Last week I used an online poll to ask my MBA students their opinions on the potential benefits of Enterprise 2.0 as well as the actual benefits most companies will be able to achieve. I also asked them to explain their answers to these questions. Below is a particularly insightful and encouraging response, lightly edited to maintain anonymity.
"I have been an eye witness of the power of enterprise 2.0 (although I didn’t know that is what it was called at the time) technology in promoting collaboration and connectedness across disparate individuals and groups within organizations.
While interning at Chemco this summer, we were briefed on the Company’s brand new intranet, which included blogging capabilities. The site was relatively new, and only a few people (mostly more senior leaders) had created blogs at that point. About a month into the internship, my supervisor (the head of coporate development and strategy) forwarded us a link to one of the comments to the CEO’s blog.
The comment had come from a low-level marketing manager located in a satellite office. In his remarks submitted to the CEO’s blog, the marketing manager openly questioned Chemco’s sacred cow – its ability to wring costs out of a process and to successfully operate an ultra-lean efficient organization. Specifically, he questioned the importance of one of the company’s favorite metrics (something they are extremely proud of); I’ll call it Metric A.
In his post (which was several pages, probably 800 plus words), he broke down basic financial information for Chemco and its 3 or 4 main competitors. Chemco was the clear leader in Metric A. He then overlayed this analysis with metrics such as market cap per employee and other metrics of value (I have forgotten what else he used), where Chemco was a distant laggard.
He went on to say that Chemco needed to essentially reverse its strategy and begin adding significant additional costs in the form of additional sales reps and R&D professionals, which are the key drivers of value in large chemical firms. His analysis was insightful, extremely thorough and bold.
I was amazed at how much buzz it created in the organization – my project team decided to use much of his material as a source reference for one of our deliverables. The office of the chief executive formed a small (informal) task for to investigate some of the marketing manager’s claims and test their potential benefit.
In short, without this new E2.0 vehicle, this manager’s voice would likely never be heard. From the look of his robust analysis, this was something he wanted to (and perhaps had tried to) share for a long time, and he now had the means of doing so. As the above example illustrates, I think that the potential benefits of E2.0 to an organization can be revolutionary – a step-function improvement in collaboration and efficient dissemination of information and resources.
However, in the near term, I think the actual benefits may fall short of the potential benefits due to company inertia and the difficult tension that managers face in actively promoting (even mandating) the technology while at the same time giving it enough room and freedom to be effective. This tension is perilously difficult to manage, and I think some managers’ inexperience will result in more than a few E2.0 rollout failures."
This sounds just about right to me. What do you think?
{ 22 comments… read them below or add one }
Looking at the other side of the coin this is a perfect example of “User 2.0″. Although I agree that traditionally managers have had a hard time mandating technologies I believe that this go around these technologies will be bottom up as opposed to top down. Dr. McAfee, have you noticed any trends that might speak to LOB uses around E2.0? My hunch is that these technologies will first be adopted in customer facing and highly collaborative environments such as sales and R&D.
I think this is a great story, but could equally have been a case study for how Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t work had the culture of the organization in question been different.
In a more formal or reserved organization, the commenter probably wouldn’t have posted his comment for fear of reprisal – assuming the CEO had approved his comment (which would have undoubtedly been moderated).
What this example demonstrates for me is that both the potential benefits and the actual benefits are completely dependent on the formality of an organization and the level of interaction it encourages.
Great story.
As Niall points out, Enterprise 2.0 is not just about the tools, it also about a culture change.
I think there is a little bit of a chicken and egg. Some of sharing may not be happening because there are not good tools to share. In your story, I doubt the CEO would have sent an email to the entire company with what he posted in the blog. I also doubt the manager would have replied back to an email. I think E2.0 makes it easier to communicate within the organization.
I agree that Enterprise 2.0 is about cultural change, and technology is one of the better leverages to facilitate and escalate the change. This story illustrates opening internal corporate communications, which could easily be achieved without Web 2.0 tools. It is opening lines and re-balancing asymmetry in relationship between Big enterprise and Small customers, where Enterprise 2.0 promise is most profound IMO. I have seen a few examples where semantic web technology is blurring the fences between enterprises, social networks and blogs to produce tangible and monetary values,
Great post.
I very much agree with Niall’s comments. Enterprise 2.0 is like all other tools – they are enablers. As long as the expectations around Enterprise 2.0 focus on that, its contribution to potential and actual benefits can be great. But I don’t know that E2.0 could ever be the cause of benefits.
It is a good example of the value of persistence of the employee’s behalf – assuming he had tried to make his point through other routes – and the willingness to listen and respond on the corporation’s part, as represented by the actions of the office of the CEO. Had the ability to comment not been there, there would have been nothing stopping the employee sending a DM to the CEO with the same insight. I imagine that the CEO put a little of himself into his post, and that openness was played back by the employee. The role of culture in this scenario is vital, as the final paragraph acknowledges that one sunny day does not make a summer, and a more widespread willingness to engage up, down and across the company needs to be nurtured.
This is a great example of how open communication can influence organizational change. Certainly the E2.0 tools helped facilitate that and lower barriers.
But remember – in the end, the information was leveraged because it was well reasoned, insightful, and thorough. One of the problems with many social networking tools is that they lower the bar so far that people also lower the quality of their work. So in the end, the greatest difficulty is sifting through all the off-the-cuff extraneous stuff to find these kind of rare gold nuggets.
Great story.
As Niall points out, Enterprise 2.0 is not just about the tools, it also about a culture change.
I have to agree with Niall as well in that this could have gone a completely different way in a different company with a different culture. In this instance, the post was embraced, responded to favorably and prompted action. It could have been simply tolerated with no action or worse, blocked and prompting the shutdown of the blog.
Does your company Embrace, Tolerate or Prohibit?
Agreed, I think that this 2.0 is more of a two way communication that is much easier to handle as opposed to email… etc.
It’s a good way to inform everyone were the company is heading in the future as well it opens the communication lines a bit easier as opposed to listening to a presentation or worse – not being heard at all.
In todays economy it’s everyone’s responsibility to ensure the company succeeds, anything less and everyone could be looking for new jobs.
This platform should be a welcome addition along with incentives to encourage interaction from the top of the company all the way down o the person who takes out the garbage.
It might just be that one effect of all the Facebook-ing and Myspace-ing that certain corporations look askance at, will be to make it easier to introduce corporate blogging. Why? Because corporate blogging, just like Internet blogging, is a more cerebral medium and can be better at eliciting sensible posts like the one quoted. It might be seen by CEO’s as a safer and more sensible option than a corporate Facebook.
I don’t think this scenario would have played out as positively without E2.0. A subtle but significant difference is that the “conversation” between the CEO and the low-level marketing manager located in a satellite office essentially took place in front of the entire organization. This would not have occurred in email because no underling would respond to every person in an organization (or even be allowed). With an open door policy the conversation would most likely be private, if even attempted (due the geographic separation). The public nature of the conversation changed everything. Such a medium has the potential to break down silos in large organizations, preserve knowledge better, encourage participation and perspective, and allow management to “factor in news from the periphery” (Only the Paranoid Survive, p. 110) among other things.
However, I think this story worked so well because there were only a few management blogs and probably only a few responses. The “new” factor probably caught more eyes than usual and there weren’t as many postings to sift through, resulting in less noise and more meat.
The actual benefits will depend on people at all levels of the organization doing more sharing than whatever they are doing now.
i agree that there has to be a culture change for enterprises to use web2.0. I read a recent article that today’s enterprises aren’t even realizing the full power of collaboration tools using technologies like facebook. The article goes on to say that facebook and many other social media sites are implementing collaborative features much faster then enterprises can even review some of the “older” functions like blogs, Wikis ….sorry…but i cannot remember where i read the article.
In my opinion, web 2.0 is about a paradigm shift. Ultimately, enterprises cannot ignore it totally. But rather think how to control this web2.0 beast!
We know that somehow the lack of control and security is what most companies are concerned abt. If these concerns can be addressed – maybe web3.0, 4.0 , etc…then its adoption can further be rocketed.
That’s a great story – and in so many organizations, that could’ve been a very powerful story of failure, with a different outcome.
Definitely agree that culture is important, as so many of the commenters have pointed out.
More explicitly though, I have data to back it up – in the AIIM Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 ( http://www.aiim.org/enterprise20 ), we asked a battery of questions of the 441 respondents to the survey, to explicitly look at issues of knowledge-sharing cultures, incentivization, where ideas come from and who executes upon them, etc.. Those answers were used to calculate whether a respondent passed a threshold that would make their organization “knowledge-inclined.”
Based on that cut, we compared the “knowledge-inclined” group versus the general population of the survey, and found that adoption was faster, success was more likely, and that overall, Enterprise 2.0 was far more reality than in the “typical” organization.
Mind you, it’s still not the case (and won’t be for many years) that Enterprise 2.0 is a resounding success and that there is no potential for failure or cause for a cautious approach, but with a suitable environment (including yes, support from the top AS WELL AS participation from the bottom), success is much more likely.
For those who haven’t already downloaded the AIIM Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 ( http://www.aiim.org/enterprise20 ) – it’s a free download, so have at it. Over 1,000 people have downloaded it thus far.
We’ll also be presenting a much abbreviated set of findings at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston in June, and for anyone who will be at the conference, I’d love to meet up in person and discuss this topic at length.
Cheers,
Dan
if companies are already using E 1.0, then it would not be hard for them to migrate to E 2.0. business managers might be lacking experience and efficiency, but they must realize that they can get the right info at the right time. they just need to realize that E 2.0 allows them access to several collective intelligence which saves time and increases productivity
I know – this story illustrates opening internal corporate communications, which could easily be achieved without Web 2 0 tools. Thanks all.
I know – this story illustrates opening internal corporate communications, which could easily be achieved without Web 2 0 tools. Thanks all. :long:
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Cheers. Carry on . nice post.
Good presentation style…
Regards,
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This is very true. I mean it should have been like this along time ago, but the tech tools that are available certainly facilitate it. I think the biggest problem is that companies don't want to change. Because if they break down that corporate barrier they are afraid of what might happen, or that nothing good will come of it and that it will be a waste of resources. I think some people are afraid that the upper coporate management might actually listen to the rest of the company and find out that there are real problems that need to be addressed. Some people would rather just stay ignorant and comfortable.
I think its a perfect example of the book “who moved my cheese”. 3M is an amazing company – the CEO actually has encouraged this type of breakdown for years and years. Its one reason they do so well. It kind of boils down to networking. Getting the front line networked in with the board members on equal terms.