It’s been quite an event at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week. Plenty to share with non-attendees. Dr. Wave of Google Wave fame made an appearance, based on customer feedback Enterprise 2.0 is not a crock, and claims that when the recession is over we’ll be working differently due to Enterprise 2.0 solutions. I’ve also had some great discussions with conference attendees over the future of the space.
One of the more notable is a heated but friendly debate with Larry Hawes at Gilbane and Christian Finn of Microsoft over the need for analytics to drive Enterprise 2.0 adoption. For the record, I believe analytics and metrics are important to decision makers within corporations to either justify an Enterprise 2.0 investment and to gauge success of the program at key milestones. Unless you’re Microsoft SharePoint with a lot of internal corporate champions that accept anything from Microsoft prima facie, most organizations require ROI analysis on large enterprise wide initiatives.
Note to Larry and Christian: My position is that analytics are not the most important thing, but important nonetheless. 🙂
In fact Booz Allen is a case in point. They made sure metrics were a part of their early roll out of award winning Hello (their enterprise 2.0 intranet). They use metrics and analytics to gauge the success of the program and used it to convince the company to make further investments in the tool. This is exactly what’s needed for organizations to make the initial investment in Enterprise 2.0
Some interesting points on metrics in Hello. The important metrics for Booz to gauge success of the program are the amount of overall searches in the community month over month, the number of log ins, the number of profiles created versus the number of employees, and average number of visits per day. You can see some of the other metrics they use to judge success in the slide below:
According to Walton Smith of Booz Allen, all content added to Hello is ratable and if the employee has highly rated content then their vote counts for more. Then highly rated subject matter experts are rolled up on a leader board. This makes expert search much easier.
These customer case studies are a great opportunity for internal corporate champions to highlight success in other companies as proof points to help sell an Enterprise 2.0 solution. If you can figure out how to communicate, “it will increase efficiency by X and save us $Y,” then selling Enterprise 2.0 to senior executives will be easier and they may just jump on the bandwagon. It might not be mature and it might not be the nirvana solution vendors are claiming, but Enterprise 2.0 works.
And the analytics prove it.
(Cross-posted @ Seek Omega)
If we want to create value through social medias, tools have first to be used. It’s a prerequisite.So seing such indicators (and such number) is a good thing and it makes sense.
But, in my opinion, contenting ourselves with that is stopping halfway. We have no evidence (maybe BAH has some but keep it secret) that the social activity has a quantifiable impact on indicators related to business operations.
I see so many projects with people focusing on the success of their tool to such an extent that they were forgetting their purpose was to not make people use the tool but help their staff to be more effective through the use of the tool that I’m often worried when indicators are based on the sole use of the social platform.
I posted something about that earlier :
http://www.duperrin.com/english/2009/10/20/your-indicators-say-that-your-online-communities-are-very-busy-so-what/