It's a good and important question. At some point we have to move past saying "These new tools are going to make a difference" and start saying "Here's how these new tools have been making a difference."
I'm working on a couple interesting case studies at present, and will share findings once they're finished. In the meantime, we would love to hear from you.
What's the track record to date? Who's had experience with the Enterprise 2.0 toolkit -- wikis, blogs, tagging infrastructures, RSS feeds, prediction markets, etc. -- and what has that experience been?
How long have the technologies been in place? What have been the adoption and use patterns? Did Enterprise 2.0 take off immediately and spread like wildfire, did it go nowhere fast, or did something in between happen?
Has the experience been positive and have participants 'played nice' with each other, or have there been instances of vandalism, trolling, flaming, etc.? Have there been any security problems or breaches? Have there been any unintended consequences, whether positive or negative?
What kind of organizations have been deploying these tools? Big or small? For-profit or not? Geek-heavy or not? In what industries?
Have the installations been done with the awareness and blessing of senior management and/or the IT department, or have they been stealthy?
And what have been the results? What, if anything, can you take to a hardheaded pragmatist to demonstrate the value of the new tools?
We're eager to hear as much of the story as you're able to tell, at any level of disclosure or anonymity. Please tell us via a comment here or an email to me. I'll treat emails as confidential unless you specify otherwise.
We're looking forward to hearing from you...
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I doubt that any industry will voluntarily fall on its sword to allow any of these technologies to take hold.
Creative destruction is maybe the best way to look at what possibilities Enterprise 2.0 has.
CustomerVision has a case study that discusses how one of our customers, Communications Data Services, (a division of Hearst with 3,000 employees) has implemented our CustomerVision BizWiki enterprise wiki.
We’ve provided a way for our customers to start with a more traditional enterprise deployment and then gradually transition to a full Enterprise 2.0 approach that conforms to your definition of Enterprise 2.0. This is an approach that I’ve called “Transitional Enterprise 2.0”. What we’ve found is that this allows us to implement in places that would otherwise be skeptical of an Enterprise 2.0 approach. But we’re happy to report that our customers continually gravitate towards the full wiki model because it’s easier and produces better results.
This case study can be downloaded from the front page of our website:
http://www.customervision.com/
Below are my answers to the specific questions you posed in your post:
The CDS implementation of BizWiki is delivered as a secure, hosted web application. We haven’t had any issues with vandalism, flaming or security. The only issues we’ve had to respond to are requests to optimize performance because they’ve added users and content so rapidly.
CDS has 3,000 employees and at least half of them use BizWiki. The users are NOT techies and they are not early adopters.
The technology was purchased by senior management with full agreement of IT and has been embraced by users. We seem to be unique in our “top down” sales model. We’re not looking to get in the door in a stealth mode. Our sales and marketing efforts are targeted at senior executives and the people we talk to are usually at the VP, CIO, General Manager or CEO level.
The results of the CDS BizWiki implementation have been great. They love the product and they use it heavily. They are adding content and adding users at a rapid rate. In order to reduce the fear of embracing a full Enterprise 2.0 implementation up front, we provide a workflow option in our “Transitional Enterprise 2.0” approach. As we expected, a higher and higher percentage of content additions and updates are done in full wiki fashion. The important thing is that the customer can embrace Enterprise 2.0 at their own pace and, as we would expect, the trend is towards more and more openness, because it produces the best results.
I have a lot friends on the corporate side who are involved with knowledge sharing initiatives that don’t follow an Enterprise 2.0 model and they take longer, cost more, produce inferior results and have a high failure rate so I think a hardheaded pragmatist would be nuts to not at least do a pilot of an Enterprise 2.0 initiative.
Paul - huh ? I don’t think industries have to fall on their sword to get benefit from social tools - in fact, I *know* this to be the case.
Andrew - you might want to take a look at the company I work for - Headshift. We’re a social software consultancy and development company doing some pretty fine stuff in blending together blogs, wikis, tagging, aggregation and RSS for both external and internal applications.
Andrew,
I think this is a great idea. I intend to include half a dozen detailed case studies in the book I am writing on enterprise social software (follow my progress on my blog). I will be sure to contribute these once available, and will of course be interested in any you uncover.
Niall
You probably saw this article from Susan Scrupski http://susanitsa.wordpress.com/2006/10/26/atlasstian-why-i-luvem about Atlassian. We have over 1800 customers using Confluence, our wiki, and we have a handful of case studies on our website http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/casestudies. In fact, one of our customers is right around the corner from you: Harvard Business School (http://www2.universitybusiness.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=273&p=2#0). We’re happy to put you in touch with others. Let me know how I can help.
Atlassian customer list: http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/customers.jsp
Anu,
Enlighten me.
I think Paul Cox is right.
Creative destruction is maybe the best way to look at what possibilities Enterprise 2.0 has.
Paul,
Why would any industry have to “fall on its sword” to embrace the possibilities of social tools ? Maybe there will be some disruption of the internal politics and, of course, changes to the ways that information and knowledge are shared and communicated, but that’s a long way away from the self-sacrifice you seem to imply is necessary.
Take the DrKW case - nothing has really changed about the fundamental nature of their business as a result of adopting wikis and IM - but certainly there has been augmentation: some processes are made more efficient, and some employees who were previously unheard now have better channels to share opinions and knowledge.
I’m currently researching an article for Computerworld for IT execs who’ve experimented with and/or realized success or failure with Enterprise 2.0 apps. I’d be interested to hear from IT execs on the record or off. You can reach me at . Thanks!
I see the “Enterprise 2.0” type of applications challenging the status quo. As they are more then just blogs and wiki’s but transactional as well. The status quo currently has control of the budget. Any of the social networks or Enterprise 2.0 applications can be kept out by not dedicating any time or resources towards them.
Key to the Enterprise 2.0 value proposition is the enhanced productivity that comes about from organizational changes. Organizational changes that again challenge the status quo. Therefore it would take a rather progressive company to adopt these radical solutions that inevitably will create chaos within their organizations. Therefore I believe these organizations will predominately eliminate the threat and continue muddling along.
The only method that I see the success of Enterprise 2.0 is to attain scale over the remaining shortened life of the hierarchy, or, massive creative destruction.
What’s most fascinating about the case studies is not always what eventually gets published, but what happens afterward that’s not publicly disclosed. There’s a continuing struggle between those who want to centralize and control information and those who want to release and distribute it. Most don’t assume that the story ends with an initial brave foray into this area.
You should make a distinction between some enterprise 2.0 technologies and others. Internal wikis and enterprise mashups are one thing, and public blogs another. I notice a lot of people are willing to talk about success with wikis, but that’s not likely to be where the real pain and payoff is. Small wonder that few among the Fortune 500 have ventured into the kind of blog territory that exists on the public Web.
Note that the enterprise irregulars url doesn’t work—that’s a little *too* irregular!
Ok, after reading through the comments, it is clear, there are more vendors interested in this than companies. I think that this is a great idea. There are a ton of questions regarding Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise Web 2.0.
What is extremely interesting is how many companies who deliver a wikis believe that is what Enterprise 2.0 is about. Delivering a web application is nothing new and can cause more issues than benefits. Nothing could be further from the truth. In a real company or organization, “real-world” IT departments need to figure out how to integrate many of their legacy and back-end systems to take advantage of these new technologies. I am interested to find out what these vendors do for SAP, Oracle and mainframe data and applications? Do they provide an integration tool for exposing these as web services and then providing an orchestration tool or mashup tool?
I am really asking these questions of companies and vendors. This is not a test or a marketing issue.
There are clearly at least two facets of “real” IT that needs to be addressed. Using legacy applications in Enterprise 2.0 world and using new web applications for collaboration. Do these need to be separate? Can a company create a strategy and get a product or solution that allows them to use legacy information and data and create a collaboration portal? The answer is yes - not through individual web applications - through a web services infrastructure.
Creative Destruction is conceptually very appealing. Foster and Kaplan wrote a book on it in 2001. Drucker emphasized dialogue, an effective form of Creative Destruction, as a powerful means for Knowledge Management way back in 1988 in his ‘Coming of the New Organization’. Peter Senge called attention to dialogue in the mid 90s for creating the learning organization in his ‘The Fifth Discipline’. But the problem was and is creaton of an enterprise wide means for constructive dialogue on each event with the proper securty in place.
Collaboration as practiced today is discussion and not dialogue. Discussion is not Creative Destruction.
The critical hurdle is an end-to-end process for collaboration. Until this is created organizations will be impaling themselves in pursuing Creative Destruction with IT.
The process automation approach favoured by IT has reached a dead end since it regards an end-to-end process as inconceivable. This still leaves room for exploring teamwork patterns.
Based on my R&D I can confirm that the effort in this direction is very rewarding.
To David’s point (on 11/2)—yeah, the vendors are interested… because we have a story to tell. By no means is Enterprise 2.0 only about wikis (besides, wikis have been around for 10 years, before there was an “Enterprise 2.0"), I think that’s just a reflection of (1) who’s reading Andrew’s blogs 
and (2) where many demonstrable successes have come from. At Office 2.0, it seemed like there was way more attention paid to wikis than to other Enterprise 2.0 apps. I’m not sure why that was. Again, maybe it’s a reflection of where there have been some successes.
Andrew,
I stumbled across a great videocast about enterprise 2.0 at the BBC. It is presented by the head of learning and is vendor-pitch free.
http://theotherthomasotter.wordpress.com/2006/11/17/bbcs-nigel-paine-on-podcasting-wikis-and-blogs/
Three papers with case-studies on blogging / social bookmarking in corporate settings forthcoming at HICSS’07 (in the last two cases the company name studied is anonymised, but you can relatively easy figure it out):
- Lilia Efimova, Jonathan Grudin. Crossing boundaries: A case study of employee blogging. https://doc.telin.nl/dscgi/ds.py/Get/File-65836/
- Anne Jackson, JoAnne Yates, Wanda Orlikowski. Corporate blogging: Building community through persistent digital talk
- Laurie Damianos, Donna Cuomo, John Griffith, David Hirst, James Smallwood. Exploring the adoption, utility, and social influences of social bookmarking in a corporate environment
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