Crossposted from my posterous-Blog

A nice updated slideshow of Adidas’ Christian Kuhna on their implementation approaches and lessons learned. Found via George Dearing who cheekily talks about “intranet rejuvenation” - that is indeed one reasonable thing to expect when stepping into Enterprise 2.0 - refactor some of the existing stuff (see DMS Review: E2.0 braucht ECM), while not leaving the fast lane (quick experimentation and learning, small pieces loosely joined rather than a biggy project, fast speedboats beating slow moving-and-turning ships et al.)

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

When it comes to Social Software in the Enterprise the full suite solutions are on their way. See the last Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social Software for details and vendors.
As the pure products vanish and build up on functionality, it might be worth a look to some general categorizations of social software. So we won’t have to talk about “kind of a blog with wiki functionality” or something similar.
Gartner uses the dimensions “ability to execute” and “completeness of vision” in the Magic Quadrant which are great for vendors or products, but not for functionality in general.

A common approach in germany builds upon a classification system for CSCW-Systems. (Teufel, 1995)
The first adoption for Social Software by Schmidt focused on the three funtions Informationmanagement, Identitymanagement and Connectionmanagement.

In an improved version by Koch and Richter (Cooperation Systems Center Munich (german), Bundeswehr University Munich) changed the connection part to communication and added the loose connections to the identitymanagement. You might think of all your quiet facebook friends here.

Niall Cook has a totally different Matrix, the 4C’s as in his book Enterprise 2.0 book.

I merged two diagrams to get this one, so some software examples aren’t in here. I’m not confident with this classification as there are some well known apps split up across the matrix, i.e. Tagging and Social Bookmarking. In the original book you’ll find more examples.
Cook mentions cooperation and collaboration, two points which misses out on both triangles.

Another idea is a draft by Joachim Niemeier in a german slideshare presentation.

Personally I like the quadrant best, but I would add some modifications to it. As long as my ideas on this are not fully set, I prefer even more inspiration.

So did I miss out some well known ideas?

Crossposted from my frogpond blog

These are the slides I used yesterday at a workshop talk at T-Systems SI in Stuttgart. I got invited to talk about the potentials of Web 2.0 for corporate uses, Enterprise 2.0 and implementation. Turned out to be a great event with +30 people listening and discussing vividly – thanks.

Well, when I initially met with T-System SI’s Franz Binder and Marcus Dreher for arranging the get-together I promised (or threatened them …) a helter-skelter ride through the field. Now, after some fiddling it turned out to be both an invitation to join the bandwagon (and T-Systems they are, I wish the team all the best with QBase) and a half-joking warning about ill-fated past knowledge management efforts and some related implementation tasks (and pitfalls) to understand if one wants to enjoy the ride:

Unfortunately the processing of this video at the Sevenload site took more time than expected. Anyway, in the following you find a nice fireside discussion with Dion Hinchcliffe - interviewed by Dr. Frank Schönefeld from T-Systems during a press event we made at CeBIT 2009. Mainly they are discussing the latest developments on E2.0 in general, its adoption in the US and Europe as well as how to evaluate the effects of E20 activities. On the last aspect Dion pointed out that “ROI is famously hard to measure on E2.0″ and his urge to put together more case studies in order to evaluate the effects.

Sevenload Direkt

In an internal discussion of our Advisory Board regarding the topics of the E20 SUMMIT program Joachim Niemeier posed the question whether classical economic measures are suitable to measure and verify Enterprise 2.0 effects. Though cases like the TransUnion project (cited by Dion in his blog post on determining the ROI [cross-referencing to the post of Ross Mayfield]) give a proof of evidence for measuring the E20 effects with the classical ROI formula - many projects have difficulties in measuring it. As from the discussions about this problem at E20FORUM the main difficulties in measuring are perceived as the difficulties in identifying and quantifying the “net profit” from Enterprise 2.0 activities - as the nature of effects is mainly soft and intangible. As this is planned to be a major discussion at E20SUMMIT I would like to sort my ideas on this to stir up the discussions upfront.

In regards to a distinguished discussion I’d like to differentiate the notion of Enterprise 2.0 into two dimensions of impacts. In a recent German article for the T3N Magazin Martin and I have discussed (as already a lot of other people before) the characteristics of Web 2.0 apps and social software in comparison to classical “information management systems”. Besides mentioning the leveraging characteristics of being mainly open-source concepts with light-weighted architecture and a “simplified user experience for the masses” we focussed on Tim O’Reilly’s main point: the supplement of the social dimension and the network effects. This lead us to the point that the usage of Web 2.0 tools within the enterprise (as the notion of Enterprise 2.0) results into a more transparent and outward focussed information gathering that itself implies again a more transparent and effective collaboration. We quoted Lee Bryant at this point who is talking always about the change from a world of “content objects & processes” towards world of “feeds & flows”. So in regards to the ROI discussion we have therefore to distinguish the impact on information management & distribution within the enterprise from the impacts on collaboration.

At this point I would like to focus on the part of “information management & distribution” as this is a precondition for the impacts on collaboration and also seen as the more difficult part to measure.

Measuring the value of information management & distribution

For the further discussion I’d like to equate the term of “information distribution” to the technical dimension of “communications” - leaving out the social, emotional and intential aspects of communications. Why am I doing this? Because the “communications” discipline within the enterprise has a long time existant valuation problem which is recently addressed by “value based” approaches (see a explanation on “value based management”) that might be very suitable towards the valuation of Enterprise 2.0 effects.

At least within the German speaking PR community there is a controlling (or better KPI) model - based on the ideas of Walter K. Lindenmann and Norton/Kaplan. The latter have discussed a “strategy map“, a concept that illustrates the causes and effects on the building of business values. “The strategy map links the long-term game plan or competitive strategy of a business with its operational activities.”

In referring to this strategy map and its different “perspectives” Walter K. Lindenmann has developped a three-level KPI model for the valuation of PR effects, that constitutes the foundation of valuation for the IPR toolkit (IPR = Institute of Public Relations) as well as the German PR association (GPRA / more German background papers at CommunicationControlling.de). The model consists of three interdependent levels of impact:

1. output level: e.g. questions whether the message has reached its target group
2. outgrowth level: e.g. questions whether the message has been perceived and understood
3. outcome level: e.g. questions whether the message has changed the knowledge, opinion or behavior of the target group

As this model is not including any reference to the financial dimension of the strategy map Lothar Rolke added in article in 1997 the term “outflow” as a forth level that questions the business effects. While the GPRA is nowadays not differentiating between level 2 & 3 and therefore proclaims only a three-level model (output / outgrowth & outcome / outflow), for a further discussion on how Enterprise 2.0 is effecting the business value a differentiated four-level model would be more suitable.

The connecting pieces of these levels are the “value links” that constitute a causes and effects diagram like this example for the “value links” in communications by Mirko Lange:

I won’t translate this model as it is only a fictional examples of a value link system. Actually the causes and effects differ from industry to industry and from company to company - as the value generation differs in all kinds.

I first heard about the practice of this model in a non-PR context from the people of aexea at our Swiss Intranet Management FORUM about Intranet governance & controlling. They are using it to evaluate the effects of an Intranet project which in return resemble the targets of Enterprise 2.0 projects but mainly driven from a centralized viewpoint of organizing it.

As from the common practice of working with this model they have added a input level to the diagram that discribes the denominator of the classical ROI formula in terms of costs for the Intranet management. “Output” describes the produced content by the input - in quantity, frequency, reach & actuality, comprehensability & usability. “Outgrowth” explains the perceived messages from Intranet output - measured for example by the knowledge about the contents of the distributed messages/information. “Outcome” indicates the effects from the “outgrowth” in regards to the changed behavior in terms of participation in any Intranet services. At the top of the model “outflow” pictures the business effects of the changes in behavior.

Evaluation approach towards Enterprise 2.0 activities

Returning to the starting point I think this model is a very good approach in describing the effects of the impacts of E20 activities on the corporate “information managenet & distribution”. In contrast towards the classical ROI formula the model takes into account the “soft effects” of the activities.

In the following I put together some potential key indicators on the (for me) four main E20 activities: tagging, blogging, “wiki”-ing and “social network”-ing:

I think this little practice shows quite nicely that using a more differentiated approach to the valuation of Enterprise 2.0 is very useful as it illustrates the achievements made in an earlier stage.

During the last few days a lot of discussing has happened behind the stage of the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT - and it is triggering more worthwhile posts as well. As the idea of the E2.0 SUMMIT on Oct 6-8th is to represent a community and expertise hub for the European Enterprise 2.0 community this is a great thing to have, we really want to reflect the common Enterprise 2.0 discussions (especially from an European point of view).

So as we’ve been working on the scope and concept of the SUMMIT with several members of the advisory board - who were very active in contributing ideas and overall evaluating the topic list we’ve been devising. Calling on this round of experts in the field is only natural: We want the event to be attractive for both thought-leaders and practitioners, and we want to attract all the essential players of the E 2.0 industry. So we called on our “trusted” circle of people to provide the feedback we need and add ideas.

By now we can tell you that we’re finished with putting up the structure and scope side of the agenda for the October 6-8 event in Frankfurt. You may have a sneak preview here - now we are entering the stage of staffing the panels with the right people. So from the big picture the event structures as follows:

• Day 1 / Oct 6th: WikiCamp ‘09 (besides the regular workshop day)
• Day 2 / Oct 7th: plenum sessions in the morning, then fourparallel panel sessions (each 50mins - means 4×3 panels on Day 2)
• Day 3 / Oct 8th: 3 parallel panel sessions in the morning (each 50mins - means 3×3 panels on Day 3) plus 2 plenum sessions in the afternoon

So in total we’ve got 5 plenum sessions and 21 single track sessions for the E 2.0 SUMMIT. Each of these tracks is designed to be of interest to a distinct set of people, and tries to avoid conflicts with thematically related parts. Additionally we’ve included some industry panels (telco & banks), and several open
space orientated sessions.

For the “trusted” circle of experts feedback we can say that the biggest topic of the behind the scenes discussions was the dichotomy between orderly processes (read BPM) and the fuzzy world of Social Software (read Enterprise 2.0), how to deal with it, and basically how to tackle the topic at the conference. So while we all shared understanding a nice thread evolved that covered things like:

• How do we prevent that social software works out to be just another “silo” (”build a wiki, and they will come”)?
• How can we integrate social software into existing domains, usage arenas and task specific systems?
• What are the best ways to start with social software in the enterprise?
• How do we ensure that social software implementations turn out to be “complementary and integrative”? Is it a good idea to marry up SNS functionality with BPM software

Especially the last point triggered a lively discussion, whether the structured processes that go with BPM (and its systems) are preventing collaboration. Granted, this discussion isn’t of interest to everybody, but it has an audience beyond (enterprise) information architects and systems people for sure. Especially, it’s a question that arrives sooner or later in a corporations travels towards Enterprise 2.0, and members of various departments should listen:

• people (well, hailing from companies and/or departments) that are interested in improving specific business processes (e.g. quality assurance, customer service knowledge, etc.), and IT people who need to integrate legacy systems with Web 2.0
• communications department - they are interested in improving communications (and being more conversational needs more flexible processes, not more structure and control)
• Intranet & ECM management teams - interested in enhancing existing activities with Web 2.0 elements, so they need insights into when and where to ease process policies, and when and where to control things more tightly
• knowledge management and e-learning people - interested in better knowledge sharing, like w.g. leveraging collective intelligence (which needs altered processes as well, probably more flexible ones)/actions
• business development is fundamentally interested in changing the company (for more innovation, for better/more outcome/output or for cost reduction, for innovative business models, etc.) - all with heavy process implications
• overall the management board and people dealing with strategic planning …

To cater for these needs we have structured the conference into four main parts that shall

1. facilitate visionary and forward-looking discussions about collaborative performance of Enterprise 2.0
2. support the emergence of strategic discussions, like e.g. whether open innovation is an interesting arena for Enterprise 2.0 (we think it is!)
3. provide “hands-on” best-practice discussions and
4. provide space for more technology- and tool-oriented implementation discussions.

So connecting Enterprise 2.0 towards BPM will be a part of the conference discussions, especially in the panel “Best-Practices for Process Management 2.0″ and - in a more abstract way - in the panel “New Models for the Enterprise: Being Open, Collaborative & Disruptive”. I guess we will find time and space to discuss how to make our corporations more adaptive and flexible, or as Lee Bryant said it “how can we re-design businesses and organisations around the ideas of flow, aggregation, networks and collaboration?”.

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“.