Happy Friday! Here’s the last two enterprise 2.0 principles from my recent guide.
Principle #9 – Status Updates
Consumer social networking has driven the status update phenomenon, with most services including function so we can see what our friends, family, coworkers and other associates are up to. While it may seem that the status update is too frivolous or fun for the enterprise, it offers a powerful tool to engage users within communities. Within a social learning community, setting the status update to what are you learning provides a relatively simple, yet robust way to communicate with and engage others in the community. Status updates are particularly interesting as they have proven very effective within consumer social networking sites and now users are comfortable with communicating in this manner. They provide an easy way to engage users that may be hesitant to participate as it closely mirrors something they are likely doing on a personal level. . As they visit the site to do status updates they are apt to become engaged in other activities over time.
Principle #10 – Measurement Matters
To truly ensure the success of your enterprise 2.0 initiatives, metrics need to be clearly defined and measured on an ongoing basis. Metrics are central to being able to plan and strategies ,efforts and activities in a project. This enables users and community managers to have tangible metrics so they can know what is working/what is not, who is participating/who is not, and setting targets for growth of the project.
Social networking sites are driven by metrics, numbers of friends, followers and so on. Enterprises need to take these metrics much deeper to identify short, medium and long term goals, manage and nurture top contributors and determine what is most successful within the community. A project without substantiated ROI is not a project for long, so measuring items like page information and overall community information can make a critical difference in the adoption and success of the community.
Summary
Enterprise 2.0 offers organizations a new and tangible way to drive business results using proven technologies and approaches from social networking. Applying the above principles can enable organizations across the public and private sector to make Enterprise 2.0 and communities a success.
I completely agree, one of the problems will be the measurement, but then again it’s always been a problem in most organizations. We just have better tools to help with the measurement now.
There have been some interesting talks on applying “gaming” to the enterprise. Imagine a central event server that captures everything about your business day. Each time you edit / create a page on a wiki, attend a meeting, make a comment on an internal blog, answer a phone call, check in a document, send/read an email, etc, that event gets written to a central event server. These events have been registered to be accepted by the centralized “eventing” service. The company, your organization, your boss, etc. all weigh these events and their associated actions. This way you can be quantitatively and qualitatively measured against your peers and others in the organization. People at the same level, with the same title, etc. can easily measure themselves against their peers across the organization at any given time.
Obviously, people will learn to game the system and the measures will have to be tweaked, this is no different then any organization today with core metrics measuring their people. We’re just making the monitoring of these measures easier to capture through technology. The people at the top will still apply personal knowledge, but it will help find the diamonds in the rough that are more heads down in delivering solutions instead of pontificating.
We have built this internally and are trying a few different measurement scenarios, but so far it has proven to be very effective. Each system has a series of events and the events are tied to actions. Some of the actions have numbers assigned to them which give more insight to the magnitude of the actions being performed. For example if I add a 5000 word document vs I add a 500 word document to a CMS system, the 5000 word document can be weighed higher. We’re able to slide the metrics around changing the weight of the events and see how that effects ranking.
I really believe that this is the future of the enterprise, providing data to managers and HR that were never available before.
I’m going to ask kind of a stupid question.
How do you count “goodwill?”
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
Albert Einstein, (attributed)
US (German-born) physicist (1879 – 1955)
Define “goodwill” in your terms, based on the Websters definition I see a system like this helping someone prove their goodwill to a new manager or the organization as a whole
Time to complete said tasks i.e. faster than others, status updates, etc.
Its not perfect and there will always be a certain amount of human intervention in the real world that can never be counted. However, it provides a better view into what we do every day.