Social Glass

Chuck Hollis, Vice President of Technology Alliances at EMC, recently chronicled their adoption of Clearspace, Jive’s social productivity solution. They called the implementation EMC One. Sam Lawrence, CMO of Jive, has summarized their effort here. It’s worth a read as it provides some enlightening and encouraging insight into how Enterprise 2.0 can work for a large company. Here are some notable observations:

1. EMC has over 35,000 employees and, among other things, makes two knowledge management systems, Documentum and eRoom, and yet they chose to use neither for their social productivity needs.
2. Regarding rollout strategy, Chuck says they “…announced availability virally — we all pushed email announcements to people we knew who were interested in what we were doing. We wanted people to “find” us, and not have some sort of official corporate announcement”. The initial rollout would be to supporters of the initiative who would be patient while they ironed out the kinks. But what happened was that EMC employees who nobody knew started using the system.
3. The result of unanticipated use, or “the network effect”, was confusion as to how to distribute the costs of the investment across the organization. If Divison A purchased Clearspace but users from Division B started using it extensively, shouldn’t part of the cost come from Division B’s budget?
4. HR had to get involved implementing a “social engineering” program to get workers used to this new way of collaborating.
5. Chuck says “It’s now “cool” to be an active participant on EMC ONE”.

As a result of implementing Enterprise 2.0, Chuck says “We now have so many business value stories that we don’t really need any more to make our case, even to the most stubborn ROI cynic”. EMC ONE has

• Connected employees from remote outposts (like China)
• Become a repository for research and a platform for “ideation”.
• The salesforce is much better informed as it can leverage conversations from the platform

Again, check out Sam’s summary here to get more insight and detail.

Update: It seems like Cogenz does a lot of what is discussed below (see the comment from Niall Cook).

We spend a lot of time talking about wikis, blogs, etc. when it comes to Enterprise 2.0. The problem I have is nobody ever seems to expand on “etc.”. I thought I might take a stab on expanding something besides wikis and blogs that is important for internal collaboration, social bookmarking.

What if Digg came out with Enterprise Digg? This would accomplish two goals.

The first is allowing workers inside the firewall to share content they find interesting with others through the “social bookmarking” effect obtained with Digg. Users would be able to bookmark content from the internet and intranet in an effort to harvest and share relevant information with others. This also makes it easy for knowledge workers with similar interests to find each other (if worker A and B both save the same URL it’s safe to conclude they’re both interested in the content).
The second goal is the creation of a platform through which workers can gauge the effectiveness of information. The Digg voting mechanism would allow knowledge workers to vote on shared links they find useful within an enterprise context with the most useful documents rising to the top of the index. In this way the most important enterprise knowledge assets are the easiest to locate.

I see significant value in Enterprise 2.0 ecosystems having a Digg-like platform.

Last year I started work on a project and thought it’d be a great opportunity to run through the requirements process using a wiki. My cohorts and I quickly procured a server, downloaded MediaWiki and installed the FCKEditor plugin (which probably does more harm than good, but that’s a different matter). We then started recording minutes, requirements and action items in the wiki and used it to store shared documents as well. Internally the team, which was somewhat technical and exposed to this stuff, thought it was great.

We then exposed a portion of the wiki to the client who was largely unaccustomed to the idea of writable web applications. Almost unanimously they asked “what does wiki mean?” to which I replied “well, it comes from a Hawaiian word meaning ‘fast’…”

But once they saw us use it, once they saw how quickly content could be edited and how each page version was neatly cataloged they became very impressed with the software. I received several compliments from them on how helpful the software was and we’ve since adopted the wiki as a requirements/collaboration standard for the project.

In retrospect it’s neat to look back and see the reaction of first timers when the light-bulb turns on. Those of use who are used to blogging or evangelizing about Enterprise 2.0 often loose sight that most out there are “un-enlightened” and oblivious to the meaning of terms like blog, wiki, tag, etc. It’s important to spend time explaining the fundamentals for this stuff to gain mass adoption.

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.

Update: I’ve had to change the name of this post to use “and” as it seems RSS is not tolerant of special characters.
I’ve intertwined discussion around the value proposition of Enterprise 2.0 in several posts (like here and here), and thought it fitting to be clearer and more direct about areas in which Enterprise 2.0 adds value to the enterprise. I read a lot of blogs on the topic, and while we spend a lot of time covering its theoretical aspects it’s important not to forget that “Enterprise 2.0″ is intended for enterprises, and most enterprises exist to make money. In my view, then, Enterprise 2.0 will take off once:

1. A few brave and cutting edge enterprises incorporate social software into their intranet (at reduced consulting rates since they’re the first) and we begin to establish emperical “quals” (i.e. a list of companies that have done this already).
2. These early adopters show definitive gains in profitability (+$) that can be linked to their Enterprise 2.0 implementation.

At this point I think we’re waiting for the early adopters to take shape, so over the next few months I’ll be covering reasons why they should consider Enterprise 2.0.

Mergers and Acquisitions

I recently had dinner with a couple of friends of mine who are lawyers in the Mergers and Acquisitions space here in Australia. We discussed reasons why one company would seek to buy another, or why a company would wish to be sold. A lot of the reasons had to do with assets and liabilities, but some of them had to do with intellectual property.

A successful Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem augments the intellectual property of an organisation by harnessing the tacit knowledge of its workforce through a writable intranet. The augmentation is enhanced when an effective Discovery mechanism is put in place making intellectual property easy to find.

Based on this, a company seeking to be purchased would significantly benefit from having implemented an Enterprise 2.0 solution. It’s intellectual property would be tangible, content-rich and verifiable. And this means less risk for a potential buyer when the acquisition of intellectual property is a primary driver.