Within social networks, there is a “code of conduct” that exist within the network. This could be in the form of a formal conduct or an unspoken culture, norm and beliefs that governs the actions of individuals. One simple example would be in an organisational context, it would be unacceptable to discriminate against gender or disability. Formal or unspoken culture is an important issue in social norms. Little things like emoticons and usage or certain words like “Nah, I can’t be bothered” in an Enterprise 2.0 environment could have different effects on different cultures. Therefore its never quite easy to implement a global Enterprise 2.0 initiative as part of culture stems from the culture of the race and nationality. However, corporate culture can be more easily controlled.
More importantly, shared strategic visions, shared language / interpretations, norms of cooperation, obligations and expectations are all critical factors in generating social capital. Each of these are important factors to consider in the success of the social network. Even without Enterprise 2.0, the above are all critical for a business in general, if a global organisation do not have share visions, language and culture, it would pretty much be individual companies running by itself. According to Kaplan and Norton, shared visions and strategy is critical. Shared languages and interpretations are important as well. For example, someone might say put the file in system X. It really doesn’t say much but if there is a common understanding that when you put a file into system X, you have to update a certain field as well – now that’s shared interpretations.
Norms of cooperation, obligations and expectations discusses more around what Putnam said “I’ll do this for you now, in the expectation that down the road you or someone else will return the favor.” In a very layman’s term you could even call it “how selfish is the organisation?” or “how competitive is the environment” Also I believe that a wide spread in power between managers and general staff will contribute to a low level participation in certain areas. Putnam also added that a society that relies on generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society.
I’ve always heard people talk about culture and change management in Enterprise 2.0 and it is very important. However no one really discussed in detail what does is involved – at least I haven’t read any so far. There are a few factors that must be considered before implementing Enterprise 2.0 – social norms, obligations and expectations, trust, rules and recognition. I hope to cover one topic per post over the next few days.
Lets start with rules. 1) Rules have a strong impact on formal organisations with regards to the success of Enterprise 2.0. Decisions made at the top can change and influence network ties and the content of the communication across the organisation. Also within organisations there positions and hierarchy which will also affect the way people communicate and the content provided across any medium. Some may argue that organisations are becoming flatter but I am arguing that there are still very traditional and old school type organisations – lets not get into this.
2) Organisations can also influence the norms and beliefs which will in turn affect the success and failure of Enterprise 2.0. For example, if in a traditional firm, innovation is frowned upon (read as authoritarian), it would be unlikely that people would suggest new ways of doing things. Or if an organisation, removes some redundant hierarchy within the organisation and creates a more accessible path to the top, it would increase the chances of people interacting more efficiently.
Rules can be a detriment or enabler for Enterprise 2.0. Make sure you know how to use it well.
HBR List 2009 (See the Feb 2009 edition of Harvard Business Review for full details) is really interesting. HBR list is an annual list of breakthrough ideas for the year and ideas that would impact businesses. Out of the 20 ideas presented there were two ideas that is linked closely to social networks (How social networks network best; Harnessing social pressure) and another on semantic web (What you need to know about semantic web). Interesting enough, there were only 2 articles on the credit crisis. If you think Web 2.0 is small, think again.
I believe that most business leaders are really scratching their heads when it comes to social networking, collaboration, sharing, instant messengers, collective intelligence, wisdom of crowds and so on. On top of all these terms there are examples like facebook, digg, youtube, flickr and thousands of other examples to understand. My goodness, even when I have studied this for two years now, sometimes I still feel like its a word game and everyone has their own take on different terms.
Rising above the confusion of terms, look at it from the fundamentals – connecting people together will lead to communication, sharing and supporting each other – this what communities have done since early human existence. With all these communication and sharing done of the web, the information is stored and reusable. Web 2.0 at an extremely high level is that simple.
So to convert it to business sense at a high level as well would mean that if you can connect the most people together and get them communicate and share effectively that would mean the platform is successful. If search and reusing of information is easy for users then collective intelligence and knowledge sharing has been achieved.
Get into this really really cool phenomena. You’ll enjoy it.
The definition and coverage of Web 2.0 has been rather broad and loosely used by many. Sometimes, I get confused with my thoughts on Web 2.0. The amount of terms that are being used is plentiful and sometimes these terms do not have a clear definition. The basic idea of web 2.0 is about social network and collaboration. However, in different settings, different approaches are taken thus different outcomes are achieved. I hope to define some of these terms in a clearer way.
The key ideas behind C2C web 2.0 is all about social networking, for example in the case of facebook. To a large degree there are direct user contribution to Wikipedia and Linux where people consciously contribute and add to the body of knowledge within these networks. There are also alot of sharing of information through tools like Slideshare, YouTube and GoogleDocs. These tools allow people to collaborate and/or contribute for their individual purposes.
In general, consumer to consumer is aimed at connecting people with the same friends, same cause or same interest. Collective intelligence is a very strong outcome of such forms of social networking. In many cases, C2C Web 2.0 could be just for leisure purposes.
2) Business to Consumer (B2C) Web 2.0
In B2C Web 2.0, there are some really famous case studies like Lego, Procter and Gamble’s Connect and Develop and GoldCorp. Read these case studies for a better understanding of B2C Web 2.0.
These kinds of Web 2.0 is really getting consumers to contribute and share their knowledge, expertise and/or feelings towards their products or services for the organisation. The organisation can choose to compensate their contributors with a cash reward or not.
3) Consumer to Business (C2B) Web 2.0
There are also many forums out there that helps people solve their issues for any organisation. For example, Whirlpool is a telecommunication forum for Australians where consumers help consumers solve problems that they have with Telco companies. This is a tricky situation as in some instances, problems can be solved using free contribution from users however, it might go the other way where people start ranting and saying bad stuff about the organisation.
4) Business to Business (B2B) Web 2.0
B2B web 2.0 is about how two different and separate organisations can collaborate and share sensitive information about each other for their own specific benefits. For example, in a supply chain, organisations can tightly integrate any two or more organisations together through an online platform and share information not only about their inventory status or production output but also information about key staff, communicate via a communal platform on issues, progress, updates and anything in between.
5) Enterprise 2.0 (Internal Business Web 2.0)
This is all about the internal social networking and collaboration within the organisation. Tools like Jive’s Clearspace, SocialText and Telligent have generally focused on this requirement from organisations.
Web 2.0 within organisations require more governance and control as compared to consumer Web 2.0. The data that is being exchange could also be generally more sensitive and holds some commercial value. Many of such implementations are also done at a global level where there are different teams working on different things and they require some kind of workspace for them to operate in (think of a virtual team). These are just some of the functionality that is not available in consumer Web 2.0.
Consumer web 2.0 is purely voluntary. Users choose to put up what they want and choose what they want to do. Due to the sheer amount of people on the net contributing, sharing and collaborating, one or two less people who are not willing to join the community does not really hurt the community. However, in an Enterprise 2.0 environment, there is generally a limited amount of resources available and organisations need to leverage these resources as much as possible and the more people contribute and share information, the more successful the platform is. Change management is key to the success.
I am glad knowledge is so freely available nowadays. Easily five years back, I would not have the luxury to watch world leaders and industry experts and global CEOs speak at universities like MIT Sloan, Harvard and various conferences across the world.
Well today’s video is by John Chambers, President and CEO, Cisco Systems. Thanks Bertrand for his post on this.
One of the key points of his talk was about collaboration and web 2.0 technologies and he has clearly stated that this is the direction CISCO is taking into the future. I shall not comment or question on their ability and capability to make it happen. CISCO is an extremely large firm with great talent and I hope they can really pull this off. This is no easy task, seamless collaboration and information sharing is a huge task. I have 4 computers in my household, 1 mobile phone (which is really a mini computer) and two calendars which I have trouble trying to sync my work and personal life together. I was just wondering that at this age where I have trouble trying to get my life to “collaborate” nicely, it would be even harder to get people to collaborate easily. John (in my opinion) is right though, I do share the same vision as him – collaboration and web 2.0 is the future of the internet.
Innovation is the process of coming up with new ideas, products and process that will help an organisation perform better. Large organisations generates alot of ideas internally and compete on bringing many of these ideas to the market fast and cheap. With the era of M&As happening, innovation across different silos is getting very complicated. I have read a question a while back where someone asked why did Time Warner and AOL not come up with the iTunes concept post the merger. Its a great question and one that could possibly be due to the lack of innovation and cross departmental innovation. After all, one of the reasons for M&As is to harness the potential and intellectual capital in the other organisation.
Innovation at a departmental level will receive departmental results. Organisations need to look at new ideas and processes at an organisational level and understand the impacts of these ideas on other affected stakeholders. Organisations should also look at replicating the idea to other countries, region and product line – if applicable. I believe the best way to do it is to have a dedicated team to control the ideas coming from the organisation and pursue potential valuable ideas further.
So what is IT’s role in this? I have discussed about how social networking and collaboration previously and IT can enable innovation to happen smoothly across boundaries. IT should make it really easy for people to get to where they would like to go and allow the ideas to flow.
Google search engine has started allowing users to tweak its search engine so that users can get the search results they would like to get. This is highly impressive and it will make searching in a specific domain much more accurate (e.g. Enterprise 2.0 or Web 2.0). However, I would say one of the pitfalls is that similar words but not related to the topic (Enterprise 2.0 or Web 2.0) might not return the results users might be looking for. I haven’t tested the new functionality extensively and I am not sure if Google has done something to tackle this potential issue.
Another big thing Google has done is to allow commenting on search results. This is a basic feature of many web 2.0 applications and even though the straight forward benefits of this might not be known now and there could potentially be abuse on such a tool, however, time will tell. Within weeks we could possibly get the initial results on how successful commenting on search results are.
The key themes in Enterprise 2.0 is social networking and collaboration and the technologies involved in getting this done are Wikis, Social Networking, Blogs, Search, Really Simple Syndication (RSS), Social Bookmarking, Mashups, Portals, Social Voting/Ranking, Web Services, Web/Videoconferencing, Bulletin Boards/Discussion Forums, Web Content Management, Workflow/BPM, Instant Messaging, Social Network Analysis, Taxonomy and Podcasting. If you look at the list, its actually alot of stuff we are dealing with. However, most of it can be broken down to some levels of social networking and collaboration.
Many people do not think that Enterprise 2.0 is the next Knowledge Management buzzword and I am one of them. Enterprise 2.0 does much more than that. However, what enterprise 2.0 does WILL change the way people look at knowledge management in future. Let me explain why.
How Knowledge is Created?
For knowledge to be created, some ingredients must be involved. For the purposes of this discussion, I will limit this to knowledge creation of one specific topic only (i.e. Java programming). First, an individual needs to have some base knowledge and through combination of new findings and materials, new knowledge is created. Combination in this case does not necessary need to come in the form of individual exploration but can be in the form of exchanging ideas and knowledge between friends, colleagues and almost anything under the sun. For an organisation, to gain new knowledge, they can either 1) invest in their employees (through the above) and 2) Hire new people with new experiences.
In this part, social networking enables unprecedented power to explore a network that allows the exchange of ideas which can lead to new knowledge creation. However, this does not mean that when you find the right person, that person would actually be willing to help.
Different types of knowledge
There are four main types of knowledge in an organisation 1) Individual explicit knowledge, 2) Individual tacit knowledge, 3) Enterprise explicit knowledge and 4) Enterprise tacit knowledge. I would assume that whoever that is reading this understands the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge, if not read this or this. So what I am proposing here is that each employee knows something and some part of the organisation and its practices and processes. Collectively, through some storage system (i.e. Knowledge management systems), the organisation stores this information and make it searchable. We must understand that unless that information is stored and made searchable, the information that each individual have within the organisation is only valid for as long as the employee is valid. Also, the information that is stored would be predominately explicit knowledge and enterprise tacit knowledge would be pretty much the work habits, culture and business processes.
In this part, Enterprise 2.0 provides the collaborative platform of consolidating all the information from around the company. The collective intelligence of (hopefully but not realistic) everything that is known by all employees in the organisation would be stored on the collaborative platform and everything will be searchable.
From the above, you can see that Enterprise 2.0 changes the way an organisation collects new knowledge and how it stores the knowledge and therefore changing the way organisations would approach Knowledge Management in future.
I have been thinking about this topic recently. Innovation is required all the time in this highly dynamic market. After all, the market recently lost a trillion dollars in a matter of minutes. So what’s really important to organisations in down times? Well, i think everyone would have a different argument on this but let me give you mine.
Innovation is important in any period and to make innovation work, the culture of the organisation must embrace innovation. To get to this point a varying degree of investment has to be made make this happen. So in order for the board to go hard on innovation would require a cost benefit analysis. However, the returns on innovation cannot be calculated. You do not know what ideas people might have nor the dollar amount you will receive from this investment. So an investment in innovation is going to be gamble from the dollars and cents perspective because you do not know if 1) employees will contribute, 2) How good are the contributions.
In an event of a down turn, money is the most important and there is a limited supply of it. So if there is a decrease supply of money, would anyone invest on innovation unless they are sure that this investment would be a good one? I guess there will be but its gonna be lesser than when the economy is doing well.
Having said all these, if an individual employee can innovate and contribute without all these initiatives from the organisation and deliver savings, higher revenue or profits for the organisation, it will reflect well no matter if in good or bad times. Employees are on the ground and they can see certain parts of the business much clearer than the C-level folks. They should have a voice in some of the decision making within the organisation. After all, the wisdom of crowds is a powerful tool.
I was speaking to a colleague today and was talking about innovation and enterprise 2.0. “At a high level, one of the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 is constant innovation” I said. He looked confused straight away.
He asked “what do you mean by constant?”
“Well, on a daily basis.” I replied.
He couldn’t understand how innovation can happen on a daily basis (alrite, I might be exaggerating abit here) but I believe its achievable. He said that innovation requires approval to do things in a new way or just doing new things requires business plans, stakeholder analysis, Porter’s 5 forces analysis and the list goes on and on and on. He is right. Big innovation plans requires such forms of analysis. However, heaps of little innovation idea goes a long way too. For example, if a company’s word/powerpoint template has a page that is extremely ink “hungry” as the whole page is filled with the colour blue, for example. No one really notices how much ink it consumes, from the financial perspective, colour inks are expensive, from the environmental perspective, using too much ink is bad for the environment. If this can be picked up quickly just by ONE employee and this employee has a channel to express this idea (Enterprise 2.0 / collaboration platform) and the company takes a new approach to display the same information then the company immediately 1) save money, 2) save the earth.
The above example is also innovation, does it require business plans, stakeholder analysis and Porter’s 5 forces analysis. I believe not. But it has the same outcome, save money. Innovation can come in many kinds. As long as you can save money, increase revenue, improve morale and efficiency, then it meets its purpose. Lets take baby steps and make the world a better place and make your company a better place to be in. Let’s innovate everyday!
G'day, Sean here. I am a technology consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers and also a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and I am working on Web/Enterprise 2.0, information sharing, motivation and benefits.
This blog is dedicated to topics surrounding emerging technologies in the online space, IT strategies and business strategies. Hope you enjoy this blog.
Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer's and/or University of Melbourne's positions, strategies or opinions. I have not been compensated in any way for the content.
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Within social networks, there is a “code of conduct” that exist within the network. This could be in the form of a formal conduct or an unspoken culture, norm and beliefs that governs the actions of individuals. One simple example would be in an organisational context, it would be unacceptable to discriminate against gender or disability. Formal or unspoken culture is an important issue in social norms. Little things like emoticons and usage or certain words like “Nah, I can’t be bothered” in an Enterprise 2.0 environment could have different effects on different cultures. Therefore its never quite easy to implement a global Enterprise 2.0 initiative as part of culture stems from the culture of the race and nationality. However, corporate culture can be more easily controlled. 
