Collaborage: Enterprise 2.0 Implementation Overview

Many organizations are now deploying collaborative and social software as an enterprise solution. There is tremendous overlap between the different technologies as more and more vendors emerge with solutions (i.e. IBM, Microsoft, etc.). While these technologies have been out for several years now, we only have a few success stories to learn from. Organizations like Intel, CIA, and Dell have published their success stories but few others have emerged to share their lessons learned. Part of the reason can be found in the difficulty in deploying these technologies, not from a technical perspective but more from the culture, political, and social point of view. Additionally, organizations are finding out the 1% contribution rates of most Web 2.0 deployments is not enough to drive business value with a smaller enterprise. Businesses needed to have 20-30% engagement rates in order to show the return on investment required in this economic environment.

One idea that is emerging and getting traction is the idea of utilizing social software technologies in a controlled and secure environment. Some researchers classify this as a closed collaboration model versus an open one. Instead of having the application open to the entire organization, groups are finding value with a predefined customer base. One Fortune 100 company is building a social software environment that includes blogs, wikis, discussion groups and collaborative solutions where the content is secured just to graduates of the executive program. Another group has built a customer support wiki but limits the access to the customer service personnel of the department. The value-add of this type of environment is a specific focus on information that can be easily applied to the business situation without the noise filtering required by an open environment. These two are examples where the community is predefined by an involvement event and organizational role. Other community segments are forming around projects, organizational levels, and community programs.

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Thanks for sharing your observations on adoption of Enterprise 2.0 software. Do you have research that supports the 20-30% engagement figure? I don't disagree or dispute the number, but I'd like to see some solid evidence.

Deploying closed collaboration systems may be a good way to achieve the level of engagement needed to drive ROI in Enterprise 2.0 software, but it strikes me as a bad idea overall, especially when customer information is involved. There have been too many islands of information and knowledge created in the past and many organizations have spent large amounts of money and time trying to bridge them. IMHO, it's better to deploy an open collaboration system and create group/project/process-specific filters that allow users to focus the information and knowledge stream to suit distinctive purposes.

Adoption and engagement of the open system will happen if value is demonstrated to end users, or if they discover it for themselves. Closing the system places severe limitations on innovation, the lifeblood of any organization. Therefore, deploying a closed collaboration system to achieve short-term adoption and engagement goals is done at the expense of long-term relevance and viability of the organization. That's a tough tradeoff to make!

R. Todd,
If you are looking for examples on how to get awesome enterprise 2.0 adoption at a big company, check out this blog from Nate Nash of Bearing Point: http://www.e2oh.com/2008/10/29/come-and-get-it/
I work for Atlassian and Bearing Point is one of our customers. Instead of having a top down approach, Nate got a team of folks together who simply wanted a better way to work. They found Confluence as a great way to start because it is feature rich and inexpensive. Now thousands of folks cant work without it! To hear Nate talk about this journey, click to: http://blogs.atlassian.com/news/2008/11/going_global_wi.html

January 6, 2009

Secured (Closed) Social Software

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