OK sports fans…As you may know (but might care less), Jay and I are headed to the 2008 Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston on Jun 9-12. It should be a real barnburner for the ones and zeros crowd and hopefully I won’t add Massachusetts to list of states I am embarrassed to show my face in.
Like any good Enterprise 2.0 disciple, I quickly joined the Facebook Group for the conference and was drawn to a discussion thread calling for attending bloggers to run a giveaway for a platinum pass. I jumped at the chance to execute such an effort and with a heart swelled with pride, I am pleased to announce the first-ever, possibly-repeatable, marginally-popular, disappointingly-simple, yet highly-rewarding E2oh Giveaway (hereafter referred to as Contestivus ‘08).
So here is the deal…If you would like a platinum pass to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference comment on this post with your answer to the following question:
“What is the best metric for determining and demonstrating the value and success of an Enterprise 2.0 deployment?”
Jay and I will judge the responses using a proprietary algorithm (involving bourbon, dice, and 3 bags of beef jerky) to determine the lucky recipient of the platinum pass. You have until 1700 Zulu time, a fortnight from the date of this post.
Post a comment below and join in the fun of Contestivus ‘08!
12 responses so far ↓
1 Sean Lew // May 13, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Hey Jay, Nate, interesting enough, i just wrote a couple of posts over the last few days regarding measuring value of Enterprise 2.0. check it out. http://www.bluethots.com/
I would LOVE to win the platinum pass but I am at the other corner of the world and I don’t think anyone will fly me there.
2 Nate Nash // May 14, 2008 at 9:00 pm
Thanks for the link Sean! You may get that pass anyway…
3 Paula Thornton // May 14, 2008 at 10:43 pm
You’d have to first start with a question that was worth answering. I’m not dissing your ability to ask a question, I’m suggesting that if you ask a flawed question, any answer you get will be irrelevant.
Enterprise 2.0 is not something that is deployed. Indeed Enterprise 2.0 is the antithesis of deployment. That’s why it is so misunderstood. We’ve been ’standing up’ technologies for years. 2.0 is different in that it doesn’t start with the technology and it doesn’t end with it (http://twurl.nl/ink7xv). 2.0 is a mindset — being successful means that everything changes to embrace its possibilities, if not success is isolated and temporary — like a rainbow after the rain, it will fade (http://twurl.nl/ak8vp3).
Enterprise 2.0 is the absence of the spoon (http://twurl.nl/un5g1c).
4 Jay Hariani // May 15, 2008 at 8:45 am
Paula, agreed wholeheartedly - Enterprise 2.0 is amorphous, a mindset. But, I’d argue that they are some elements of the process to achieve that mindset that can be quantified, and encouraged – allowing the change to occur, allowing human capital to self direct, aligning the organization to a more transparent, innovation-centric form, and giving users access (or at least not hampering their access) to technology. Technology is, albeit not the centerpiece, and enabler for Enterprise 2.0.
5 Nate Nash // May 15, 2008 at 9:17 am
Thanks for the comment Paula! I didn’t mean to confuse the word deployment with “technology implementation”. I agree Enterprise 2.0 is a mindset. However, for most it is not self-generating. Thus the catalyst for that paradigm shift that must be “deployed”. Someone (maybe us?) has to exert effort to make that happen. So…what is the best metric for demonstrating the value of that effort?
6 Paula Thornton // May 15, 2008 at 10:01 am
[BTW -- lest there be any doubt -- great stuff on this site...e.g. beat me to a Clearspace aha by a month or more]
All great thoughts: allowing human capital to self direct…and giving users access (or at least not hampering their access) to technology. Least of which is the ‘transparency’ reference, which is the most difficult for companies to embrace, because of the standing legacy of ’secrecy’ being one of the last perceived ‘controls’ of management: Your status is based on what you know and others do not.
That alone would suggest that being able to assess not necessarily a specific level of transparency but a ‘change’ (delta) in transparency would be a phenomenal measure. How to assess? That would be individual.
But there are some basics that many companies still surprisingly fail at.
1. How readily can you find other people based on their interests/experience, across the entire company? Do people have direct control over their own profiles (at least a portion of ‘non-fed’ data)?
2. Does the business model disincent working together across boundaries (e.g. compensation models)? [This is generally a cue for negatively influencing the adoption of such changes.]
3. How effective is the primary openbox search field at connecting individuals to what they need? [e.g. success measure of search results, http://twurl.nl/ca7li7
4. If any enabling tools have been put in place, how seamless are they to daily work (have they been ‘customized’ to the experience in any way)? Often, the tools are stand-alone, separate interface, ‘come and play’, and/or highly ‘controlled’ — all points of failure to launch.
7 Paula Thornton // May 15, 2008 at 2:14 pm
To reinforce the ‘customized’ reference (or maybe put it in a better light to also embrace Jay’s correct principle of ‘open’ and ‘evolve’) let me offer this: “These tools consequently require translation because they are unfinished products for the organisation. ” Source: http://info-architecture.blogspot.com/2008/05/your-organization-museum-or-zoo.html. Thanks 2 @frogpond.
8 Dean Thrasher // May 15, 2008 at 2:36 pm
A platinum pass! That’s an opportunity we Infovarkers can’t resist.
Ideally, the best metric would be an increase in knowledge worker productivity, but measuring the productivity of folks that think for a living is really hard. Instead, you’d have to look for the second-order effects of implementing E2.0 tools and practices.
The best indirect measure we can think of is long-term user adoption. If employees are using an E2.0 solution in their daily work, it’s either because they enjoy it or it makes their job easier.
9 Jay Hariani // May 16, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Paula, thanks for the kudos; I’m just catching up on this comment thread. I think “transparency” is a good metric to measure an organization’s “E2.0 delta”, to borrow your phrase. It would need tailoring on a firm by firm basis, but I think the four items you lay out are good generalized yardsticks for organizational transparency that could drive such a metric. I’d summarize them as:
1. Mobility of human capital (end user control of profiles is, as you suggest, a big part of this)
2. Transparency Incentives. Award contribution and openness. Attribution is key to this.
3. Discovery - Not just openbox search. Putting context around organizational knowledge is certainly a part of this. We feel like wikis have a big role to play in contextualizing enterprise knowledge assets.
4. Supporting Technology - Is it meldable? Can end users mash it up and customize (think Netvibes, iGoogle) to suit their tests? Is it compelling to users? Otherwise, it will fail to launch.
Most of all, as consultants “E2.0 delta” provides us with a nice buzz phrase :)!
10 Ian Heiman // May 22, 2008 at 10:44 pm
Ultimately, which metric is best depends upon what matters the audience to whom value must be demonstrated (once again, whining about the imprecision of the contest question). If you work at a company’s tech support help desk and the daily call volume goes down significantly after someone puts up a great Tech Support Wiki, then you are convinced of the value of that E2.0 tool. But if you’re a manager responsible for driving the accumulation of your staff’s billable hours and you notice your people spending more of their time playing with this new, cool wiki tool and less time billing the client for work done/value delivered, then I doubt that the reduced help desk call volume metric shows you much value.
Sean Lew’s comprehensive posts on the value components of E2.0 are excellent, but there don’t appear to be many hard metrics suggested. From the comments to this post, I’ve inferred the following suggestions for the best metric for demonstrating the value of promulgating an Enterprise 2.0 mindset:
1. The degree of ‘change’ (delta) observable in an organization’s overall level of transparency
Question: What is the unit of measure for this squishy, qualitative metric that must derived from calculating the widely varied (and variously interpreted) behaviors in an organization that may or may not count as “improved transparency”?
Such a “measure”, if you can call it that, could be considered anecdotal at best. I gather that the spirit of E2.0 is one of “letting every flower bloom”, but the target audience for this contest question - those who need a metric to be convinced that E2.0 tools and practices deliver demonstrable value - they are unlikely to be persuaded by mere anecdotes to continue investing in the E2.0 initiatives as a winning strategy.
2. Knowledge worker productivity (direct measure)
Mr. Thrasher correctly acknowledges the difficulty in quantifying productivity for knowledge workers, but I think he is on the right track and shouldn’t throw in the towel on this suggestion too quickly. (See my suggestion for a long-term metric below)
3. Long-term user adoption (indirect measure)
The implication in measuring this secondary effect, as stated by Mr. Thrasher (BTW, such a cool name that it pretty much makes blogging mandatory for him), is that “If employees are using an E2.0 solution in their daily work, it’s either because they enjoy it or it makes their job easier.”
Question: How does one characterize or measure this? I’m going to guess that it might be done by calculating a rolling average of the number of registered users at the end of each month who continue to have more than one usage session/interaction per month… I don’t know. But you can see from my suggestion where a lot of potential problems could creep in to make the metric seriously skewed and therefore meaningless.
My suggestions/entries? … I suspect that many reading this will (just as I am inclined) see my attempts to actually trying to define discrete, calculable metrics for determining the value of E2.0 initiatives as terribly naive and clumsy, but here they are anyway:
a. Short term metric: Number of page views per registered user per week using a defined set of E2.0 tools
- Assumption: If people find E2.0 tools and practices valuable, average week to week tool usage metrics will suggest this fact. Whether this sign of appreciation will yield value for a company’s staff and shareholders can only be measured over longer periods of time.
b. Long term metric: Track the correlation between the change in a company’s EBITDA and the total number of page views by all registered users from quarter to quarter and year to year
- Assumption: If a strong correlation is observed (i.e., when usage is high, earnings are high), then over time, value is demonstrated to the shareholders.
11 Nate Nash // Jun 2, 2008 at 5:28 pm
OK sports fans…announcement of the winner coming soon!
12 Enterprise 2.0 blog » Blog Archive » It Pays to Read Blogs // Jun 30, 2008 at 12:06 pm
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