Imagine that an organization has deployed a full suite of emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) for its members —  blogs, wikis, discussion / Q&A forums, upload facilities for photos and videos and etc., Digg-like utilities to flag and vote on digital content, prediction markets, some kind of enterprise Twitter, and whatever else a ‘full suite’ consists of, now or in the future. And imagine further that the leaders of the organization are sincerely interested in pursuing Enterprise 2.0 and getting their people to actually use the new tools. What would they then do? What would be their smart course(s) of action?

Virtually everyone agrees that coaching, training, explaining, and leading by example would be appropriate and beneficial activities. But what about measuring? It’s a technical no-brainer to measure how much each individual has contributed and to generate some kind of absolute or relative metric. Would doing so be helpful or harmful? Would it lead to negative outcomes and perverse behaviors, or would measuring E2.0 contributions stimulate and encourage the right kinds of actions? 

These are fundamental questions, and they touch both on uncharted territory (ESSPs are new, after all) and on longstanding debates about motivations, incentives, and the interplay between them. It’ll likely take a few posts to cover all this territory, so consider this the first in a series of posts about the utility and desirability of an "E2.0 Rating" for knowledge workers.

One immediate objection is that E2.0 is simply too broad a phenomenon to be reduced to any single metric. Furthermore, a single metric that’s too simplistic, like ‘number of blog posts per month,’ leads to bad and easily predictable results: people blog at the expense of using any of the other tools, and have a strong temptation to put up lots of short (even trivial) posts in order to up their scores. 

There are a couple responses to this objection. One is that a score can be composed of many elements, even if it’s just a single number. In American football, passer ratings are an example of such a metric. The NFL’s passer rating takes into account most of the things a quarterback is supposed to do when he throws — complete passes, throw for a lot of yards and a lot of touchdowns, and not get intercepted —  and combines them into a number that varies between 0 and 158.3 (?). It seems to work pretty well at capturing the player’s contributions, and is widely referenced.

But an E2.0 score wouldn’t have to be distilled all the way down to a single number. Instead, it could be multidimensional. For example, an off-the-top-of-my-head list of productive activities using ESSPs includes authoring (on a blog, for example), editing (wikis), interacting with others (on discussion boards and Q&A forums), tagging online content, and uploading such content or pointing to it (using something like Digg). All of these activities can be done well or poorly, and there are lots of tools like votes and ratings that colleagues can use to give positive feedback that someone is doing them well. 

So one approach would be to graph where everyone stands within the organization along six dimensions: authoring, editing, interacting, tagging, uploading, and positive feedback. A simple radar graph would instantly show were an individual is on each, based on their contributions to various ESSPs and relative to everyone else in the organization (in the graph below, ‘100′ means that they’re at the 100% percentile, in other words the top contributor).

In the hypothetical graph below the individual is a relatively heavy uploader and interacter, does some authoring and tagging, and not much editing. This person has also received a lot of positive feedback — enough to put her in the 75% percentile:

Is this good or bad participation in ESSPs over all?  That’s for the organization to decide, but this kind of contribution looks pretty good to me.

The benefits of measuring this way are that it doesn’t weight some kinds of contribution more heavily than others and that it provides for easy comparisons across people. 

But is this latter really a benefit? Should participants in E2.0 be compared in this way? Or would it be counterproductive, or in violation of the whole spirit of contribution to organizational ESSPs? As I said, later posts will consider these questions; I just wanted to get the ball rolling with this post. 

Leave a comment, please, and tell us what you think of the whole idea of quantitative measurement and E2.0 ratings. What, if anything, would you do with them if they were available?  Would you include them in formal objectives and/or performance reviews? Do you think they’d lead to perverse incentives, or proper ones? Hold forth, please, and let us know what you think and what’s on your mind when it comes to this topic. I’ll try to shape later posts around these comments. 

I’ve spent the past couple days at the Talk the Future conference in Krems, Austria. I was not suprised that it was well organized, but was pleasantly surprised at how well attended it was. There seems to be sincere interest in today’s technology-enabled business opportunities and challenges. I was asked excellent questions during my talk on Enterprise 2.0 —  ones that reflected a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities brought by emergent social software platforms.

Everyone I talked to at the conference, however, told me that European businesses were lagging American ones in the deployment and use of these new tools. Most of the attendees were from German-speaking countries so I wasn’t hearing voices from throughout the continent, but the ones I did hear were saying that both Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 were gaining steam, but were not as far along as they were in the States.

I didn’t get the idea that these people were just being modest and polite to an American guest. Instead, they sincerely believed that their businesses were behind in this area. I give their opinions a fair amount of weight because many of them worked for or with US-based companies, and so had points of comparison.

So the question is why is this the case? One explanation for a lag is simply that many of the novel technologies and communities (blogs, wikis, Facebook, Ning, Twitter, etc.) were invented in the States, so we’d expect them to accelerate first there as well. 

Is that the whole story? Or do we need to understand other things as well? Particularly for Enterprise 2.0, are there real differences across countries in:

• Corporate willingness to invest in all forms of IT?
• Comfort with 2.0 technologies, especially among older workers?
• National-level corporate cultures? And yes, I hate the phrase ‘corporate culture’ too, but I think it does mean something. And everyone I talk to, both in Europe and the States, keeps talking about the same characteristics of Nordic, Teutonic, and Latin countries, northern vs. southern European ones, etc. If these are baseless stereotypes, it’s bizarre how widespread and durable they are. 

I not asking this question in order to tee up my answer. I honestly don’t know what the answer is, or even what the main contributing factors are. I’m not an expert on country-level differences in corporate cultures and environments, and I’m not even up to speed on best research on the topic. So I don’t know which of the above factors, if any, are legitimate —  which have gone beyond stereotype and held up to rigorous analysis.  

So this post is simply a call (plea) for information. Are there real country-level differences in Enterprise 2.0 — the use of emergent social software platforms?  If so, are these differences enduring?  Will they persist over time?  Will Slovakian companies always lag far behind Estonian ones, or be far ahead of them?  Why is this?

Please feel free to share your personal impressions, but what would be really valuable here is pointers to surveys / research / frameworks that would help us understand this phenomena. Who has done the best work to understand country-level differences in business climate and corporate culture? What work have you found particularly insightful on this topic?  Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

It’s a plastic shovel sent by Intellipedia central to the boss of a particularly active contributor, along with a request to present it to the contributor.  All members of the military, for example, have access to the secret-level version of Intellipedia, and periodically Intellipedia HQ notices that a low-ranking serviceman or -woman stationed in a hot spot far from home has been making a huge number of edits. HQ then sends a shovel, a citation, and a letter of explanation off to an officer as high up the chain of command as possible, requesting that the officer present the shovel to the prolific editor as a way of saying "job well done."  It turns out that officers are usually more than happy to make a little ceremony out of the shovel presentation, that the whole affair is good marketing for Intellipedia and marketing of E2.0 within the intelligence and warfighting communities, and that it means a LOT to the recipient.

I told this story as an example of an E2.0 best practice,  but one of the healthcare folk wasn’t so sure. "That wouldn’t work for our salespeople," he said. "They don’t care what the bosses think of them. But they care a lot what the rest of the salesforce thinks. If we put an idea like this in practice with them we’d make sure the positive feedback came from peers, not from above."

I thought this was very sharp thinking. It led me to an initial conjecture: if an organization is trying to get E2.0 in place among a bunch of free agents, free thinkers, renegades, or any other distinct and largely closed subculture, it might do well to concentrate on encouraging lateral communication, feedback, recognition, praise, etc. If instead it’s trying to get E2.0 adopted ‘in the mainstream’ it’s a good idea to include proportionally more vertical feedback recognition, etc. 

So this is a conjecture about the edge vs. the center of the network. Is it correct, or useful, or at least on the right track?  Or does it contain a meaningless or counterproductive distinction? If you have any experience in this area please leave a comment and let us know.