locations speaking different languages. How would Enterprise 2.0 benefit all these people? Benefits are seldom across the board – it depends on adoption rate, style of usage and so on.
Benefits should also be studied from different angles. For example, it doesn’t mean that a well connected company is efficiently sharing knowledge and capturing it in the right places. Adoption rate doesn’t necessary reflect increase in productivity and reduction in communication cost.
Academic theories could be a way to understand some of these benefits – Social network analysis, IT portfolio theory, transaction cost theory are just some examples of previous work we can use.
Posted by Sean Lew on Sunday, 15 March, 2009 under Academic, Blue Sky Thinking, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, IT strategy |
“Other things being equal, idiosyncratic exchange which features personal trust will survive greater stress and display greater adaptability” – Williamson (1985)
When I started thinking about this particular area of Enterprise 2.0 recently, I was pretty confused. Trust is such a big unknown. How do you trust someone? Can you trust an organisation? or do you trust the people in the organisation? Can trust be exchanged or transferred? Does the build up of trust related to how desperate the person is (when one is desperate to get something and someone says that they can get it, is the trust given to that person generally higher??) These were some questions I had. Moreover another really tough aspect of trust is that, its very difficult to measure. In this post, I plan to describe what is trust and the key areas Enterprise 2.0 implementers should look at.
So what is trust?
Gambetta defined trust as the subjective probability with which an actor assesses that another actor or group of actors will perform a particular action, both before she or he can monitor such action (or independently of his or her capacity ever to be able to monitor it) and in a context in which it affects his or her own action. Great definition but still quite high level and doesn’t tell us much from here.
At a high level, I would like to say that trust is like a chicken an egg question. When two actors connect and communicate (and even collaborate) some levels of trust must exist in the first place (generally neutral trust). I would like to propose at this point that there is no such thing as no trust for something. There is only negative trust (distrust), neutral trust or positive trust. As communication develops, depending on the situation, a positive relationship will lead to an increase in trust and vice versa.
Adler wrote a really good paper on trust and I am basing much of this blog post on his findings. He argued that there are four dimensions of trust – Sources, Mechanisms, Objects and Bases – Source of trust, mechanisms that generate trust, objects that trust can be built on and bases or factors that trust can be generated from.
| Dimensions |
Components |
| Sources |
Familiarity through repeated interaction
Calculation based on interest
Norms that create predictability and trustworthiness |
| Mechanisms |
Direct interpersonal contact
Reputation
Institutional context |
| Objects |
Individuals
System
Collectivities |
| Bases |
Consistency, contractual trust
Competence
Benevolence, loyalty, concern, goodwill, fiduciary trust
Honesty, integrity
Openness |
To find out more about the details of the above table, I recommend you to read Adler’s work. Note that even though Adler listed the components as individual items the components within each dimension is suggested to be interdependent and intertwined complements.
Here comes the important bit, we can’t assign trust to a person. Trust is earned not given and for people to effectively share and collaborate, positive trust is needed. So does it mean that if people in an organisation has a culture of distrust, Enterprise 2.0 would not work effectively? I would think so – no practical basis for what I said here though.
I believe that trust is not just an Enterprise 2.0 issue, its an organisational issue. If it doesn’t exist within an organisation, it must be looked at from a strategic standpoint and internal HR initiative. With trust, things can work so much better – I’ve been there done that.
Posted by Sean Lew on Sunday, 23 November, 2008 under Academic, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0 |
To understand social networking in the enterprise, one would need to know what are the key ingredients for social networking to exist. I will try to explain this using the social capital theory (SCT).
Social capital theory consists of variety of components and personally I believe that most of them can be applied to making a social networking platform successful. The diagram below shows a breakdown of the key ideas in the social capital theory (click to image enlarge).
I would not go into all aspects of this theory but I would want to highlight some aspects of it that might be of interest to social networking practitioners.
1) Generalised Norms refers to a degree of consensus in the social system. It could refer to many different things from a cooperation norm (meaning its normal for people to cooperate and help each other online [read: volunteerism]) or a selfish norm or a trusting norm or a supportive norm. This is really derived from the workplace culture and unknowingly it is brought over to the social networking platform. Note that norms are also derived from the society norms, therefore employees in different countries may have a different view of the norm.
2) Neighbourhood connections refers to the network configuration of the platform. Moving away from SCT, social networking within the enterprise can be split into two main categories 1) access, timing and referrals and 2) density, connectivity and hierarchy. This is strongly related to SCT as this theory is all about providing access to information through the network.
Access – how useful is the information acquired from the network.
Timing – how fast does it take to acquire that piece of information.
Referrals – Connections in the network available to help improve the quality of the information.
Density – how many people are participating
Connectivity – how easy is it to create connections
Hierarchy – Are there roadblocks that prevent connections and sharing?
3) Volunteerism is pretty straightforward. There are three main questions in my head at the moment which is 1) Are people willing to volunteer? 2) What is the quality of the output expected by the volunteers and 3) Do people have time to volunteer? One can argue that if this is about social networking in an organisation, why is there a need to volunteer and help someone which is unlikely to impact on the end of year performance review outcomes? I totally agree, however, the more you volunteer (assuming the outout is good), news travels and it will finally come back to you and make the volunteer look like someone who not only does well in the day to day work but also stepping up and out to help others.
4) Trust is possibly the most important factor in a social network. People are generally more willing to engage in social activity when there is trust. Its a simple logic, why do you share more information about yourself with a close friend than with someone you just met? Sharing opens someone up to vulnerability and it requires some levels of trust and incentive for people to do so.
The above are some of the interesting aspects of SCT that will affect social networking in organisations and it shows some of the key ingredients for a social network to be successful.
Part of this article is adapted from Nahapiet, J. and S. Ghoshal (1998). “Social Capital, Intellectual Capital, and the Organizational Advantage.” The Academy of Management Review 23(2): 242-266.
