I realize there's a little gap in time from my last blog post but there was a little merger...
In any case, I wanted to discuss a conversation that seems to be on every customer's mind when we discuss some of the new Enterprise 2.0 capabilities. Most start the conversation this way:
"With the current economic climate, I either need to generate more business or service my existing customers better. It's very difficult to justify any new Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 projects that don't fit into one of these two categories. What do I do?"
So here's some strategies that resonate well with many customers. First of all, everything (good and bad) needs to be measured in some way. If it's good, you want to know how good. If the project is bad, then you want to know as soon as possible so you don't waste resources supporting something that adds no value.
Great, measure how good the stuff is. But what should should I measure? In many case when vendors talk about productivity, they are talking about very subjective areas. However, there are specific things that can be measured. Then a cost can be associated with the measurements depending on which users are impacted.
Here's my two places to start:
1. Find a Business Owner for the project that can describe their specific pain point and what they think might help solve the problem.
2. Make the measurement as concrete as possible. You're going to need the information to justify opening the company's wallet. So make sure they are things that should be measured.
So let's start with Wikis as an example of shopping technology around and we do another service in following posts. (I want to point out that it makes more sense to work on the business problem and then decide on technology vs finding a cool piece of technology and then trying to find where it fits.)
A simple measurement is how much time is lost by a specific user updating different documents that are attached to email. If you have two authors on one document, it might not be large enough to measure. But if you have ten people contributing to a document and they have roughly 5 edits per page and it takes a person 2 minutes to integrate each comment. You can quickly see that for each iteration of the document, they will end up "losing" (10 people x 5 edits x 2 minutes =) 100 minutes per page for one person. But you haven't finished yet, if it is attached to an email, then a subset of users will each spend a few minutes reviewing the different renditions that are sent around. So there is a follow-on number to calculate as well, if the first number doesn't have a big enough impact.
So when you think about adding these services into the organization, again find a specific metric. We'll talk about blogs, discussions, content, and others...
