Enterprise 2.0 Success Factors


There are some common success factors that emerge from all the case studies I researched and included in my final manuscript, which I thought would be both reproducing here:

Speed and flexibility
Oracle’s IdeaFactory took just a few days to build. Janssen-Cilag’s wiki-based intranet was purchased, customised and launched within two weeks. Gone are the days of 12-month deployment cycles. Today’s employees are much more forgiving if they get a solution with a few rough edges, if they get it quickly and it does the job.

Ease of use
Most of my examples could be launched virally using word of mouth alone. There was no learning curve, no training requirement and no big internal marketing campaign. Rather than the company saying ‘go and use this system, it’s great’, employees tell each other about it.

Demand driven
Successful social software systems are built in response to request from end users, not a management committee spending 12 months identifying and implementing a solution to a problem that employees don’t buy in to.

Individual value first
The best social software puts the value to the individual before the value to the organisation.

Do you agree?

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February 7th, 2008
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Comment Number:
1
Written by:
Jasbinder
Posted on:
February 13, 2008 at 10:59 pm

Niall, the success factors are spot on - trojan mice each and every one. Can’t help but feel that as e2.0 normalises, more organisations are likely to want to use related approaches to develop a more collaborative culture (I would like to say co-create with employees, but maybe that’s too optimistic) - so the demand could understandably come from the aforementioned committee.

This leads to well-known, related experiences - as highlighted by Deddie Weil (http://www.blogwriteforceos.com/blogwrite/2008/02/free-download-m.html) re blogs: “I can tell you from experience that creating a corporate blog for a Fortune 500 company is one part big idea and nine parts down in the trenches parsing each word for tone, content, nuance, legal ramifications, etc.”

Actually pleasing to hear, as the same issues arise with just about all forms of internal communication.

Comment Number:
2
Written by:
Sam Lawrence
Posted on:
February 14, 2008 at 2:12 pm

Niall,

You should check out this in-depth case study from EMC. I summed it up for Chuck Hollis, their VP. He has dedicated an entire blog to the problem, requirements, search, solution and deployment. Not to mention the resulting business impact. And this for 35,000 people, who ironically own eRoom and Documentum.
http://tinyurl.com/37vzkc

Cheers,
Sam

Comment Number:
3
Written by:
Niall Cook
Posted on:
February 15, 2008 at 11:05 am

Thanks for the comments guys. Jasbinder - agree fully. Sam - nice case study, although I’m always sceptical about case studies published by vendors in the course of promoting their own products. For the book, I purposely tried to find people inside companies recounting their experiences first hand (the last thing you want when you shell out hard earned cash is to feel you’re being sold to), but there is definitely a place for vendor case studies too.