Product Frameworks: Strategy and Execution

Talking with McAfee

3/8/2010

Andrew McAfee’s (website and blog) is one of the main advocates in the Enterprise 2.0 movement. He actually coined the term and recently he released a book entitled “Enterprise 2.0” which I reviewed here. Enterprise 2.0 is the use of next generation collaboration tools in the enterprise or as he describes it the “use of emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) by organizations in pursuits of their goals”

McAfee believes in the potential impact of Enterprise 2.0: “ESSPs will have about as big an impact on the informal processes of the organization as large-scale commercial enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, Supply Chain, etc.) have had on the formal processes.”

I met him recently and I heard a few things:

-          During the last 5 years collaboration technology tools have gone from bad to good. (However still email is the dominant collaboration tool; and email is “where knowledge goes to die.”) These new tools allow for creativity and less structured interactions.

-          However organizations still don’t have the recipe to rollout these capabilities.

-          Two recipes for failure:
   o   overstructuring offerings from the beginning (need to keep open)
   o   thinking “if they build it they will come”

-          A few ideas for success
     o   need to make sure individuals know why it is good for them (incentives may be good or they may help kill an initiative)
     o   make it very easy to use (which is hard to do)
     o   be patient and adjust user expectations downward
     o   use success stories (ROI is difficult to quantify)

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Hansen: Should a Collaboration KPI be Participation Volume? Is a KPI for your Overall Business Success the Number of Meetings Held?

3/8/2010

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Morten Hansen is a UC Berkeley School of Information professor and a part-time professor at INSEAD, France. He recently wrote my favorite book on “Collaboration” which I review here. Published by Harvard Business Press and written by an INSEAD/Berkeley professor, it is naturally very business focused which is probably why I found its insights so valuable.

Recently I had a chance to meet with him and I heard a few things:

-Diagnose your collaboration goals and problems first; tools aren’t necessarily required to get it right

-Create a business case and then back in to your tool strategy

-Consider changing incentives and creating communities of practice

-KPIs for collaboration need to consider benefits and costs; you can’t just measure volume of activity. It would be like measuring the number of meetings as a KPI for business success.

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Andrew McAfee and "Enterprise 2.0"

3/7/2010

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Andrew McAfee coined the term “Enterprise 2.0” and recently wrote a book with the same title. McAfee defines Enterprise 2.0 as the use of emergent social software platforms by organizations in pursuits of their goals.

He begins by saying that many of the problems of the early and largely unpopular computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) tools (such as groupware and knowledge management applications) were resolved with Web 2.0 technologies that:

     -are free and easy platforms for communication and interaction (texting, email, IM, etc.)

     -lack of imposed structure on workflow, decision rights, interdependencies, and information.

     -have mechanisms to let structure emerge (search, tagging, etc.)

These led to new Emergent Social Software Platforms (ESSPs) such as YouTube and Facebook. ESSPs share technical features such as search, links, authoring, tagging, extensions, and signals (SLATES).

Knowledge workers can take advantage of ESSPs to help them interact with different type of colleagues. For example wikis can help strongly tied colleagues work together more effectively, social networking software can help connect weakly tied colleagues, blogs can help connect colleagues with potential ties (in part by enabling discovery), and prediction markets creates interaction between colleagues who may never form a tie.

The benefits of Enterprise 2.0 come from using features of ESPPs such as group editing, authoring (people publicizing what they know), broadcast search (people publicizing what they don’t know), network formation and maintenance, collective intelligence, and self organization (perhaps the broadest benefit).

The adoption of these new tools can raise concerns around inappropriate behavior and content, the appearance of embarrassing information, and non-compliance with laws, regulations, and policies. However McAfee contends that the benefits outweigh the risks and that most of these risks are actually decreased by Enterprise 2.0.

It may however be a long haul to adopt these new technologies in part due to our tendency to stay with the status quo even if a better solution exists. Therefore McAfee lays out six organizational strategies for Enterprise 2.0 success which includes:

     -determine desired results, then deploy appropriate ESSPs

     -prepare for the long haul

     -communicate, educate, and evangelize

     -move ESSPs into the flow (of every day work)

     -measure progress, not ROI

     -show that Enterprise 2.0 is valued

Towards the end of the book McAfee says he is most interested in Enterprise 2.0 because it can help organizations move from a Model 1 to a Model 2 style of behavior; from unilateral control of both the goals and the tasks used to accomplished goals to an environment where decision making is based on valid information and where “winning” is replaced with free and informed choices.

“Enterprise 2.0” is a good baseline book on a topic that by its nature needs to be further explored by web 2.0 powered discussions, such as those found on McAfee’s website and blog.

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Talking with McAfee

Hansen: Should a Collaboration KPI be Participation Volume? Is a KPI for your Overall Business Success the Number of Meetings Held?

Andrew McAfee and "Enterprise 2.0"

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