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 posterous-Blog:

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:

This is a nice set of interviews, well rather short one question one answer dialogues with my friend Euan Semple.

Euan is a very thoughtful person and - obvious with his experience on the use of social media within organisations - the fifteen questions get good answers. And I like his little remarks (like social media being so un-business like from the outside, how it helps to keep the I small in RoI).

Right, to get involved with the social web both inside and outside of an enterprise does not present an immediately obvious ROI like process automation of old did. But it can empower organisations to become more adaptive and able at learning, ie. improving knowledge retention, creating collaborative environments, and encouraging a knowledge sharing culture.

Unluckily the player can’t be embedded (well, embedding 15 videos is a drag anyway) so you have to got to guruonline to watch them.

Euan explains how most companies are starting to feel pressured to jump head first into social media because everyone is talking about it, although it would be imperative for most businesses to at least investigate social media, throwing too much at it isn’t necessarily going to help.

Euan also acknowledges that social media can be perceived as being a tool for the younger generation, but that generation is now starting to work within your organisation and with them they will bring the tools which they’re used to using on a day to day basis. This doesn’t mean you need to ban social networking sites like Face Book and MySpace in your office, it means you need to encourage these staff to use these tools in a manor that can benefit your business and you need to trust them to do this. Euan justifies this by pointing out that they may be more likely to ask their existing peers within that network if they encounter a problem rather than going through the usual time consuming channels. This example is not just limited to the more junior employees; encouraging staff to participate in social media can speed up trouble shooting and enable any solutions found to be shared.

Being at reboot made me miss out not only the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston but also Kongressmedia’s Intranet Summit 2009. Sad thing, normally I would have been there for meeting other consultants like Saim or Stephan and above all meeting practitioners and getting to know more about their intranet projects and approaches.

Good then to have fellow bloggers Frank Hamm and Saim Alkan compile extensive documentation on the talks (to be found in the documentation wiki open to the attendees), write up their learnings and impressions (Saim: Der Wert eines Inranets - live vom Intranet-Summit 09 #its09 and 2. Tag: “Der Wert eines Inranets” - live vom Intranet-Summit 09 #its09, Frank: Review zum Intranet Summit with links to nine (!) further blog posts, all german posts alas).

In my mind this blogger-generated extra content is a definite added value to being at a conference, it’s a mark of excellence that separates good from very good conferences. That said, “excellent conference” may mean different things to different people, but I am sure that “blogger relations” (some hold that installing a “blogger hub” is the way to go, like Braden Kelly expands upon in Conferences 3.0) make a difference. And for the things to avoid see Gerald’s list - things that make conferences less attractive.

What’s on your mind - are there other things of importance for the upcoming E20SUMMIT and the ECM World?

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.