Get Off The Bandwagon -

In early December, I kicked off a series of posts on my core beliefs about E2.0. Since then, I’ve been devoting a post to each of them to work through some of the implications for E2.0 strategy and practice in greater detail.

In this post we’ll look at my fifth core belief: E2.0 is a means to an end, not an end in itself—an organization must accomplish something with E2.0 beyond simply embracing it.

I come across lots of organizations involved in E2.0 that have little to no idea why they’re doing so in the first place. They’re caught up in the excitement and fervor of it all, the urgency of being a part of something new—or better yet, not being left behind by the next big thing.

This isn’t exclusively an E2.0 phenomenon. Every few years a next big thing comes along and, leaving aside any judgment about whether any particular big thing is more hype than reality, there are plenty of organizations that rush to embrace that big thing because, well, we have to or we risk getting outpaced by our competition.

Advanced case management, the cloud, taxonomy, service oriented architecture, knowledge management, six sigma, CMM—who hasn’t gotten dragged into a corporate project to adopt at least one of these current or former big things that was undertaken seemingly for no other reason than “we have to do it”?

I had a client once who called this “18 hole architecture”, meaning that their CIO would play golf with business associates, hear about some hot new trend on the course, and return to work fired up to be on the leading edge of the next big thing—without the due diligence required to determine whether it was the right direction for the organization or not.

This all brings us to the raging debate about whether E2.0 needs to be justified in the first place or whether it’s dial tone, “must have” plumbing like email, voice mail, or shared drives.

But to me, nothing is dial tone; or better yet, even something as fundamental as a dial tone needs to impact a business driver positively—otherwise why support it?

We forget that the dial tone was not a given. It was a technology decision to solve a problem. Had it not met that need, or had it been too difficult or costly, another solution would have been used instead. It’s only because the dial tone (or email, or voice mail, or shared drives) meets our needs so well and at the right level of cost that it’s indispensible, beyond ROI, a must have, and so on.

The same is true for E2.0: when you leave aside all the excitement, momentum, and enthusiasm, in the end it has to meet some business need, otherwise why embark on it? The time, resources, money, and political capital required to do E2.0 effectively are too great to risk squandering them on an effort that has little chance of succeeding because its goals are non-existent or haven’t been articulated.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that unless there ‘s hard ROI attached to E2.0, it’s not worth doing. I talk about business drivers rather than ROI because I believe that there are important non-monetary benefits associated with E2.0, as well as benefits whose monetary benefits are difficult or impossible to calculate precisely.

Things like employee or customer satisfaction and loyalty, productivity, brand perception, the quality of the overall organizational culture—these are hard to attach dollar figures to, but are important to the success of a business nonetheless. And it’s precisely these kinds of business drivers that an E2.0 initiative needs to impact in order to be truly successful, to go beyond merely being the latest big thing to fundamentally transforming the organization.

In the next post we’ll explore in more detail what I mean by business drivers as we look at my sixth core belief: E2.0 must justify its existence just like E1.0 business practices, i.e., by demonstrating tangible, meaningful business value.

In the meantime, jump in and share your thoughts. I know there are horror stories about next big thing initiative out there (ill-fated six sigma programs alone could produce more comments than the AIIM servers could handle) as well as strong opinions on E2.0 as dial tone—lets’ get the conversation started!

Comments

Submitted by Russell Pearson January 11, 2011 - 3:26 PM

I believe what you're talking about has been dubbed the 'Cargo Cult' model of E 2.0 - simply strap the bits together, sing the mantras and hope the gods bring the goodies. This is the state of play of many current 2.0 initiatives. Now to move forward of course we need both demonstrate and achieve tangible business value. These are difficult to measure but not impossible to do as I've been banging on about for the last year or so. The question though becomes what specific aims do we want to achieve here - is it business transformation in terms of profitability and the bottom line or a new more socially agile way of doing work. I think that question perhaps draws out more of the uncertainty of Why, rather than Whether we can produce tangible outcomes for our endeavours.

Report

Was this helpful? Yes No

Submitted by Joe Shepley January 12, 2011 - 3:53 PM

Russell,

I think you're right that the key is deciding what our goals for E2.0 are (and then measuring to those) rather than measuring whatever we think we'll be able to. Although until E2.0 matures across the board, folks will be having to do this from scratch rather than being able to draw on an existing body of knowledge or best practices--but that's the fun of working on the cutting edge, right?

Anyway, thanks for jumping in and sharing your thoughts.

Cheers,

Joe

Report

Was this helpful? Yes No

Submitted by Michael Hess January 18, 2011 - 12:03 PM

I/we see the same problem in various areas. However sometimes asking 'Why' seems to get lost or we are looked at as almost being crazy for asking. We see this current mandate with "Social Media". The powers above have dictated that we need to have a "Social Media" setup for the public. When we ask what they mean by that and why do they want it, we get the answer, "Well the competition is doing in and we need to provide it as well".

They don't know why they need it or what they need they just know they need it.

sigh.

Report

Was this helpful? Yes No

Submitted by Ethan Yarbrough January 18, 2011 - 6:19 PM

Joe, I'm really enjoying your thinking in these blog posts. Thanks for the thoughtfulness (and the sense of humor -- love the pictures in this post).

It's interesting to see what a vast distance people often leap from hearing about the next big thing to implementing a doomed-to-failure version of it. Skipped over is the careful and time-consuming work that must be done to assess what processes in the organization might benefit from adding E2.0 elements. In fact, I think there are a lot of business leaders out there who don't really know how work is getting done in their organizations. As a result some of them don't implement E2.0 when they probably should and others DO implement it when they probably shouldn't or well before they understand where and how to implement it so that it delivers value. Making the business case is not just a way to justify E2.0 up the chain, it's also a way to check your own assumptions and make sure you can really match up what E2.0 does with what your company needs.

I'm just being wordy in agreeing with you. Keep up the good work.

Report

Was this helpful? Yes No

This post and comment(s) reflect the personal perspectives of community members, and not necessarily those of their employers or of AIIM International

The Global Community of Information Professionals

Community

Get Off The Bandwagon

Rate Post

Add a Comment

Comments

Blog Search

Need to Know: Social Media Governance

Collaborating with SharePoint

Connecting People and Content

Latest Comments

Get The Research

Grow Your Expertise

Expand Your Network