5
Uniquely Valuable
The Benefits of Enterprise 2.0
In addition to being useful at different levels of tie strength, emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) are also used by organizations for different purposes. A wiki, for example, is different from a prediction market. What’s more, the same tool can be used in multiple ways; blogs can be used to broadcast answers or questions. So in addition to understanding the bull’s-eye model of tie strength, it’s also important for business decision makers to understand the range of benefits that the new social software platforms can provide.
This chapter describes the advantages of Enterprise 2.0. It concentrates on the valuable capabilities that can be acquired with ESSPs, and that are impossible, or at least very difficult, to acquire without them.
The Enterprise 2.0 bull’s-eye shows that ESSPs can be useful at levels of tie strength ranging from high to nonexistent. As the discussion in the previous chapter also revealed, the new social software platforms can be used for a variety of purposes. A wiki, for example, is used by small or large groups of people, who may be strongly or weakly tied, to create a document or Web site collaboratively. A tagging tool like Delicious, meanwhile, is also used productively by people at many tie strengths, but for a purpose other than document creation. So in addition to emphasizing the usefulness of Enterprise 2.0 at different levels of tie strength, it’s also important to emphasize the breadth of benefits that ESSPs offer to organizations that adopt them successfully. Once decision makers understand what these benefits are, they will be well positioned to decide whether to pursue Enterprise 2.0, and if so which tool(s) to deploy.
I define Enterprise 2.0 benefits as those that arise from the deployment and use of ESSPs and that are difficult to achieve otherwise. These benefits, in other words, don’t arise readily from using previous generations of collaboration technology, or no technology at all. I’ve observed six such benefits: group editing, authoring, broadcast search, network formation and maintenance, collective intelligence, and self-organization. These benefits are described in more detail below, along with the ESSPs most closely associated with each one.
Group Editing
Group editing simply means the ability of a diverse set of people to collaborate on a single, centrally stored work product: a document, spreadsheet, presentation, or Web site. As discussed above, modern ESSPs such as wikis and Google Docs and Spreadsheets address the problems of version control and simultaneous editing that hamper many efforts to generate a work product as a group. These ESSPs are also inexpensive (many of them, in fact, are currently free to use) and require users to have no specialized software beyond a Web browser. As browsers become more powerful, and as the developers of wikis and other group editing tools improve their offerings over time, we can expect that the differences between using these tools and using stand-alone software for word processing, spreadsheets, and the like will shrink. Group editing, in other words, will come to look and feel more and more like today’s individual knowledge work.
Group editing is sometimes most valuable at the center of the bull’s-eye, where collaborators are strongly tied colleagues. In many organizations I’m familiar with, this is the main thrust of Enterprise 2.0 efforts. These organizations establish group editing environments for all entities (labs, workgroups, business units, client teams, and so on) that want them, or let the entities set them up for themselves. In most cases these environments are closed, that is, nobody outside the predefined group can edit content, and the content is invisible outside the group.
There may be valid reasons, including security and confidentiality, to make group editing environments closed by default, but this approach has two disadvantages. First, inaccessible content can’t be searched, linked to, or tagged, and so can’t be useful to anyone outside the group. The second disadvantage is the inverse of the first one: not only is it impossible for inaccessible content to be useful to outsiders, it’s equally impossible for outsiders to contribute any useful content. Closed group editing environments are often set up to mirror and support what the sociologist Etienne Wenger has termed “communities of practice,” or organizational groups with a shared goal. 1 These communities, which are important for generating and sharing knowledge and educating new members, can be surprisingly powerful.
It would seem natural and smart to set up a group editing environment for each community of practice, and this is exactly what many organizations have done. One of the earliest and best-known examples was the Eureka system, established to support knowledge sharing among Xerox repair technicians. 2 It also seems natural, or at least not harmful, to close the ESSP so that only community members have access to it. As already noted, however, doing so prevents people outside the community from making contributions that might be valuable within the community; it removes, for example, the possibility that a Xerox salesperson, or supplier, or customer could use the Eureka system to help the copier technicians solve a problem or alert them to an important issue.
When it’s at least somewhat difficult or expensive to establish a large-scale digital platform to support group work, it probably does make sense to keep platforms small and match them to communities of practice. But when it’s trivially cheap and easy to set up unlimited digital platforms, it’s often beneficial to do so, for the simple reason that helpful ideas and other innovations can come from anywhere. As MIT’s Eric von Hippel writes in his book Democratizing Innovation:
But if, as we have seen, the information needed to innovate in important ways is widely distributed, the traditional pattern of concentrating innovation-support resources on a few individuals is hugely inefficient. High-cost resources for innovation support cannot efficiently be allocated to “the right people with the right information”: it is very difficult to know who these people may be before they develop an innovation that turns out to have general value. When the cost of high-quality resources for design and prototyping becomes very low (the trend we have described), these resources can be diffused very widely, and the allocation problem diminishes in significance. The net result is and will be to democratize the opportunity to create. 3
In short, it may seem logical to make group editing ESSPs closed environments, but decision makers should keep in mind that doing so removes the chance of valuable contributions from outer rings of the bull’s-eye.
Authoring
Authoring, in this context, means generating content and putting it online for a broad audience. Unlike sending an e-mail or using any other channel technology, authoring is a public act. Authoring can take many forms, from sharing status updates using social networking software (SNS) to posting photos, videos, and podcasts to writing a blog.
For enterprise purposes, the clearest value of blogging and other forms of authoring is sharing knowledge, expertise, experience, and insight in a way that’s both persistent and easily consultable. When enterprise authors link to one another’s content, when users tag this content, and when 2.0-era search technology is deployed that surfaces the most relevant content in response to a query, the primary goal of the knowledge management movement can be realized: the organization generates a dynamic repository that contains much of what it “knows,” and members can both produce and consume the contents of this repository over time.
An example from the Canadian real estate development company Intrawest Placemaking shows how valuable authoring can be. In April 2006 the company added authoring software called ThoughtFarmer (developed by OpenRoad Communications) to its intranet, giving all employees the ability to create blogs and other content.
At the online repository of Enterprise 2.0 case studies, cases2.com, ThoughtFarmer co-creator Chris McGrath wrote:
By turning every user into a contributor, OpenRoad envisioned several benefits for Intrawest Placemaking:
Fewer barriers to knowledge sharing. By letting users publish their own content with only a few clicks, they would be less likely to hoard knowledge and more likely to share it.
No distortion in knowledge transfer. Ideas would be exchanged person-to-person, in one step, eliminating distortion and filtering.
An increase in employee engagement. Users that could add and edit content would feel a sense of ownership over their intranet. Because the leadership of Placemaking would be putting considerable trust in employees, employees would, in turn, be more likely to trust the company and its leaders.
Self-healing content. If a user saw an error, he or she would be able to fix it immediately, reducing inaccuracies.
No excessive burden on a couple of administrators. The users would be the editors. Content maintenance would no longer require a dedicated team.
The principal community-building feature of ThoughtFarmer is “Place” pages: a personal area where each employee can add a profile, upload photos and documents, create pages, and share favourite links. Every change an employee makes to the intranet—every comment posted, every file uploaded, every page added—has the employee’s name by it, linked back to his or her “Place.” Other employees can follow the links, learn about each other, explore each other’s content, and develop relationships …
Mike Hartigan, a Placemaking project manager in Vancouver, was overseeing the construction of a 66,000 square foot, heated tile entranceway for a new condo-hotel. The project would traditionally have required the radiant subcontractor to return for each of the 33 concrete pours to lay piping amongst rebar. Then Hartigan had an idea: instead of laying tile, just complete the slab, lay all the radiant piping on top, apply a two-inch layer of coloured concrete with an aggregate, and then polish it.
Hartigan’s innovative method saved $500,000 on a $2 million job, improved coordination among the trades, reduced the project timeline, and gave a stunning, better-than-tile appearance. Hartigan then created a page about his experience on the Thought Farmer-powered intranet. Other project managers in Florida and Nevada posted comments to the page, asking further questions. In response, Hartigan posted photos of the finished job and addressed their comments. Other construction managers planned to use the technique on future projects.
Placemaking manages dozens of multi-million dollar developments a year. As Hartigan’s technique is implemented, Placemaking will save millions of dollars. Without Placemaking’s everyone-as-editor collaboration system, ideas such as Mike’s could never have been shared in such a discoverable, accessible, permanent format. 4
Broadcast Search
The inverse of authoring is broadcast search, where people publicize not what they know, but instead what they don’t know. Broadcast search is the posting of queries in a public forum in hopes of receiving an answer. It is not a recent phenomenon. In 1714, for example, the British government publicly announced a large cash prize to anyone who could find a way to accurately determine the longitude of a ship at sea (a challenge eventually met by the Yorkshire clockmaker John Harrison). 5
Computer networks and ESSPs, however, have greatly expanded the frontiers of broadcast search. On the Internet popular volunteer forums like Yahoo! Answers exist, as do forprofit ventures such as Innocentive, a clearinghouse for scientific problems and problem solvers. Research groups within large organizations use Innocentive to post descriptions of scientific problems that have them stumped. These problems are “anonymized,” assigned a solution value of between $2,000 and $105,000, and then made available over the Web to the more than 80,000 independent scientists from over 150 countries who have an account with Innocentive. A 2007 study by Karim Lakhani, Lars Po Jeppesen, Peter Lohse, and Jill Panetta, found that 29.5 percent of 166 problems posted to In-nocentive had been solved. 6
As with group editing, the chances of serendipity with broadcast search increase as more and more people are brought into the community and invited to examine the problem and contribute solutions. Lakhani and his colleagues found, for example, that the most important factor in determining whether a problem posted on Innocentive was solved was the diversity of scientific interests among people around the world who examined it.
At Google, Bo Cowgill broadcast his search for collaborators on a prediction market throughout the company; he did not limit his queries to his strongly tied coworkers. The team that eventually formed to develop and oversee the market was composed of people from several different functions, few of whom knew one another before responding to Cowgill’s broadcast search. As discussed earlier, Euan Semple began Enterprise 2.0 at the BBC with online question-and-answer forums open to the entire organization. He realized the power and attractiveness of broadcast search.
Network Formation and Maintenance
The examples of Serena software and the popularity of Facebook, LinkedIn, and their peers show that ESSPs can also provide the benefit of network formation and maintenance. Social software platforms are clearly collections of information, and as a result many people commonly think of them primarily as reference works like encyclopedias. The example of Wikipedia reinforces this perception. As discussed in chapter 4, however, insights from the U.S. intelligence community and Euan Semple’s experiences at the BBC show that ESSPs do not just capture what people know—they also point to people themselves.
Within enterprises, most contributions to ESSPs can be traced back to their author (in contrast to the Internet, where contributions are often anonymous). This feature allows a searcher or browser to quickly identify people who could be valuable or helpful colleagues, based on their online track record. The searcher can then initiate contact with this person, and so convert a potential tie into an actual one. Whether or not these newly tied colleagues use an ESSP like a wiki or SNS software for their subsequent interactions, ESSPs deliver value in this example simply by bringing people into contact with one another. The new software platforms, in other words, span structural holes and help people build up valuable social networks over time.
Some of these platforms are dedicated to helping people maintain and exploit these networks. Facebook and other SNS applications keep people up to date on what both their strongly and weakly tied colleagues are doing. This capability is particularly valuable for weak ties, which can fade over time if they’re not maintained. SNS makes this maintenance task almost effortless; users simply provide updates about themselves that are then automatically and immediately broadcast throughout the network to strong and weak ties alike. I imagine that future versions of enterprise SNS will incorporate deeper capabilities for authoring and broadcast search, making it trivially easy, for example, for a knowledge worker to ask her network a question and collect answers.
One of the deep insights underlying the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 was the realization that software should be social—that in addition to making individuals more productive and automating away their roles in a process, software could and should also be used to let people find one another and form communities. At present social networking software is the purest expression of this insight. It seems very likely that social software will continue to evolve, both on the Internet and within and between enterprises, providing even more ways for people to find and interact with one another.
Collective Intelligence
Collective intelligence, or the wisdom of crowds, refers to the use of technologies like prediction markets to generate answers from a dispersed group. Very often these answers are better—more accurate and more decisive—than answers obtained through traditional individual or small-group methods. There is ample evidence that tools like prediction markets work well, and I expect that they will become more popular over time within enterprises, just as SNS software will.
Collective intelligence is also used by many Web sites to identify “good” content. Some of these sites, such as the news aggregator Digg, do this by explicitly asking users to vote. Others, such as Amazon, observe how shoppers navigate and behave. These shoppers aren’t making any explicit recommendations, but as a group they do make implicit ones. When I’m shopping for electronics, for example, Amazon often tells me what other people ultimately buy after viewing the same item I’m looking at. If 35 percent of them buy a USB drive other than the one I’m looking at, I’m likely to click on that other drive to see why it’s so popular. In this case, a form of collective intelligence has helped me make my purchasing decision.
Self-Organization
Perhaps the broadest benefit from social networking software and other ESSPs is self-organization, or the ability of users to build valuable communities and resources and shape them over time, without having to rely on guidance from any center or headquarters. I find this the most remarkable property of Enterprise 2.0, and also the easiest to overlook. We learn to take the phenomenon of online emergence for granted so quickly that we fail to stop and reflect on how remarkable it is that many uncoordinated low-level interactions can result in the appearance of high-level patterns and structure.
Google search results, Delicious tag clouds, networks of strong and weak ties captured within SNS, and many other aspects of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are at once commonplace and extraordinary. They all spring from the work of individuals, and although this work is often spontaneous, uncoordinated, and self-interested, it nevertheless yields resources and environments that appear highly planned, predefined, and coordinated by some authority.
It’s probably safe to say that self-organization is not a concept that comes naturally to most enterprises. After all, one of the key features of every enterprise is hierarchy, or a predefined and largely stable structure. Within a classic hierarchy, attributes like authority, expertise, and role are assigned or conferred. Responsibility for innovation lies within the R&D department, for example. Everyone within the hierarchy can point to the R&D department as the place where innovation happens, and it happens there because that’s where the people who know the most about innovation work. These people are assumed to know the most about innovation because of their education, prior experience, and other credentials that could be assessed at the time they were hired.
Organizations that pursue Enterprise 2.0 do not have to disband their R&D departments or any other element of their existing hierarchy. But they do to some extent have to let go of the notion that attributes like authority, expertise, and appropriate roles should be specified up front and never again questioned. They need to replace this notion with the idea that expertise, authority, and role are (at least in part) emergent over time, rather than fully specified in advance. They can then deploy ESSPs and let their people interact with one another to determine who knows what and who should work together, rather than having these decisions always defined or made by managers up front. Fundamentally, I believe that the enterprises deploying ESSPs to best advantage will be those that see self-organization as a deep benefit, rather than a risk.
Just as organizations don’t have to operate within only one ring of the bull’s-eye when pursuing Enterprise 2.0, they also don’t have to pick just one of the benefits described here. Although these benefits are categorically different, they are not either-or propositions. It’s perfectly possible, for example, to simultaneously establish ESSPs to support authoring and network formation and maintenance. I have described the benefits individually here for the same reason that I divided the bull’s-eye into separate rings: to help decision makers think through what Enterprise 2.0 should mean for their organization and how it can be most valuable. Should Enterprise 2.0 mean giving strongly tied colleagues better tools for group editing? Should it mean giving authoring tools to all employees, or setting up a broadcast search capability? Is collective intelligence the main goal?
Clarity about goals brings clarity about means—the tools that an organization will acquire and deploy, and the steps it will take to ensure broad and deep adoption. One of the questions I hear most often from managers in organizations both large and small, public and private, is, “We want to pursue Enterprise 2.0—how should we start?” I respond by asking them to talk a bit more about what they mean by Enterprise 2.0 and by introducing the concepts of the tie strength bull’s-eye and the set of possible benefits. I have found that these frameworks help focus the discussion about ESSPs for the enterprise in productive ways. This discussion of goals soon leads to a conversation about adoption—how to make sure that the new technologies are accepted and used productively. The rest of this book considers the issues surrounding ESSP adoption.