Social Glass

In researching Enterprise 2.0 platforms I came across Clearspace by Jive Software.  I’ve just installed the evaluation version but I must say it’s pretty impressive so far.  It has blogs, wikis, document management, comprehensive user profiles, tag clouds and, most importantly, syndication.

I’ll keep you updated on how I go with our evaluation.

In a previous post I mentioned that corporations will adopt Enterprise 2.0 methodologies to improve their bottom line.   As is the case with any cutting edge, rarely been implemented, technology, it’s difficult to measure the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 as it hasn’t been done in many places.

Sure we can take tidbits of information, like Euan Semple’s anecdote where a BBC producer found all of the content he needed to do a story on being single through a internal thread on the topic.  Or Firestoker’s example where Jevon McDonald was able to help a fast food franchise grow from 600 to 1,800 stores without additional headcount due to information sharing.

But how do we measure the ROI companies should expect after investing in an Enterprise 2.0 solution?

How do we approach a Fortune 500 company and convince them that Enterprise 2.0 will improve their bottom line without quals like “another client of ours saved $50,000,000 over 2 years due to the efficiency gains achieved through their Enterprise 2.0 system”?

I suppose with industry players like IBM, Microsoft and Intel (with Lotus Connections, Sharepoint 2007and Suite Two, respectively) hitting the market with “Enterprise 2.0″ solution offerings the market is becoming legitimized.  And for their solutions to sell these companies are going to have to figure out how to relate the business value to large organizations for us.

The next couple of months will be interesting.

I work for a large, traditional consulting company and when I read Jevon McDonald’s post about his predictions for Enterprise 2.0 in 2007, particularly the part that says:

An all star team of consultants will form who will be one of the few groups able to lead companies through a process of Adoption, Integration and Normalization of social software toolkits and the re development of corporate org charts to address the new, flattened, world. The major consulting firms will come out with their own consulting “products” around Enterprise 2.0, but they will struggle with it as their best consultants will break off to join looser and more creative consulting groups, now that they have access to the necessary low-cost tools.

I thought he might be right, us Enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts may have to abandon our traditional consulting organizations for those that are more receptive to new, cutting edge ideas - ideas without proven revenue streams… yet.

But I started evangelizing Enterprise 2.0 internally, and to my surprise my co-workers got it and became very enthusiastic about the possibilities. When properly presented Enterprise 2.0 can be very compelling to traditional companies.

So now I’m looking into building an Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem for my group and find myself consulting consultants. And one of the main requirements I’m getting is interoperability with Microsoft Office. Many companies store their intellectual property in Powerpoint presentations and Microsoft Word documents. The Enterprise 2.0 solution must play nicely with Microsoft or else it will fail.

Conceptually the Enterprise 2.0 solution will be the “source of truth” - the repository of unstructured intellectual property. Microsoft Office programs will be a delivery mechanism for content, but not the content repository. Knowledge workers, when preparing a formal deliverable, will export the content they need into Word, Powerpoint etc. and hand it over to the client. To me this seems a good middle ground, a tactical measure to start weening people off MS Office.

I’ll keep you posted on how this all progresses.

In a previous post I discussed the process for rolling out SLATES, and that Search should be the first item implemented in a staggered deployment scenario. Search makes content (and people) discoverable and it allows enterprises to maximise the benefit they’ve made in their existing OSS/BSS applications (by making them searchable too).

In a recent post over at the FASTForward Blog,  David Weinberger interviewed John Battelle about the future of Search.  In another post on the same blog, James Robertson discusses two types of search and the various value propositions Search brings to the table.  Both of these guys are currently at the FASTForward conference in San Diego.

The point is Search is definitely a hot topic, and a lot of guest speakers at the conference seem to be discussing it.  While a SLATES (plus social networking solution) might be the utopia, Enterprise Search is here now and is adding value for companies quickly.  I’ve personally worked on a few Google Enterprise Search implementations and have seen clients be amazed at how simple and effective it is to use.  It’s also a good way to get in the door and start pitching the remaining “LATES”.

I had an amicable debate today with a co-worker about the role of Groups, or Moderators, in an Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem. I must admit I’d previously discarded any notion of content moderation as it tends to stand as a barrier and discourages contribution, but now I’m thinking twice.

My colleague worked in the content management space for a few years and he’d recently been across a project helping a client setup a new extensive knowledge management system.  So, he knows his stuff. Regarding Enterprise 2.0, his point was this (and I’m paraphrasing), “Large enterprises are used to implementing knowledge management software with controls - gateways that content must pass through before being approved for public use - and the notion of unbridled content being published with little or no review process or standard seems chaotic and irresponsible.”

To expand on this point, say, for example, a telecommunications knowledge worker creates a wiki page about the sequence in which carrier codes should be manually associated with broadband service when the automated system fails. A subsequent search with the phrase “carrier codes manual” on the Enterprise Search system yields the new wiki page as the 3rd result. Is the content to be trusted? Can the instructions on the wiki page be followed verbatim? Enterprise 2.0 advocates would say “maybe not, but if it’s wrong the content can be corrected by the next knowledge worker”. True. As the theory goes over time collective intelligence will evolve enterprise content towards correctness. But, for the time being, inputting an incorrect sequence of carrier codes delays the order by 2 weeks (retail/wholesale setup), and this costs the telco $5,000 in additional fees.

In this case the enterprise cannot afford to have this incorrect information cascade across the enterprise, at least not when there’s no distinction between approved content and tacit content, and this, according to my co-worker, is why we need Groups and Moderation.

The idea is that a subset of the organisation, so-called experts in a given and perhaps general area, are tasked with moderating content within a subject domain. These moderators are then held partially accountable for the correctness of the content within their domain. In this way knowledge workers have more reason to trust the information they’re discovering through Search.

To me this sounds reasonable, especially in the early days when companies are just starting to look at Enterprise 2.0. Moderation might settle the angst of those knowledge management traditionalists.