Pretzel Logic – Enterprise 2.0

Earlier this week, I did a Q&A with the folks at Helpstream on the need and importance of customer communities to the enterprise.

We covered the following topics:

• the importance of building customer communities as part of an Enterprise 2.0 design 
• the role of a community manager and skills
• which functional areas will get the most value from communities in the enterprise
• important questions you need to think about when building a community
• have we reached the ‘social tipping point’ wrt the need for a community

Here’s an except:

Helpstream: What’s your general feeling on the importance of building customer communities for companies today?

Me: A customer community is one of the more promising components of the emerging enterprise design that’s powered by social computing technology. In a world before online communities existed, insight into customer intent and sentiment was limited to the few people on the organizational front lines. In contrast, most community initiatives today offer an open format that enables everyone in the organization to see what customers expect from you. But that only signals the very beginning of the promise of the open enterprise. Eventually the best minds across your organizations’ supply chain, employee and customer base, and distribution partners will be able to truly rally around the needs of your prospects and customers – often in real time, to accelerate business performance. A critical initial step to realizing such a work model is a well-conceived customer community.

The rest of the Q&A is over on the Helpstream blog, here.

Thanks to the folks at Helpstream for reaching out.

Last week was a big news week for Enterprise 2.0. It all started with this report from Oliver Young of Forrester Research stating that nearly one in two businesses will make use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies in 2009.

The Forrester Report was followed up with a post by Dion Hinchcliffe on ZDNet (“The Year of the Shift to Enterprise 2.0”) citing “The tools have arrived. How enterprise knowledge and is created and flows within our organizations is beginning to change dramatically.”

I absolutely hate throwing cold water on a promising data point, but I’m having serious difficulty reconciling these take-aways in the face of a bunch of other findings. Here goes….

The footnote behind Implementation numbers

I’m as much of an Enterprise 2.0 cheerleader as the next guy and I even make a very good living off it. But let’s be honest here. Whilst the report says 1 in 2 companies will deploy some Enterprise 2.0 tool, a more glaring finding is that only 1 in 10 users adopt the tools, once deployed.  What good does that do to anyone? “Enterprise 2.0 faces serious risk of fizzling out” should have been a bold warning in the summary of the Forrester report.

A recent teaser of “Intranet 2.0 Global Survey” based on 552 organizations shows that social computing technologies such as social networking and mash-ups have very tepid uptake. Take this comment for instance:

Social media adoption has accelerated on the corporate intranet, led by blogs, wikis and discussion forums. Despite a low cost of entry—often below $10,000—adopters are not reporting outstanding satisfaction with the investment, especially among the executive ranks, driven by inadequate planning and weak or non-existent business plans.

and…

Satisfaction levels with Intranet 2.0 tools is low:

• Only 29% of organizations rate the tool functionality as good or very good; 24% rate them as poor or very poor
• Satisfaction rates with executives is dangerously low: only 23% of executives rate the 2.0 tools as good or very good; 38%% rate them as poor or very poor

Discussion Forums and Wikis driving usage

Discussion Forums and Wikis are some of the technologies that are on top of the heap when it comes to interest.

First, granted that Discussion Forums have evolved, but really, they’ve existed for decades before the advent of Enterprise 2.0. There’s been plenty of momentum behind this social computing technology and Enterprise 2.0 can hardly take credit for generating interest.

Moving on to Wikis. Looking at the evolving vendor landscape, its clear that Wikis have not proven to be a strategic investment and have quickly fallen into the commodity category. See how SocialText, previously a Wiki-only provider has now enrichened its offering with Social Networking and Micro Blogging. Similarly, Atlassian Software’s Confluence 3.0 product (Wiki Software, today) is expected to include Social Networking and Microblogging software.

If achieving an Enterprise 2.0 design for your organization can be executed by Discussion Forums, Blogs and Wikis, congratulations. You’re on your way. To really affect the way partners, suppliers and employees accelerate business activity, it’s going to take a lot more than that and the evolving vendor product offerings is proving this.

Distribution and Adoption

If 2009 is the year of Enterprise 2.0, where are the distribution channels? None of the larger SIs have declared intent or even large scale interest in creating practices, as of this time.  I’m not talking about social computing technology distribution (where SaaS can remove the need for traditional SI implementations). I’m referring to Enterprise 2.0 enablement which is much larger than a point solution or a platform implementation. Its the stuff that has to do with business execution and adoption.  A new crop of E2.0 consulting firms will emerge to will lead the charge here but that hasn’t happened yet.

Every E2.0 vendor I’ve interacted with is constrained by economic realities when it comes to blowing up a large consulting force that can truly transform their customers into a 2.0 design. The good ones understand the need for this and would love to do it but alas, its not meant to be in the near future.

Last week, I attended the TieCON 2009 event where I had the opportunity to listen and learn from Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit. It was one of the best keynotes I’ve ever sat in on. Amongst other things, Brad talked about how they generated 2,100 new ideas in 15 months by allowing employees to spend 10% of their time generating ideas. Now they may well be using an innovation platform such as Spigit or some combination of open collaborative technologies. But its the organization design and behavior change that made this a reality. Any application used was instrumental I’m sure, but only a piece of the puzzle.

The final proof

I was pretty much done making my case until I saw this excellent write up by Enterprise 2.0 colleague, Susan Scrupski about her thoughts on Sapphire, the SAP conference that explores innovative business solutions. Susan highlights how Enterprise 2.0 was largely sidelined at this important event. Some selected quotes here:

The reality is SAP and its global customer base are just not ready for the socialization of the enterprise. It’s just not a topic that commands attention at this massive event (despite my valiant efforts to bring it up in every executive briefing). The majority of conversations at SAPPHIRE revolve around common themes such as decision-making, analysis, data, spreadsheets, databases, reports, statistics, and business processes. In other words, the real work that goes on in real businesses. Is that surprising? No.

and….

Last year, if I searched on Enterprise 2.0, I’m fairly certain I would have found zero returns for scheduled sessions. That there are two this year is, indeed, progress. Further, the soft language of 2.0 has seeped into SAP’s strategic speak and hopefully, strategic consciousness. Leo Apotheker, SAP’s co-CEO and reigning commander in chief name-dropped a smattering of prevailing social buzzwords in his opening address i.e., transparency, collaboration, trust, and social communities. So, a big high-five from me to the speech writer for positioning SAP as a “we get it.” And, in reality, they do get it. They just haven’t incorporated deep social-collaborative functionality into their product suites (yet). This is about where the majority of large customers are. They “get it.” Some may be even experimenting with it (even if they’re not calling it Enterprise 2.0), but it’s not yet core to their business.

Sure, larger firms take a while to move into new territory but they generally start talking about new concepts early on if they consider them to be strategic to their business and technological roadmap. When one of the worlds largest business software vendors is just about dipping its toes into the E2.0 waters, you have to think about how long social computing deployments are going to remain point solutions and purely emergent before they can be DNA changing in any way.

End Note

What the news of last week tells me is that there’s an uptake in social computing technology interest. But Enterprise 2.0? Not by a long shot. Here’s the difference.

I think its time to call out purely emergent implementation models (not that there’s anything wrong with that) vs. strategic use of social computing to achieve open collaborative and transactive work models.  Both have their place. But only the latter leads to an Enterprise, destined to achieve a 2.0 design.

By the way, if any of this is important to you, consider coming to the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston next month where I expect such topics to be discussed at length. Use this link for a 30% discount.

Last week, I had the opportunity to review a draft of The Guide to Online Community Management, published by the ReadWriteWeb team and edited by Marshall Kirkpatrick. Simply put, if you’re planning or considering a community effort at your organization, this is a must have. The report provides answers to any “ifs, ands & buts” with regard to the strategic importance of community engagement.

Most readers of this blog come from larger organizations. I’ve kept that audience in mind when reviewing this report.

Overall Impressions

To be honest, about 15% into the report, I struggled with the idea of buying a premium report that was largely peppered with quotes from articles that I’ve read before. However, as I kept reading, it became clear that report does a great job of identifying major trends, challenges and opportunities emanating from specific community efforts, backed by rich and sometimes opposing expert opinion. What you end up with is a set of succinct recommendations that organizations can consider and evaluate in the context of their own business objectives.  Should you publish a blog? Should you invest in a Facebook or a Twitter presence? Should you hire a full time or part time community manager? How to guarantee that your community efforts will fail? The pros and cons are nicely laid out for you, complete with real word experiences from practitioners, consultants and vendors. All of this to help with not just planning, but also practical execution.

On to specific areas that really resonated with me…..

Addressing ROI – Head On

I was quite surprised to see so many consultants and vendors either advise against quantifiable return or set a tragically low bar for success measurement. Thankfully, the unrelenting focus on ROI in this report clearly shows how community based engagement can be justified at large organizations. Ultimately, in my opinion, it boils down to whether you have the tenacity to attach the value of community management to specific business activity or not. What the report does well is to contrast and highlight examples of both approaches that enterprises can learn from and apply accordingly. Citing scores of case studies from companies such as Zappos, Dell, and WholeFoods, enterprises should be able to quickly identify what types of community efforts make sense for their business, and market place in general.

“The Morning After”

Since a good chunk of my work centers on execution planning, I was especially thrilled to see a sub section within the ROI discussion that was devoted to life after launch. As important, stakeholder expectations that need to be set with respect to ongoing operational requirements, changes in the customer engagement dynamics and new opportunities that emerge from maintaining a thriving community. For instance, on the issue of getting disillusioned because only a fraction of registered users regularly interact, Rubicon Consulting Principal, Michael Mace advises:

Managing a community is hard work and labor intensive. The report cites detailed case studies on how to beat the odds. For instance, Ex-Microsoft SharePoint Manager, Lawrence Liu (now at Telligent Systems) realized that the cost per incident was 90% lower when it was dealt with in the community forum as opposed to commercial phone support. With that in hand, he goes on to illustrate how he leveraged his success with the enthusiast community to create a business case for more dedicated in-house community support:

In terms of execution, the report also details useful how-to’s on topics such as hiring rock star community managers, establishing required resource commitments to ensure community health and sharing insights with relevant constituencies in the organization about what prospect and users want. Some of this is probably after-the-fact ROI, since you don’t know what direction the discussion will take until its’ had some time to gestate. The take away is that that once you get started, your list of benefits and value proposition for the community can continue to grow, beyond what you initially planned for.

Ancillary benefits that Community Managers can deliver across the organization

Beyond ROI that’s tied to the intended use case, the report discusses how other departments can gain from community efforts such as customer led innovation, recruiting, and awareness and research in the areas of marketing. Forrester Research Social Media Analyst Jeremiah Owyang says:

There’s some valuable discussion about how to generate leads in the context of B2B from community efforts, but this is an area where I believe that the report could have challenged interviewees even more. You’ll see some great examples at the end of the report about how sales reps engage on Twitter and surface qualified leads through conversations. But are two hours on Twitter more productive than say 5 qualified cold calls? Maybe; maybe not.

The end game

Overall, the only major component that’s missing for me is a deeper view into what a community managers’ career (and the programs they create) can look like in years to come. As new paradigm shifts in how to accelerate business performance emerge, there’s usually 3 phases to deliver lasting value:

Experiment > Operationalize > Institutionalize

This report has the first 2 phases covered. Experimentation is self explanatory and the report showcases some very effective emergent models. Operationalizing involves setting up a central command post that can incubate and manage these new work models as they bloom (much like what Dell has achieved, also covered in the report). Finally, institutionalizing requires that you get off the side lines, go to where process-laden, structured activities live, and improve, integrate with or take–out these inefficient forms of working. That’s where it can get truly transformational, towards an Enterprise 2.0 design. Business process management via ERP achieved this at larger organizations. In contrast, knowledge management largely failed at infiltrating each business activity and becoming institutionalized. How will the community function turn out and what are the risks that may cause it to fizzle? The good news is that we are beginning to see DNA-changing progress, primarily in the area of community based support. Helpstream is one company that’s leading the charge on this.

From a career standpoint I’ve always felt that today’s brightest community manager’s will not grow into VPs/CXO of Community or Social Media, etc. Rather, the very best ones will actually take over as leaders in charge of primary business functions such as Brand, Marketing, Customer Support etc. The catalyst will be successfully making relationships (not process) central to driving awareness, innovation, lead generation, support, and the like. This report confirms that hypothesis.

All that said, what the ReadWriteWeb team has done is brilliantly articulate how you can start and operationalize vibrant communities. And that’s what most enterprises are pondering, today.

The RWW Community Management Aggregator

Finally, this report is like the gift that keeps on giving. To respond to the dynamic nature of best practices as well as technology innovation, this report comes with a portal called the “The RWW Community Management Aggregator”. This important utility will keep subscribers up to date on the latest news, thought leaders and case studies in this space to make sure you are listening in the right places.

I fully expect that in the near future, this news aggregator will begin to surface insight into how to institutionalize community engagement in the context of specific lines of business activity.

Congratulations to the folks at RWW. Get a taste or buy the report here.

More reviews on the report here:

Jason Falls: ReadWriteWeb’s Guide To Online Community Management A Must Have For Businesses

Dawn Foster: ReadWriteWeb Guide to Online Community Management

Beth Canter:  Newsmastering for Professional Development 2.0 Dashboard