Enterprise 2.0 Vs Diffusion of Innovation
After reading the excellent Andrew McAfee Enterprise 2.0 book, I was wondering if there was any point for Heavy Mental to publish yet another review. There already are plenty around with Venkatesh Rao’s on Enterprise 2.0 blog and Gil Yehuda’s probably being the most interesting ones.
It might be more valuable to offer a perspective focussing on the Adoption part of the book. By and large, the adoption topic has been the one sparking off most of the conversations and thinking on the Enterprise 2.0 topic. The idea is to confront McAfee work with a reference on the topic of adoption of innovation : Diffusion of Innovation : by Everett Rogers.
In all fairness, I haven’t read Diffusion of Innovation. I only know it through Scott Berkun presentation on innovation (already mentioned in a post on the subject). Scott quotes Everett Rogers work :
The diffusion of innovation is based more on sociology and psychology than on technology. Here are the things technologists hate : whenever they come with innovation, the main forces against the innovation adoption are sociological ones : ego, envy, fear, pride, politics, security etc …
These are the factors according to E. Rodgers to evaluate how likely your solution is bound to be adopted :
- Relative advantage : what value does it bring ?
- Compatibility : how much effort to transition to this innovation ?
- Complexity : how much learning is required to apply it ?
- Triability : How easy is it to try the innovation ?
- Observability : How visible are the results ?
Enterprise 2.0 represents innovative ways to communicate, collaborate and share knowledge among distributed teams in the organizations. So let’s see how Mc Afee writings answer these questions …
Relative advantage : What value does it bring ?
Andrew Mc Afee mentions Bob Kaplan who co-authored Converting Intangible Assets Into Tangible Outcomes. In this book, Kaplan argues that
None of these intangible assets (human, organizational and informational capital – i.e databases, Information systems, networks, technology infrastructure) has value that can be measured separately or independently.
Baseline : you just can’t build a regular business case for IT with Enterprise 2.0.
Mc Afee still recommend to build some kind of business case with the following elements :
- Costs and time lines : if benefits can’t be estimated, effort should be put in place to have some cost estimates. How long the project will lasts, what are the milestones, number of people involved. Even though one knows that these estimates must be considered very carefully. Remember General Eisenhower quote : plans are useless, but planning is indispensable
- Expected benefits : Here McAfee recommends to include short cases studies or example. A great one could be Cisco Economics of Collaboration, reporting a whopping $US691M of operating savings and 4.9% of productivity increase in 2008 thanks to the introduction of Web 2.0 tools into the enterprise.
- Technology footprint : the scale of a technology reach from geographical, organisational and functional perspectives. Enterprise Social Networks are like e-mail : they are supposed to be used all over the company. So their technological footprint is quite large.
Tech It Easy Comment
Mc Kinsey have published a comprehensive report on How companies can benefit from Web 2.0 . This could be a good entry point to provide some visibility of Enterprise 2.0 benefits.
Compatibility : How much effort to transition to this innovation ?
McAfee refers to Harvard Business School Marketing professor John Gourville and his article in Harvard Business Review “Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers“. Gourville looked into research on behavioral economics and reported the three principles of people solutions evaluation :
- People make relative evaluations
- Reference point is status quo
- People are loss-adverse : a prospective loss of X is 3 times more painful that a gain of X is pleasurable.
These elements lead to the fact that we value what we have far more highly that what we could have instead. The result is what Gourville calls the 9x effect : people rate what they have 3 times more than their actual value and prospective items three times less than what they’re actually worth. A new item must therefore be at least 9 times better to justify the (perceived) effort required for the adoption.
Here, the risk is to overvalue prospective new tools (Wikis, Blogs, Twitter-like, Professional Profiles) in a view to increase or chance the reach the 9x threshold. Gourville thinks this may have disastrous consequences.
As a result, McAfee quotes Gourville and recommends not to oversell the collaborative platform and make it clear that the adoption will be a long phase.
Tech It Easy Comment
I also think the overselling approach is not good but for other reasons : this might alter the perception of our speech (buzzword, vaporware, consultants concepts etc …) and have opposite effects within our audience.
Instead, I am a firm believer that we should help knowledge workers rationalize their perceived value of the collaboration and communication tools they’ve been using for the last 15 years : MS Office, e-mails, Network File Repositories, Intranet etc …
Not by telling them these tools are not appropriate but rather by asking them painful questions. The objectives is to help them realize that these tools are the root cause of many of their daily work frustrations.
Once this frustration has surfaced and has been clearly described by the people, it will be natural for them to decrease the perceived value of these enterprise 1.0 tools. Therefore the value threshold Enterprise 2.0 tools need to meet to reach the 9 times value will decrease accordingly. And the effort to transition to E20 as well.
The Five Elevator Pitches suggests some of these painful questions to help rationalizing the perceived value of today’s enterprise tools.
Then you can ask what they are doing about these communication/organizational / knowledge sharing problems or what are they planning to do. Are they giving up despite all the new communication tools available ? Then you can talk about how Enterprise 2.0 can foster knowledge management, innovation, collaboration and productivity.
Complexity : How much learning is required to apply it ?
This is one of the main advantages of Enterprise 2.0 in terms of adoption. These tools are dead easy to use. This is the first of the three trends that yield better tools according to McAfee. It also is the A (Authorship) part of the S.L.A.T.E definition : ensuring every worker has easy access to enterprise 2.0 platforms.
Wiki, blogs, FAQ, Real Time Web, Personal Profile. Their universal adoption on the internet is a solid proof of how easy these platforms are.
Trialability : How easy is it to try the innovation ?
Again : it is extremely easy to test these tools. You can install main Enterprise 2.0 software solutions for free for 30 days and have people try the solution.
McAfee describes the case of Serena Software using public platforms (Facebook) with appropriate security settings as enterprise platform. If your company is happy with this approach, the trial can even be easier.
Tech It Easy comment
The concern with 30 days trial is that on such a small time frame, network effect won’t have the time to foster full benefits. These systems become more valuable as the number of users and the volume of injected data grows.
So a 30 days trial might not be enough to see the full benefits of such solutions. However it can still proves how easy it is to use them.
Observability : How visible are the results ?
A good strategy to make the results visible is to locate some teams of social networks enthusiasts (IT or HR departments might be a first good guess). And start to deploy the solution on such narrow teams.
Andrew McAfee recommends to measure the progress (number of blog posts, comments, wiki pages, personal profiles etc …) rather than the ROI. Besides, McAfee strongly encourages leadership in the form of valueing the people that enrich the platforms.
Tech It Easy Comment
In a transparency and observability purpose, it might be a good idea to monitor the knowledge workers perceived value of their tools and measure the progress. Preparing a questionnaire with a set of questions around the subject of collaboration, innovation, productivity and knowledge management could be a good starting point.
Organization employees could then answer these questions before and after the launch of the E20 solution and then on a regular basis. This could be a good solution to see if E20 solution helps in reducing the frustration of knowledge workers in their daily work.
The final score
The end result is that McAffe book is the perfect entry point to set up a corporate Enterprise 2.0 strategy. It describes clearly and perfectly the tools, the context in which they were born and how appropriate they are within knowledge workers organizations, via some real life examples.
In terms of diffusion, McAfee provides all the principles and examples required to answer most of Everett Rogers questions.
What would you recommend to help diffuse Enterprise 2.0 ?
(Hi It’s Cecil here. A copy of this post is available on my blog Heavy Mental)
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Interesting review. Why do you have "Tech IT Easy Comment" plastered throughout the post.
My stance is always Observability is key. I think that the internet has made a lot of headway in the domain of analytics and copywriting for effect. We are in a new age of writers, where people are constantly exchanging thoughts on how to better present information so that readers can use it. Some of those lessons should be applicable on a private networking environment. Observability is also key when dealing with the most conservative people in an organisation, usually the ones paying the bills.
Generally, I like the idea of deploying e2.0 systems on a small scale to see how effective such a system really is. I have my doubts. Just like Google Buzz isn't really an innovation over Gmail, because email is already a social network, I think there are plenty of social networks in place in organizations, they are just not labeled as such.
btw. your post doesn't seem to have a title. Is that on purpose?
Woops ! Fixed the title.
McAfee would tel you that email is a channel (i.e 1 to 1, not searchable etc ..) while E20 is based on platforms (many people accessing, searchable as data is persisted and indexed with tags etc …)/
Funnily enough, I'm not sure that CEO are the most relunctant in adoption 2.0 approaches. From many of the studies on the topic, we found out that Managers were. Bringing E20 bring transparency, fluidity, disintermediation, all this elements that make middle managers pretty uncomfortable with the whole thing.
The advanatge in deploying on small scale s that you can reach small milestones and foster small vitories. This helps in giving momentum to the project.
Agree with you : observability is key. But compatibility and complexity also are.