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Business 2.0
As organisations become more transparent, more open, more prepared to share we are seeing more and more intellectual capital being given away "free". There is the over-quoted example of Goldmine giving away its geological data, Sun Microsystems and IBM giving away software, and pharmaceutical companies collaborating openly on the human genome project.
These organisations haven't suddenly found a corporate conscience, they are still aggressive, quarterly driven, often American companies with shareholders to answer to. This is part of a deliberate strategy to compete in the modern world. The idea is that if you give away something that your competitors see as core business, you destabilise the market, and make what you charge for more valuable.
This trend, should it continue, is going to effect a profound change in the nature of the workplace and the type of people companies will look to employ.
Organisations will differentiate and compete on adding intellectual capital above and beyond what is publicly available, rather than try to milk a trade secret or cash-cow such as the Coca-Cola recipe. This will require more and more "knowledge workers" - people who don't follow an administrative business process to do their jobs but rely on their experiences, professionalism and networks to add value to their organisations - or, as recently described by Thomas A Stewart, "someone who gets to decide what he does each morning.." (thanks to Jessica Twentyman for finding me the source).
It won't be enough to hire knowledge workers to survive and thrive in this recession. Organisations will have to change their business practices to take advantage of their abilities, and provide them with the tools to be effective. Word, Outlook and even Sharepoint won't cut it. They will need custom built social platforms, or products such as Confluence, Jive, Socialtext and Lotus Connections.
This is not a technology driven change. These tools are a response to a new way of organising and operating companies, breaking free from 1950s m
How I Address the Question of Enterprise 2.0 ROI
How I Address the Question of Enterprise 2.0 ROI
Enterprise 2.0 and the Trough of Disillusionment
Gartner notes the following: “Following the phenomenal success of consumer-oriented social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, companies are examining the role that these sites, or their enterprise-grade equivalents, will play in future collaboration environments.”
Last August, Gartner had put social computing platforms right at the cusp of falling into the Trough of Disillusionment. Eight months later, we’re seeing the first signs that Enterprise 2.0 may be falling into that trough.
One thing I find odd is that collaboration is touted as a benefit of social software. Collaboration is an activity. There is no ROI in collaboration itself. What enhanced collaboration produces is the benefit.
And that’s where it’s been tough in the enterprise 2.0 world. A lot of vendors offer tools with wide open use cases. They can be used for any purpose inside an organization, with an eye toward better collaboration. It makes sense, and yet it is challenging to identify specific ROI-grounded use cases.
What pain point inside companies does an enterprise app, social or otherwise, address? An answer of “any pain point” is unfortunately too broad, and makes it tough for executives to visualize exactly how the software helps. As Dion Hinchcliffe writes in Determining the ROI of Enterprise 2.0:
However, a key aspect of the ROI issue is that the strategic capabilities represented by Enterprise 2.0 are primarily emergent in nature, instead of carefully aimed at and unleashed at specific problems.
Indeed, a focus on what works becomes more important than ever.
For the Enterprise 2.0 industry, the Trough means this: focus on solving specific problems with social software. If you can talk pain points of enterprises, you will win.
The rush of jubilation followed by the disappointment that a technology cannot, in fact, change all that needs improvement. But that doesn’t mean the technology doesn’t have value. It just means the hard work of addressing more specific tangible problems becomes the focus.
What gives me comfo
An Online Community Packing An ROI Punch
Goozex says its online community is now responsible for more than a one-third (33%) if its recurring transactions, something that lowers the incremental cost of additonal sales. The other piece that stuck out was how Goozex reduced its customer service workload. The company tells us nearly half of its service issues are resolved through its forums.
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