Posts Tagged ‘Enterprise 2.0’
Two Strategic Visions for Enterprise 2.0
Enterprise 2.0 advocates seem to be splitting into two camps. Their goal is the same: finding ways to apply collaborative tools to improve the way businesses operate. But they differ on what strategy to use. Dennis Howlett cautions Enterprise 2.0 advocates to tread carefully.
The root of the debate is whether you feel it’s better to focus on organizational effectiveness or individual productivity. Oscar Berg highlights some influential articles from both sides and notes that there seems to be a bias toward personal efficiency in most of the arguments made to support Enterprise 2.0
I think he is right that there is a bias for personal efficiency. I think it’s a healthy one, though others disagree.
The two strategies
Every organization is composed of multiple functions. These are normally grouped into logical departments such as accounting, marketing, product development, and so forth. The proponents of organizational effectiveness ask the question, is there a better way to arrange these parts? Can we reduce the friction between these components?
Now, let's see... should marketing report to sales or...?
If you fall in this camp, you want to do things like improve interdepartmental communications, establish clear lines of authority and areas of responsibility, break apart organizational silos, ensure smooth hand-offs, and improve business processes.
Those that focus on knowledge worker productivity, on the other hand, focus on whether the parts themselves can be improved.
Adopting bright ideas to save time and effort.
If you fall in this camp, you’re concerned about knowledge sharing, expertise location, cultivating talent and skills, and making sure that individuals have the right information for making decisions and the right tools to take action.
Power to the people
Both approaches are valuable and necessary. Which one you prefer has much to do with where you sit within the organization, as this article on productivity points out. But there are good reasons why we should favor the personal productivity over organization effectiveness.
- Web 2.0 technologies follow a user-centered approach. Applying Web 2.0 sensibility to organizational problems will require lots of customization and re-engineering. Applying those designs to knowledge workers is a much better fit.
- Many employees are already familiar with the conventions of these social tools. They use them at home. You lower training costs by following those models as closely as possible.
- User adoption has been a major stumbling block in most Enterprise 1.0 technology deployments. It makes sense to highlight the benefits to employees.
- While there have been at least two or three different waves of enterprise products targeted at organizational effectiveness (ERP, portals/KM, BPM, CRM, etc.) the suite of office tools used by knowledge workers have changed very little since the early 90s. There’s simply more opportunity for improvement there.
- Small changes applied across all knowledge workers can lead to dramatic gains. Just like in finance, productivity improvements yield compounding interest. If you can save a few extra minutes per day or per week, over time it can add up to something revolutionary.
For these reasons and others, I believe that companies pursuing Enterprise 2.0 should start — and think — small. What can we do to simplify, streamline or eliminate the tasks that prevent our knowledge workers from producing their best work? How can we provide support to small, agile, ad-hoc teams?
For me, the defining characteristic of Enterprise 2.0 is that it is about the individual, not the organization. There would be no need for an Enterprise 2.0 approach if Enterprise 1.0 approaches had worked.
Instead of Enterprise 2.0, perhaps it should be Employee 2.0?
You get what (someone else) paid for
Dean’s post about the impending failure of Enterprise 2.0 got me thinking a lot about the strange nature of selling enterprise software, and of selling things in general.
Okay, so imagine you walk down to the local store and buy a lollipop, which you then proceed to happily lick all the way home. In this instance, you’re the purchaser and the consumer. You have a direct relationship with the company that makes the candy. You buy it, so you are funding their existence, and you eat it, so you are also the direct judge of the effectiveness or quality of their product.
This direct relationship is exactly what happens when people buy products for themselves. Per sale, the company has one customer, and that leads to the product being developed and grown with a linear relationship — feedback from customers is meaningful, and important. It’s this model which led to “The customer is always right” — after all, you’re not going to argue with your customers. If your latest Snozzberry flavored candy isn’t selling well, it’s safe to assume it’s because consumers are not fond of it. Hits and misses become immediately apparent. An increase in purchases can be attributed directly to an increase in satisfaction.
Me and My Shadow - Combined Purchaser and Customer
Sadly, the world isn’t often this simple. There are many situations when the consumer and the purchaser are different people. Let’s consider the scenario where your twelve-year-old daughter is trying to convince you that she really needs those designer sneakers.
In this instance, the consumer and the purchaser are different. You won’t be wearing the sneakers, so your criteria for purchase is likely to be much different from your daughter’s. As the purchaser, you’ll be looking at price, and value for money. You might be looking for things like good quality stitching, materials or the country of origin. Your daughter, on the other hand, doesn’t care about any of those things. She only cares that they are awesome and that her friends will be soooo jealous.
The sneaker company has a dilemma – to optimize the product for purchase by parents, or for its appeal to teenagers? An increase in sales may not actually indicate satisfied customers (as any kid who was forced to wear sensible school shoes can attest). Per sale, the sneaker company has two customers to keep happy here. And the criteria for success are different.
Split Personality - What if the purchaser isn't the consumer?
If push comes to shove, and the shoe company has to decide between a feature that delights a teenager or a requirement that satisfies her parents, we know which ones will appear in the final product. He who pays the piper calls the tune.
The other shoe drops
If the central tenet of Web 2.0 is, in Tim O’Reilly’s words, that “users add value,” a Web 2.0 company wants as many users as they can possibly attract. To build the largest audience for their Web 2.0 tools, these hot new companies developed a razor-sharp focus on the user experience. Every other imperative — including profitability — was secondary.
The wave of innovation that followed was all about design. Simple, attractive, usable and useful sites sprang up everywhere. Emergent, free-form sites that generated communities and empowered individual users.
All of this was possible because the customer was the user. Individuals could vote with their feet — or their wallet — for the solutions that worked for them.
When Web 2.0 software gets translated to the corporate environment, where the customer is not the user, you have to be extremely careful that the features that get cut aren’t the ones that employees were clamoring for in the first place. Did you sacrifice an intuitive user interface because it didn’t match the look and feel of your company’s intranet? Did you substitute free-flowing, spontaneous conversation for a lengthy edit-and-approve cycle? Whoops. You just forced your 2.0 employees back into a 1.0 solution.
It’s no wonder that most users in the enterprise are wearing uncomfortable, tight-fitting sensible shoes.
Why Enterprise 2.0 Will Fail
Scott Gavin recently listed the Top 3 Business Benefits of Enterprise 2.0 inside the company firewall.
- Personal Information/Knowledge Management
- Expertise Identification
- Collective Intelligence
I was glad to see someone discuss the internal benefits, because the E2.0 conversation lately has focused on the external benefits — how E2.0 can help marketing and sales.
The case for organizations reaching out to their audiences via social media is easy to make. If you want to improve your outreach efforts, you either have to go where the people are or create an inviting place for people to gather.
The case for E2.0 inside the firewall is considerably more difficult. As Tom Davenport points out, is essentially the case for what used to be called Knowledge Management, or KM. The term KM fell out of favor with consultants and analysts because it didn’t deliver enough of these benefits. There are a lot of folks hoping that flexible, easy-to-use “2.0″ applications might succeed where centrally managed KM failed.
But it likely won’t, because most E2.0 vendors are doing it wrong.
If the #1 benefit is personal knowledge management, why are all the big players selling to the CEO, CIO, and IT departments? Where are the tools targeting individual knowledge workers?
Missing in action
I can think of two reasons why we haven’t seen a flowering of office productivity applications.
1. The Free Brigade — Companies don’t think they can make money from ordinary people anymore. Even if software companies came up with killer applications that helped people manage their daily tasks, email and files, they don’t think they would be able to get people to pay for it. Perhaps their software will get pirated. Maybe some college students will throw together a free and/or open source version that will destroy their market. Or — the most common reason I’ve heard — is simply that employees don’t expect to pay for software they use at work.
2. The Microsoft Effect — Microsoft owns the corporate desktop computing environment. Period. Software vendors fear to challenge the hegemony of the Office Suite, afraid that they will suffer the fate of Word Perfect or Netscape or any number of other products and vendors that have tried, and failed, to break Microsoft’s lock on desktop computing. Despite the fact that Microsoft Office applications have been around for more than 15 years (an eon in software industry) and despite the fact that they have known deficiencies for managing information that the Content Management and Knowledge Management industries have exploited for years, there has been little or no direct competition in this space.
The Enterprise 2.0 distortion field
These two factors cause all Enterprise 2.0 vendors to compromise in one of two ways.
- While promising personal benefits to knowledge workers, they actually take their marching orders from senior management, who purchase the software.
- While promising to help individuals with their daily flow of information, they live in fear of deploying software to workstations and laptops, where all information is received and all the work is actually performed.
This means that most Enterprise 2.0 Software vendors violate at least two of Andrew McAfee’s criteria for an Enterprise 2.0 tool: Freeform, frictionless, and emergent.
Because many of these tools have a management bias, and will subordinate individual initiative to central control, they sacrifice being freeform and emergent. Because many of these tools will be based in the cloud to avoid the tyranny of the Microsoft desktop and corporate IT, they sacrifice the frictionless flow of information inside the firewall.
Ironically, the companies that actually deliver best on the E2.0 promise are ones that would never consider themselves enterprise software.
The Second Biggest Mistake of Enterprise 2.0
I imagine most folks begin their journey toward Enterprise 2.0 by saying, “I wish we had some of these Web 2.0 tools at my company.”
Actually, I imagine that people are more specific than that. Substitute Wikipedia, Facebook or Twitter for “Web 2.0 tools” and you’d have the starting point for most organizations.
What happens next can determine the success or failure of your Enterprise 2.0 effort.
Watch your step
The Tao Te Ching reminds us that “a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step.” Taking that first step is important.
I’ve read lots of advice regarding that first step. Probably the most common advice is to know why you you need the tool. It’s not enough to want to be “more 2.0.” What objectives do you want to achieve with the new technology?
Many Enterprise 2.0 bloggers are quick to point out that you must be specific. The answer can’t be “to work better together” or to “share information more effectively”. If you can tie the technology to the improvement of a specific work process or output, you’ve got a much better chance of the enterprise 2.0 implementation succeeding.
But I won’t spend any time on that, because frankly, the “Why are we doing this?” question comes up all the time during an implantation. If you have to justify resources for your enterprise 2.0 effort, you’ll get asked this question repeatedly. And if you don’t have a specific answer, the E2.0 effort won’t get underway, period.
Look before you leap
The second biggest mistake companies make is picking a specific tool or technology too early.
Software evaluation practices at many organizations are backwards. You evaluate the features and functions of one tool versus another, and then you ask the question, “how do I buy?”
It’s tempting to consider the tool or technology in the abstract, separate from issues of support, maintenance and training. Don’t fall into this trap! Most software works. But whether it will work for you or your team is about much more than its features and benefits.
How you buy software is the second biggest challenge to implementing Enterprise 2.0.
I think it might be better to consider these question in reverse: “What sort of vendor relationships do I want? What sort of product does that imply?”
For example, do you want your own IT shop to implement the product, or do you want to bring in outside consultants? Is a pay-as-you-go cloud solution feasible, or do you prefer to own the solution outright?
These provider arrangements have almost nothing to do with the technology itself. Frequently, they’re left out of the evaluation process. In the government sector, buying a software product is often a different line item than buying consulting services. Sometimes they fall under different contracts altogether. Trying to force a one-stop-shop vendor into this procurement model can be a disaster in the making.
Before picking a tool, you should know what your team is able to support. Finding a tool or a vendor that matches your procurement process can be more important than the tool itself.
Think broadly about a focused implementation
The good news is that companies today have lots of choices when it comes to implementing Enterprise 2.0 solutions. You can construct a deal that works for all of the groups involved. But that often means that you can’t be wedded to a particular tool or technology at the start. You have to know what sort of financial and working arrangements will suit your organization first.
