As the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT is a European conference, we certainly need to discuss the multi-cultural challenges of introducing E 2.0 in international companies. Last year, Craig Hepburn from the UK hosted the panel consisting of E 2.0 experts from all over Europe: Bertrand Duperrin/France, Mark Masterson/Germany, Emanuele Quintarelli/Italy and Dr. Frank Schoenefeld/Germany.
Here is last year’s video of the session:

Sevenload Direkt

In the following I have listed the aspects that I found most remarkable and interesting in this discussion:

• Cultural differences do not only occur on a geographical level, i. e. between people from different countries, but also between a sales guy and someone from the IT department.
• A big challenge for Enterprise 2.0 is measuring its value: How do we account for people who benefit from E 2.0 without actively participating themselves? Some people from other cultures benefit from a collaborative environment, e. g. because they can easily find the information they need/solve a problem etc. But you cannot see or measure that value, because these people do not actively bring themselves in and do not want to speak out.
• Mark experienced an interesting pattern at CSC: For whatever reason, blogs (that address a huge, not-specified number of recipients) are more used by collegues with an Anglosaxon background while tools for discussions (where you address a limited, specified number of recipients) were used by people from all kinds of nations. So different people from different nations seem to prefer using different kinds of tools.
• We should spend more time understanding the different cultures and include that knowledge into the process of the developing a (flexible) software. The ultimate, perfect solution would of course be a system in which the end users themselves can make it fit them better via feedback loops.

This year, Bertrand Duperrin will be the host for the discussion on how to overcome cultural boundaries for Enterprise 2.0. An interview with him on his views and expectations for this year’s Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT is about to follow soon.

Just like last year, we have set up an Advisory Board for the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT 2010. The members of this board reassure the quality of talks and discussions at the conference and support us with their knowledge and experience in setting up the event. Now that the SUMMIT is getting closer and the program is set, we asked them about their expectations and the “hot topics” they are looking forward to the most. In this post, our female members have their say.

Jenny Ambrozek is the founder and lead consultant of SageNET LLC, USA. She is committed to promoting dialogue and best practices for building organizations to succeed in a global, networked, and mobile 21st century world. Her views on the upcoming event are as follows:
"The Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT is an outstanding conference, in giving practitioners the microphone to share their learning with peers. The event perfectly meshes fresh voices and perspectives with access to industry thought leaders.
Andrew McAfee set the stage four years ago with “The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” . The growing trend, I see, is the increasing importance of addressing organizational structures for successful Enterprise 2.0 initiatives. See for example, recent talks by Clare Flanagan and Mark Masterson. I’ll be paying close attention to the consensus on next practices for architecting participation throughout organizational ecosytems.
In 2004, 72% of respondents to the Online Communities in Business study reported they could not measure ROI. In Frankfurt I’ll be watching for new approaches to assessing value created through use of social technologies. What methods are Enterprise 2.0 project leaders using, beyond simple activity and participation metrics, to establish return to their businesses?"

Anu Elmer is the Vice President Communications at the Swiss Reinsurance Company. She has been consulting large-scale projects in change management, communications and training for more than ten years. Currently, she is the core team member of the Collaboration Initiative which rolled out a social business platform to all 11,000 employees in 2009 and is now looking into further integrating it and extending it to external communities. Regarding the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT, she is especially looking forward to networking with the E2.0 experts from different industries and to an inspiring exchange of ideas.

Ellen Trude has been with Bayer Business Services GmbH/Germany for more than 25 years now. She is a staunch supporter of the 2.0 concept and currently working as training consultant for social media and special projects concerning collaborative platforms at Bayer. She says about the conference:
"The confernce theme ‘Setting the path towards an open and agile enterprise’ reflects my expectation: By sharing experiences, case studies and knowledge, we will get the power, motivation and arguments to discuss with sceptics within our own enterprises. We get support for our firm conviction to continue the E2.0 way or to finally get started with it.
I am actually looking forward to all the conference topics. If I had to rate I, would choose ‘New Leadership Concepts’ and ‘Managing the Change’ as my hot topics concerning Enterprise 2.0 challenges. In the best practice track, I am especially interested in ‘Fostering Knowledge Sharing’ and ‘Strengthening Collaboration’. These sessions reflect the two cornerstones on our path: the management-driven change and the employees’ experience and recognition of E 2.0 behaviour and working."

Recently we have been quite busy in preparing and organizing events that did not leave time to systemize and arrange my collected thoughts about all those discussions and informal exchanges I had with experts and practioneers in the field of Enterprise 2.0 during the last months. Today I am quite locked to nothing more than accompanying Bertrand at his pre-conference workshop for our E20 FORUM in Paris tomorrow. This leaves time to sort out my ideas that are turning around my head already for weeks.

It’s about the emergence of the E20 idea within the corporations. A lot has been said and written about the necessity and potentials of the new forms of collaborations and communications by using social software. Quite a few contributions have even predicted a big bang of change in the enterprise world. Others have criticized this vision and labelled the E20 thingy a “crock”. The truth is - as always - in the middle because E20 - as so many other business innovations - is not emerging in one step but is dependent on a cultural change within the corporation that again happens slowly.

So to explain the state of E20 we have to take a differentiated view on the different stages of the E20 emergence in the corporations. For each stage I see different people being involved in the diffusion process of this idea. They have different motivations regarding the E20 subject that serve more or less towards the big vision of E20. But they all contribute their share towards the diffusion process of this idea. Therefore I’d like to compare the diffusion of this idea with the dissemination of a virus:

(0) At some point someone is initiating some social software projects in the corporations - mostly under the radar of any strategic decision. These projects are mostly departmental projects with a small group of co-workers involved. There are quite some examples in which the IT departments started using some kind of wikis for documentating IT projects. In other examples some tinkerers (and yes I am not talking about the Generation Facebook but about tinkerers because I do not think it is a matter of age!) have installed or introduced some kind of social software e.g. microblogging service as Yammer in their departments. According to the image of the virus dissemination I’d like to describe this stage as “localized infections”.

(1) At the second stage I have observed quite a lot of companies in which the communications department came along the Web 2.0 thingy in the first place. Quite a lot of them have perceived this Web 2.0 thingy as a new way of communication format - in the terms of using social software to get people more involved into the messages corporate communications wants to send out. This in mind they might install corporate blogs to initiate discussions and feedback channels or add wiki or social networking functionality to the intranet in order to centralize the knowledge capturing and sharing. In regard to my analogy to the virus dissemination I’d call this the “first outburst” - as these initiatives have created quite a lot of attention within the enterprises. But in the long term most of these project could not gather any critical mass of participants because they have been set up as top-down initiatives to improve the impact of corporate communications and not been used to enhance the information flow. But we must not underestimate the effects of these projects. Because even they might have failed or not as supportive for the E20 vision in the long run, they are important for the further dissemination of the E20 virus - as they show the strategic relevance of social software within the corporation. This said these project will be indirectly supportive towards the growth of the grass-rooted projects.

(2) Eventually the growth of some of these grass-rooted projects will call the attention towards the department that is in charge for the organizational development. They will analyse and try to “decode” the effects of these projects. Eventually they might realize the business value generated by the improved information flow and the enhanced knowledge sharing within these projects. They might try to take over the control of these initiatives and turn them towards a corporate initiative. This is the point at which steering committees are been created and the subject of E20 becomes a strategic issue. But though there are thoughts about the enterprise-relevance most of the enterprises in this stage will not reorganize completely at this point. Because the realized business value is mostly generated “above the flow” and not “in the flow” of the business value chain. And as the enterprise is driven primarily by the success of the value creation in the line of business and not by some kind of enhancement in collaboration and information flow - only service companies that are primarily dependant on knowledge sharing for the business lines will succeed with the E20 thingy already at this point. Examples are for example CSC or Booz Allen Hamilton.

(3) Therefore the next stage in the diffusion process I see within those projects that deploy social functionalities towards the IT systems of the line of businesses. Examples for this I see in the Business Innovation Community project of Daimler (that is an open innovation platform installed by the business development department), the social enhancement towards CRM processes as well as the emergence of “personal learning networks” promoted by HR departments. According to my analogy I would call this stage the “virus variations” stage as in most cases there are more than one department that start a strategic E20 initiative.

(4) Finally as each of these different initiatives grow towards strategic relevance the management board eventually sees the demand to “streamline” the initiatives in order to effectively balance the benefits on the enterprise level. At this point they will approach the crossroads of the E20 success or failure as the “streamlining” can be organized as a top-down centralization of the projects which will kill the grass-rooted movements of each project. Or - the “streamlining” will lead towards a deconstruction of the business model because the management board as well as the corporation is “viciously infected” by the idea “to let loose” and “to open up” in order to gain new business value.

As a result the enterprise might eventually reach the final stage of a new form of organization that I do not want to describe at this point - as it would be quite hypothetically as I have not come along enough examples that resemble this stage.

To reply upfront to the critics of the above describe sequence of diffusion stages - there is no statistical evidence to this image, it is only a personal observation and conclusion towards the different stages of E20 infection. It might be an answer towards the question why the “big bang theory” won’t work for this kind of projects because the E20 thingy is a cultural change that must emerge slowly to all parts of the corporation and leads eventually towards a change of the business model.

Looking forward to any comments.

While we are still far away from the maturity stage of Enterprise 2.0 in terms of numbers of realized projects, the discussion about the Enterprise 2.0 topic becomes more matured and leads finally beyond talking about the chances and opportunities. This might be a sign of the on-going economic crisis and its urge for a more specific discussion about this topic (see the call for the Reality Check 2.0), but it might also be a result of the emergence of the now gained insights from the first best-practices in this field. The exchange of experiences is a very supportive means for this - as enforced by initiatives like the 2.0 Adoption Council , E20Cases.org and others.

This said - I think it’s time to consolidate the topics to be discussed in regards to improve and enhance Enterprise 2.0 projects. From my research for setting up the conference program of the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT - I identified 5 key topics for project leads to take care of:

1) There is only one goal to be achieved: collaborative performance.

Yes - we can talk about changing the our world but at the end of the day we live from what we have achieved on a set of goals.

Keeping this in mind it is the results orientation that is driving a project to success. While the measurement of the return of Enterprise 2.0 activities is more complex than with ordinary business processes it is not unfeasible. 2.0 systems are depending on group dynamics that are not always measurable at first sight (as for example in the case of indirect network effects). Therefore we need new approaches to measure the effects. But in the end it’s all about "performing" as stated in Bruce Tuckman four-stage model called Tuckman’s Stages . In conclusion of this is that the development of a collaborative performance measurement is firstly the key to the argumentation for Enterprise 2.0 initiatives as well as the "steering" wheel for the success of the project.

2) Keep the interaction alive and kicking with participation & community management

As already said the 2.0 world is depending on group dynamics realized by social software systems that increase transparency on what other group members are doing and ease the way of participation. So changes and transformation is indirectly caused by interactions within the group. The facilitation and guidance of the group’s interaction process is one of the keys to Enterprise 2.0 effects. It is and will never be guaranteed just by the installation and implementation of technology. The management of this facilitation and guidance is a strategic task of the project and therefore highly important as discussed in Dion’s post on "Community Management: The ‘essential’ capability of successful Enterprise 2.0 efforts" . The conception of the participation & community management is the operational structure for this kind of projects.

3) Set the right environment variables to new forms of organizational schemes and leadership models.

As we are talking about a new way of operational structure within Enterprise 2.0 activities we also have to have a look at the organizational structure. While the traditional organizational structure is based on the concepts of bureaucracy best-practices of Enterprise 2.0 initiatives show that they are better off if they are structured by the ideas of adhocracy . This implies new forms of organizational schemes and models of leadership.

As taken from the Wikipedia the concept of adhocracy leads to the following characteristics of the organizational setup that have to be discussed:

• highly organic structure
• little formalization of behavior
• job specialization based on formal training
• a tendency to group the specialists in functional units for housekeeping purposes but to deploy them in small, market-based project teams to do their work
• a reliance on liaison devices to encourage mutual adjustment, the key coordinating mechanism, within and between these teams
• low standardization of procedures, because they stifle innovation
• roles not clearly defined
• selective decentralization
• work organization rests on specialized teams
• power-shifts to specialized teams
• horizontal job specialization
• culture based on democratic and non-bureaucratic work

4) Be aware of the complexity of changing the game

As derived from the first three topics the implementation and adoption of Enterprise 2.0 concepts within the organization implies a cultural change process at some level (dependent of the scope of the project!). Therefore the management or (as some may say no to a cultural change management) better the facilitation of the process of a cultural change is another key to the success of these projects.

I would like to cite Stuart French at this point :

The key here is that while culture is not a “thing” to be managed, it is certainly undergoing constant transformation. As mentioned earlier, the real power of a cognitive view of culture comes from a change of perspective. If we can learn to see that cultural issues are complex and highly contextual and that intra- and cross-cultural interactions are actually collaborative, mutual learning experiences (Holden, 2002, p.54), then managing both the opportunities and pitfalls simply becomes an issue of knowledge management, specifically networking, knowledge sharing and collaborative (or organisational) learning (Holden, 2002, p.52).

So therefore adoption is a reciprocal process of a) the guidance and governance of the interaction from an organizational perspective while letting people the freedom to take up the group action from a personal perspective and b) the feedback of the outcome of a).

Matthew Hudgson has put together a great diagram of the "Meta theory of social computing tools adoption within Enterprise 2.0".

5) Discuss the scope of Enterprise 2.0 beyond blogs & wikis

While the scope of the discussions around Enterprise 2.0 is mainly focussed on facilitating the generic collaborative processes within the enterprise we have to look beyond this to get the big picture.

Susan Scrupski has drafted a first scene of what has to be viewed in a conjoint way:

These are my takes from my research. As a conclusion I would say it is still a long way to go before we can clearly write down a handbook on Enterprise 2.0. But the discussions are getting more focussed on theses key topics and with the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT on Nov 11 & 12 we are trying to support this as we have chosen these topics to be the underlying themes of the sessions within our Expert Talks Track .

But tell me what are you thinking about this?

PS for those that may be interested in coming to the E2.0 SUMMIT: Get your ticket now and register with a 200 EUR discount on the full conference pass until Oct 11 with the promotional code "e2open200". http://www.e20summit.com/registration.html

UPDATE: Updated Susan’s diagram with the final version!

GULP, a german platform bringing together IT projects and freelancers, took a survey on the latest tech trends according to Gartner.

You can view the results over at their blog in German, IT project managers (dark blue) and freelancers (light blue) were asked to qualify each trend as a bubble or serious technology. The answer “bubble“ is always above, serious technology below.

You see a clear positive statement towards Desktop virtualizing, Unified Communications and Business Intelligence. Mashups and Enterprise 2.0 are seen as bubble.
So the result matches the well known attitude in conservative IT departments.

Convincing the IT is still an issue and more Enterprise 2.0 examples with a clear ROI are welcome.

This week, several german journalists released the Internet Manifesto, seventeen Statements on modern journalism.

The Manifesto is well known on the german blogosphere, but I can’t tell if it made it’s way out to the international audience.
So I’ll go ahead and have a look, if those declarations go along with Enterprise 2.0.

1. The Internet is different.

It produces different public spheres, different terms of trade and different cultural skills. The media must adapt their work methods to today’s technological reality instead of ignoring or challenging it. It is their duty to develop the best possible form of journalism based on the available technology. This includes new journalistic products and methods.

This affects the communication with customers as well as the collaboration of employees, but it’s one of the fundamentals of E2.0.

2. The Internet is a pocket-sized media empire.

The web rearranges existing media structures by transcending their former boundaries and oligopolies. The publication and dissemination of media contents are no longer tied to heavy investments. Journalism’s self-conception is—fortunately—being cured of its gatekeeping function. All that remains is the journalistic quality through which journalism distinguishes itself from mere publication.

I wouldn’t speak of an empire within a company, but several gatekeepers will vanish.

3. The Internet is our society is the Internet.

Web-based platforms like social networks, Wikipedia or YouTube have become a part of everyday life for the majority of people in the western world. They are as accessible as the telephone or television. If media companies want to continue to exist, they must understand the lifeworld of today’s users and embrace their forms of communication. This includes basic forms of social communication: listening and responding, also known as dialog.

Any consultant would like to see E2.0 a part of everyday work, but in most environments we’re far away from that.

4. The freedom of the Internet is inviolable.

The Internet’s open architecture constitutes the basic IT law of a society which communicates digitally and, consequently, of journalism. It may not be modified for the sake of protecting the special commercial or political interests often hidden behind the pretense of public interest. Regardless of how it is done, blocking access to the Internet endangers the free flow of information and corrupts our fundamental right to a self-determined level of information.

Ask your local IT on that point. But as soon as you get out to your customers or partners, keep it in mind.

5. The Internet is the victory of information.

Due to inadequate technology, media companies, research centers, public institutions and other organizations compiled and classified the world’s information up to now. Today every citizen can set up her own personal news filter while search engines tap into wealths of information of a magnitude never before known. Individuals can now inform themselves better than ever.

Yes, free the information within your company. But to be honest, there’ll always be some figures you don’t want to expose to all.

6. The Internet changes improves journalism.

Through the Internet, journalism can fulfill its social-educational role in a new way. This includes presenting information as an ever-changing, continual process; the forfeiture of print media’s inalterability is a benefit. Those who want to survive in this new world of information need a new idealism, new journalistic ideas and a sense of pleasure in exploiting this new potential.

Although I wouldn’t name it journalism, Enterprise 2.0 might change the way you deal with agendas, protocols and reports. And as far as I have seen, in a very positive way.

7. The net requires networking.

Links are connections. We know each other through links. Those who do not use them exclude themselves from social discourse. This also holds for the websites of traditional media companies.

Collaboration requires networking. So great we have the net.

8. Links reward, citations adorn.

Search engines and aggregators facilitate quality journalism: they boost the findability of outstanding content over a long-term basis and are thus an integral part of the new, networked public sphere. References through links and citations—especially including those made without any consent or even remuneration of the originator—make the very culture of networked social discourse possible in the first place. They are by all means worthy of protection.

And they build up your professional reputation.

9. The Internet is the new venue for political discourse.

Democracy thrives on participation and freedom of information. Transferring the political discussion from traditional media to the Internet and expanding on this discussion by involving the active participation of the public is one of journalism’s new tasks.

That one misses out. At least in Germany, a political discourse isn’t something you want in your company.

10. Today’s freedom of the press means freedom of opinion.

Article 5 of the German Constitution does not comprise protective rights for professions or technically traditional business models. The Internet overrides the technological boundaries between the amateur and professional. This is why the privilege of freedom of the press must hold for anyone who can contribute to the fulfillment of journalistic duties. Qualitatively speaking, no differentiation should be made between paid and unpaid journalism, but rather, between good and poor journalism.

At least the customer service will open up, but imho press releases will stay for a long time.

11. More is more – there is no such thing as too much information.

Once upon a time, institutions such as the church prioritized power over personal awareness and warned of an unsifted flood of information when the letterpress was invented. On the other hand were the pamphleteers, encyclopaedists and journalists who proved that more information leads to more freedom, both for the individual as well as society as a whole. To this day, nothing has changed in this respect.

You’ll need intelligent filters, but every bit of information is worth something.

12. Tradition is not a business model.

Money can be made on the Internet with journalistic content. There are many examples of this today already. Yet because the Internet is fiercely competitive, business models have to be adapted to the structure of the net. No one should try to abscond from this essential adaptation through policy-making geared to preserving the status quo. Journalism needs open competition for the best refinancing solutions on the net, along with the courage to invest in the multifaceted implementation of these solutions.

I think, this depends on your environment. Even in Social Media you can keep traditions up, if your culture is ok with it.

13. Copyright becomes a civic duty on the Internet.

Copyright is a cornerstone of information organization on the Internet. Originators’ rights to decide on the type and scope of dissemination of their contents are also valid on the net. At the same time, copyright may not be abused as a lever to safeguard obsolete supply mechanisms and shut out new distribution models or license schemes. Ownership entails obligations.

This is a tricky one, I’ll pass out.

14. The Internet has many currencies.

Journalistic online services financed through adverts offer content in exchange for a pull effect. A reader’s, viewer’s or listener’s time is valuable. In the industry of journalism, this correlation has always been one of the fundamental tenets of financing. Other forms of refinancing which are journalistically justifiable need to be forged and tested.

The Internet is lifting journalism to a new qualitative level. Online, text, sound and images no longer have to be transient. They remain retrievable, thus building an archive of contemporary history. Journalism must take the development of information, its interpretation and errors into account, i.e., it must admit its mistakes and correct them in a transparent manner.

As Sebastian Schäfer completed my comparison of different Social Software Categorizations with an interesting model by Andrew McAfee, I’d like to share a crash course on Enterprise 2.0.
The video is already around for a few weeks, but Mattias Schwenk reposted it today. It contains the concept of the Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye, a look on social software tools strictly through the ties between people.

I just didn’t get to embed the video, so please go and see it on youtube in HD-glory and have a nice weekend.

Update

YouTube Direkt

Recent conversations about Enterprise 2.0 have, it seems to me, become increasingly focused on return on investment (ROI). This is a rational consequence of any number of factors — in order to deploy these technologies in any sensible fashion, it is necessary to demonstrate that doing so will bring a return on the investment needed that is greater than its cost. If we accept that, in the recent past, much of the activity surrounding the meme has been of an experimental nature (where there is, by definition, a high tolerance for risk), and also accept that many of these experiments, within the context of their constraints, have been successful, then we can expect that these results will begin to move the meme into the mainstream. This clearly seems to be happening. Insofar as it is, the meme thereby now commands some degree of management attention, so this increased focus on ROI is both correct and obviously understandable.

But…

Preparing an argument about the ROI of E2.0 that is both true and logically consistent is no simple task. That’s not because we don’t have enough case studies — it’s not because we don’t have enough data. It’s not because we can’t quantify benefits, or assign costs properly (well, actually, it is, but not in the sense that most people usually mean, in my experience). It’s because, most of the time, we’re using words incorrectly.

Words are a big deal. People mostly use them without (much) conscious thought, and therefore, underestimate them. That’s unfortunate, because they are the primary tools of thought, and choosing the right ones essentially determines whether our thoughts are robust, or not.

A huge part of any conversation about ROI is the underlying economy of the organisation in which the investment is taking place. And for various reasons, this economy is often misunderstood, ignored, obfuscated or just plain badly described. That fact, in turn, means that subsequent conversations about problems dependent upon it have an imperfect basis — a conversation about ROI in this context is a conversation about a house built on quicksand. It will sink.

And to the extent that many people are not even aware of the quicksand — not aware of all of the misunderstandings and incorrect assumptions about the underlying economy of the organisation — they often fail to perceive that the house is sinking until it’s gone. This leads to a certain degree of bewilderment, eventually, when they go searching for it on the plains of the organisational economic quicksand, in vain.

I’m not an economist. Even if I wanted to try and describe the abstract economy of an enterprise in this post (which I do not, lacking the patience for it — be grateful, reader!), I could not. I lack the words to do so. But I can, for whatever reason, perceive these economies, so what I can do is offer some examples of them at work. Perhaps, if you are not yet aware of them, this will help you perceive them as well. If you are aware of them, then the examples may help clarify my argument here.

Consider the common example of a governance board. Let us assume that we are dealing with a very large organisation — one for which the term “enterprise” would not seem a poor fit — it has 20k employees and revenues of several billion dollars. This organisation has set a high level, strategic goal to “control costs”. Moreover, it has iteratively specified that goal to mean, among many other things, “attempt to maximise reuse of assets”, a goal which, in a further iteration, has then been specified to mean (or correlate to) the following goal for the IT organisation: “conform to a documented enterprise architecture”. This latter goal, finally, is achieved by attempting to rationalise the use of IT assets across the organisation. The entire enterprise will use one and the same email system, for example: the scenario where two (more or less otherwise) independent business units each use their own, differing email systems will not be allowed. The “governance board” is a tool to achieve this goal — once established, all new IT efforts must be subjected to its scrutiny, and the members of this board are tasked with enforcing this goal.

Hmm. But like the House of ROI, this too is built on the quicksand of the enterprise’s economy. What does that mean? Consider this further development of the scenario: shortly after being established, the board finds itself overwhelmed. At any given time, there are hundreds, even thousands of efforts, initiatives, projects and whatnot, across the enterprise, that need to be scrutinised for compliance with this goal. The board cannot keep up. So, typically, the response to this reality is this: the board sets a price. It sets a gatekeeper rule that says something like: “Any project with a projected cost of more the $X must be approved by this board”. Projects that cost less, do not. This is a simple risk management strategy, on its surface, and on that surface, perfectly sensible. The load on the governance board is reduced to something it can cope with, but the organisation is nevertheless confident that the goal is being managed, balanced with the risk associated with a particular effort.

Below that tidy surface, though, the economic quicksand upon which it sits is the context for fascinating effects. Among other things, what happens is that the marketplace of potential projects, within the organisation, reacts to the price. Let’s assume, for the sake of developing the scenario to its conclusion, that you are the new project manager of an attempt to roll out an implementation of an enterprise wide social networking platform. One of the criteria that you will be judged on (where both those criteria and the process of judging people by them are part of the mysterious economy!) is the amount of time you take to complete this task. You examine the overall mechanism, and notice two things: one, the scope of your project is large, and two, it will cost enough that it will trigger the governance board process. “Hmm,” you think, “what does that mean? What impact will this have on my project plan?” So you go take a look at what the governance board is doing, and discover two things that, from your perspective, are appalling. First, you learn that the duration of the process of approval — the time it takes for the board to review your project and issue a “go” or “no go” — is 6 work weeks. Second, you learn that there is a queue of projects waiting for approval — the soonest point in time that your project could be evaluated, even with the newly implemented “fast track” mechanism for “strategic projects”, is two months from now.

You know instantly that this is unacceptable. For one thing, the governance board review is part of the initial setup process — you need a “go” from them to proceed to implementation. The only way to work those 3.5 months of delay into your schedule is if you continue to work on the project while waiting — delegate the governance board to its own, parallel stream. But that means assuming full responsibility for the risk — if you’ve called it wrong (or failed to make a convincing enough case), and the board says “no go”, you will have committed resources and expended funds in vain. That’s not likely to lead to a glowing appraisal for you.

So you look at the price tag for the governance board process, and begin figuring out how to break your project up into multiple, smaller ones, such that they will not be subject to the process. You react to the price.

Consider another, real world example: in a large organisation I know of, there is an ongoing effort to move IT efforts, across the enterprise, in a direction that conforms with a fairly rigidly defined service oriented architecture (SOA). One of the stumbling blocks to doing this is expertise — the people who understand the SOA, as defined by and for this enterprise, are not numerous, and individual projects need only transient access to them, typically. The organisation responded to these factors by establishing a “SOA Centre of Excellence (COE)”, where it clustered the experts. The intent is / was to “hire out” the COE’s expertise to individual projects. However, the COE is sinking into the quicksand, a year or so later — its services rarely invoked, the SOA it is tasked to evangelise largely ignored and absent from the organisation’s new and ongoing efforts. How did this happen? Why did it happen? It’s the economy, stupid. A key economic concept is one of incentives — pricing is all about negotiating them. From the start, because of the high fixed costs (mostly personnel) associated with the COE, the “cost” of using its services was widely perceived as being higher than the benefits derived (which were not seen as being significant in the immediate, small-scale context of most projects). This amounted to a disincentive.

Some time after inception, the organisation, frustrated by the lack of uptake of the COE, did the following two things: one, it changed the governance board process. For any project of a cost above $X, it added a mandatory step to the review process — the SOA COE had to review the project and determine if it was “SOA relevant”. Number two, and further, if it did determine that a project was “SOA relevant”, that project was then obligated to purchase a unit of the COE’s services, to ensure that subsequent designs and whatnot were “SOA compliant”.

This change — which quickly became known as the “SOA tax” — had an interesting, and entirely rational result. It caused the complete destruction of the SOA COE. Projects began to actively attempt to not be “SOA relevant” (to avoid paying the tax) — whether, in some absolute sense, they really were, or not. This, in turn, accelerated the funding problems that these measures had been intended to solve, so that within a year, the COE had effectively been dismantled.

I have literally been in situations where I have seen agitated project managers turn to a hapless architect and say “You! Go through all 260 of these documents, and remove or obscure everything that might even slightly resemble the word SOA! Do it now!” And I have also seen those same sorts of managers, deep in panic mode, literally tearing a project up into bizarre, otherwise completely nonsensical chunks, merely to ensure that each chunk was small enough to avoid some such gatekeeper price tag.

These behaviours, however, are completely rational within the context of the overall enterprise economy.

So, what does this have to do with Enterprise 2.0? Well, like SOA, E2.0 is a meme that explicitly, deliberately attempts to cross silo walls. Indeed, like SOA, E2.0 derives the bulk of its value as a function of its success in doing just that. For that reason, and again like SOA, it is supremely sensitive to the vagaries of the true enterprise economy. Sensitive in a way, and to a degree, that a meme with a smaller scope (”let’s do CRM for the sales guys” defines a very small subset of the overall enterprise economy) is not. This is the truth that underlies all of the various discussions of “top down vs. bottom up”, “executive sponsorship” and whatnot.

Thus, the precise meaning of the words you are using is of utmost importance: when you speak of “ROI”, if you are not doing so with a meaning for the words “return”, or “investment”, that is broad enough to include things like the ways participants are judged (rewarded) or the various mysterious costs (like the price of the governance board, or the SOA tax) of the enterprise economy, then you are probably engaged in a futile exercise. If you think that ROI is a matter of getting some numbers into an Excel spreadsheet, then you are probably building a house on a foundation of economic quicksand. It will likely sink, and that would be unfortunate.

Postscript: I was inspired to write this post by two other blog posts, recently read. The first, an excellent screed by Venkatesh Rao about the myth of “culture change” in large organisations (”There is no such thing as culture change“), speaks about linking E2.0 efforts to real incentives within the context of an organisation’s structures and behaviours. The second, which I found as a consequence of the reactions to my comments on the first, via the typical torturous path of weak ties, is a blog post by Paula Thornton called “Crossing the chasm” (search (Ctrl-F) her post for “small is the new black”, which made me laugh out loud). The twisted intersection of those posts, in my (twisted) mind, led to writing this one. If you are one of those strange folk who have actually read this far, I strongly encourage you to click through and read these posts as well. Venkat’s, in particular, would make a great panel at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit. Also in this same vein, and highly recommended, are Venkat’s series of posts about his “cloudworker” meme, in particular, “Cloudworker Economics“.

Besides my german language summary at frogpond I suppose it’s important to compile some impressions for the non-german speaking Enterprise 2.0 community. And when one of your keynote speakers travelled all the way from London to Cologne it’s even more timely. I already did my best in twitter-translating the german-language talks for him (neat if you have companies like Vodafone among the best practices that present in German but sport english slides). Yes, David Terrar triggered off the conference day with a well-received talk on community building in the Enterprise. See the embedded slideshow below on “How to build vibrant communities”.

While I knew David before (we first met at the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 in Varese, but didn’t find any time then), I enjoyed it a lot to have time for discussions this time - and we’ve had great conversations both at the pre-conference dinner and on conference day itself. He and Thomas Koch of Kongressmedia made me miss a good part of the afternoon starting session.

And here’s the Harvard video of John Chambers David mentions (seen also at Oliver Marks):

YouTube Direkt

Or France, or Japan, or Brazil? Or, indeed, anywhere that is not an “Anglo/Saxon” culture? Now, wait, wait — before you flame on! (or worse), hear me out. It’s hard to talk about the issue I want to raise here without raising some emotional reactions as well — often rather heated ones. That’s understandable, but it may also hinder us from having a conversation about a very interesting topic.

Important caveat number one, therefore, is the one I raised in my very first sentence — despite my (deliberately) provocative headline, I think that what I’m about to speculate about applies to some degree in any society that that is not a progeny of England (and even that formulation will be fighting words for some in the USA, Canada, Oz, New Zealand and particularly Ireland or Scotland — but I am thinking in almost biological terms, here. You may well dislike your parents, but you can’t change who they are). I will use Germany as the basis for my speculation, because it’s the non-Anglo/Saxon culture I know best, and not because I want to pick on Germany or Germans in particular. I love Germany — it is my home; my wife, daughter, large parts of my family, and many close friends are all German. But I do believe that certain aspects of German culture, and their implications with respect to social software, can be used to illustrate points about a broader theme, and so I will use them to try to do so. OK?

This is slippery, and dangerous terrain, and it is essentially impossible to venture out onto it without falling, and making a fool of oneself. I will surely be no exception here. But I am convinced that there is something important lurking out on those dangerous plains, and I think we would all be well served by finding some way to call attention to it. What is Anglo/Saxon culture? What is German culture? How do they differ? Frankly, I’m no expert in such matters, and not really qualified to voice an opinion on them, in many people’s eyes. But I will now proceed to forthrightly go ahead and do so anyway.

And therein lies a fascinating difference between the two cultures: Anglo/Saxon culture encourages — even lionises — such acts. German culture does not.

Now, having said that, here comes important caveat number two: there is no such thing as absolute truth, and there are certainly no absolute truths with regard to sociology or politics or cultural differences. These are not binary states, of which I speak, but points near the median of a very analogue — Gaussian — distribution. For every rule, there is an exception, and indeed, the exceptions sometimes make the rule. Etc. I understand and acknowledge that. However, there is nevertheless value to be found in examining the median in such distributions, and when I say “German culture does not”, that’s what I am aspiring to do. OK?

It may be impossible to ever come up with “the” definition of something as amorphous as a human society or culture, but any fool can see immediately, upon leaving the one she was born into, and visiting another, that they exist. And that they have differences. These differences are typically expressed as stereotypes and prejudices, many of which are the product of nothing more than ignorance (and often, its correlate, fear). But some of these stereotypes will have a kernel of something approximating truth at their core.

Thus, for example, in 1758, the Württembergischer publisher Karl Friedrich Moser wrote: “Every nation has its principal motive. In Germany, it is obedience; in England, freedom; in Holland, trade; in France, the honour of the King”. This is an absurd exaggeration, verging on hyperbole, and particularly in the modern world, one which many Germans would vigourously object to — and rightly so. To the latter point, and despite that, I might respond by doing the following: let us fast forward the lens of our attention to the early 1970s. And turn that lens on the anarchist and terrorist elements that surrounded people like Baader and Meinhof. Even before violence became a tragic element of the student protests in the late 1960’s, there was an element of distrust and frustration with the established order that took the form of an outright contempt of reason — a disdain for Wissenschaft, and a belief in the instincts of the Basis (the collective) as a useful guide to behaviour, as opposed to reason. These sorts of ideas are the clear and unmistakable descendants of German Romanticism of the late 18th and early 19th century. And the contrast between these stereotypes — the idea of an extreme affinity for obedience versus the inchoate Sehnsucht and open contempt for reason embodied by Romanticism — is profoundly illustrative of the complexity of German culture. This is a culture that produced both the Prussian hierarchies of Bismarck’s Ämte, and the theories of Karl Marx. It has a long, complex and unique history, of which one quite prominent thread is an ongoing, recurring struggle between the needs and desires of the individual, and those of the group in which that individual resides.

The history of Anglo/Saxon culture contains such a thread as well. It is not necessary — or even useful — to engage in a conversation about the merits of these two contrasting threads. All that I wish to do is make the following point: in each of the two cultures, the thread exists, and they are different from one another. The history of the the struggle between the individual and his society is a different story in Anglo/Saxon culture than it is in German culture. And the product of these respective threads — the day to day realities in which we now find ourselves — are also different.

To what extent, then, can we expect that practices regarding social software, as developed and espoused by an English-speaking, Anglo/Saxon culture, to be a seamless fit in a German-speaking culture? I think it must be obvious by now that I think the answer is: to no extent at all. Indeed, to the extent that software of any kind embodies social and cultural norms, to what extent is it reasonable to expect that the design of a software artefact produced in an Anglo/Saxon culture will be optimal in a German one? Again, I think the answer is clear: it is not at all reasonable to expect such a thing.

On the other hand, we live in a “globalised” age, one where every culture is exposed to many of the same influences, to an extent never before known in the history of our species. Communication technologies — particularly television and the Internet — are the enablers of this. No culture now exists, on the planet, that has not been exposed, to some degree, to Baywatch. Many cultures — and certainly all of the more affluent cultures — have their own version of Big Brother — in Germany, this past month, the local version of the British reality show “I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!” was watched by an extraordinary number of people.

And lurking within that observation, I think, is the essence of a problem currently confronted — and as far as I can tell, largely unacknowledged — by social software systems in general, and certainly Enterprise 2.0 punditry in particular. Most of the social software currently “in play” in the market, and certainly virtually all of the commentary on the themes it provokes (like Enterprise 2.0) are products of Anglo/Saxon cultures — representative of Anglo/Saxon thinking. This is an understandable consequence of their provenance, perhaps, but it is nonetheless insufficient. Just as “I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!” can only be successful in Germany in a version that is German in nature (and then it can be very successful indeed), we are in need of an articulation of Enterprise 2.0 that is German in nature. And one that is Spanish, one that is Japanese, Russian, Chinese and so forth. Lacking such an articulation, we are likely to find ourselves lost in the quagmire of discussions that purport to be about “das Ding an sich”, but which are (also) about differences between two cultures. We need to tease those two thing apart from one another — such that, hopefully, we can concentrate solely on talking about “das Ding an sich”.

And to those Germans reading this who are now shaking their heads, perhaps annoyed, perhaps merely perplexed (and perhaps both), and thinking, “Why? Why do we need such a thing? What value is there in the Anglo/Saxon definition of ‘Enterprise 2.0′ that could possibly prompt me to want a German version of it?”, I would say the following. As someone who is in the rare position of being able to read something like Andrew McAfee’s definition of Enterprise 2.0, and “see” it with both the eyes of a native Anglo/Saxon, and (to some debatable but undeniable extent) the eyes of a German, I say to you: if there is a concept that is more uniquely, perfectly German than the one of “emergent structure”, implied by McAfee’s theory, then I would like to hear about it. ;D

So what would a German version of Enterprise 2.0 look like? What would it entail? Well, I’m not sure. But this forum is as good a place as any to debate and define it. Certainly, there are some obvious characteristics — German social software will need to have a slightly different relationship to hierarchies, authority and expertise than Anglo/Saxon software will. And German social software will have to take into explicit account both such “soft” factors, as well as the “hard” realities of everyday existence — such as German laws, customs and norms regarding things like privacy. But I am sure of one thing — without it, social software will not “work” in Germany. Or anywhere else.

What do you think?