Can you help Andrew McAfee design Enterprise 2.0 use experiments?

by Jenny Ambrozek

October 8, 2008 at 8:29 am · Filed under Reviews

Andrew McAfee, to whom we owe the term and thinking behind “Enterprise 2.0″ offers a unique opportunity to help design experiments investigating the effectiveness of the technology to change organizations.

McAfee’s October 6 blog post here explains. McAfee’s experiments will concentrate on:

“…. technology (duh) and working to design IT-enabled interventions. I’ll be particularly eager to design them around Enterprise 2.0 tools and approaches, and to address questions like:

Does a salesforce that uses Twitter outperform one that doesn’t?

What happens when you start measuring contributions to ESSPs ? Does hit accelerate or kill participation?

If the goal is better output from the R&D department, should the Enterprise 2.0 environment be limited to the department or open to all ?

Does a prediction market yield consistently more accurate forecasts of future sales than the forecasting group does?

Does t help when the CEO starts to blog? How much?

Andrew McAfee’s blog post specifically asks:

“.. what experiments should I advocate? How would you design research to determine how much of a positive difference Enterprise 2.0 can make, or research to understand effective adoption strategies? If you had a pristine greenfield site, what experiment(s) would you conduct? This is our chance to play mad scientist; how should we best take advantage of it? Leave a comment, please, and let’s get the brainstorming started. “

Given the research will be conducted under the auspices of Gary Hamel and the MLab in a meeting hosted by Ideo, why not put on the table your burning questions about how to create and prove the value of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. And if you are a pristine, Enterprise 2.0 free organization, perhaps you want to volunteer to be a guinea pig.

Here again is the link to McAfee’s post:

http://tinyurl.com/mcafee-invite

And I’m curious. Anyone not using Enterprise 2.0 tools and if so, why not? And if you are, have the technologies met expectations?

~ Jenny Ambrozek

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5 Comments »

I think that plenty of companies in Sweden haven’t implemented an Enterprise 2.0 strategy yet and therefore is not using these kinds of tools. They are stuck in the old way of doing business and they don’t have personnel to take care of the new applications.

Martin, THANK YOU for contributing to TheAppGap conversation with your perspective from Sweden. I’m interested to learn more about how you distinguish “old ways” from new and the kind of skills needed to adopt Enterprise 2.0 tools.

You might want to connect with Kenneth Lavrsen, Electrical Engineer, Motorola A/S in Denmark. He gave a terrific presentation at Enterprise 2.0 Hanover (in March). He described the process and positive impact from moving compliance documentation from a document to a wiki as a grassroots initiative Mr. Lavsen’s speaker profile is here:
http://www.enterprise2.0-summit.de/speakers.html

And Andrew McAfee, you are a VERY WELCOME visitor here. Clearly I promoted your research because I see the need. Please keep us posted on the specific projects you pursue. Among them I hope is serous attention to techniques for measuring value created through blogs, wikis and social networking platforms that from my experience is a missing piece for organizations. It seems to me there is a gap between the activity metrics most platforms provide e.g. page views, visits, posts, files added (easy to gather) and how that translates into demonstrable business value. Perhaps you already have conducted research on this issue that I haven’t yet stumbled upon.

I’ve thought a lot about the measurement topic over the years but most recently covening our Facebook Groups in Business Investigation. http://preview.tinyurl.com/FGIBI

For example we aspired, drawing on organizational network analysis methods, to look at the relationships of people joining a Facebok Group, specifically degree of tie (1st, 2nd etc) or unknown. Based on Ron Burt’s “Structural Holes” work and John Seely Brown and John Hagel’s writings we assumed the highest potential value comes from the weak ties. However, we had to settle for tracking the data that Facebook made possible e.g. wall posts, discussion posts, photos added through a painstaking manual process. We quickly concluded that the lack of administrative access to Facebook Group activity data was a strike against Facebook for becoming a serious platform for business use.

[...] The AppGap » » Can you help Andrew McAfee design Enterprise 2.0 use experiments?: Work 2.0, Web 2…. [...]

Jenny Ambrozek: Thanks for the information on Enterprise 2.0 and Kenneth Lavrsen. I haven’t seen many corporate blogs here in Sweden. It is still some kind of hype here with journalist from the mainstream media writing mainly about gossip and tabloid news.

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