In this exploration we address the latter of these two scenarios, in which business user empowerment allows knowledge management solutions to quickly be constructed and the barrier to effective knowledge work to drop within an organization. People are hard pressed to deny the “cool” factor of these new tools, but these suites inherently pose some tough, critical questions about their business value. Between the practical application of these technologies, challenges around governance and security, and issues around education and adoption, it is easy to see where an organization has to think long and hard about implementing these tools and ask important questions:

• Where do these tools fit into the enterprise?
• How can we govern the usage of these tools and manage the data generated by these tools?
• How do we leap the user education hurdle?
• How can these tools generate business value, thereby justifying a potential deployment?

Once you are able to address these points and understand what makes sense for your enterprise, you can identify where these product sets can provide value. You’ll be able to see that harnessing these tools makes it possible to accelerate knowledge work through the capture and presentation of information through user-authored spaces. It will also be possible to calculate an objective return on investment by measuring key performance indicators that satisfy the justification for the toolsets. Ultimately, this allows you to unlock value from enterprise knowledge management for your organization, granting you new levels of knowledge sharing and efficiency.

Fitting Into the Enterprise

A medium- to large-scale enterprise has an electronic mail solution along with a host of vertical applications implemented to address core needs like procurement, financials, and other common line-of-business needs. These tools run the gamut in the way they allow users to produce and manage an organization’s data.

Email is the essence of unstructured data and, conversely, vertical applications manage and host rigidly structured data. In organizations where knowledge work is occurring, these tools fail to provide a platform to act as a workspace to facilitate the dynamic, ad hoc collaboration around business challenges.

Although written from a sales and marketing standpoint, Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail details dormant economic value that goes unaddressed by large systems. Only when a vehicle exists to cost-effectively address niche needs will this value ever be realized. We’re continually presented with projects that have technical solutions falling somewhere between unstructured email and highly structured vertical systems like SAP. Enterprise 2.0 collaboration technologies support the needs in this middle ground that never could have been managed or cost-effectively addressed before.< /p>

This middle ground, or “whitespace,” has traditionally implied custom development effort, and generally it took six to eight months to develop a solution for even the smallest of business problems. When business users need a tool to manage this middle ground, it is not feasible to justify custom development, and the business makes use of the only tools at hand to tackle the problem. These have traditionally been email and other tools that are not well suited to knowledge management work.

User-driven product suites shine under these circumstances and provide a framework for teams to quickly create and manage these situations. When business users are able to identify a need that the traditional application space does not address and quickly satisfy those needs with these toolsets, value is realized because they do not need to engage development resources from the IT arm of the organization; instead, they can respond at near real-time speed. This allows IT to focus on more strategic projects around their core business that do require precious resources, and business users can work efficiently within a managed space in the enterprise.

Governance

With highly dynamic collaborative tools, mitigating fears of misuse is not a trivial matter. Within most organizations, any electronic information outside of email and casual office documents requires some degree of formal regulation.

Often, a battle ensues between business teams and technology management teams as to how best to use the tools. To make the most of the toolsets and to obtain the greatest business value, a reasonable, but not overzealous, level of governance must be placed around them. When we think of governance within a highly dynamic collaborative environment, some basic principles can be followed to smoothly manage the processes, while still allowing business users to create value.

Like a traditional IT initiative, obtaining executive- or departmental management-level sponsorship is crucial to the success of the initiative. Just because the toolsets enable fast solution development does not reduce the need for sponsorship. In addition to the sponsorship, the purpose of the deployment needs to be clearly defined. It is not enough to deploy a project with the toolset just because of the features available within the toolset. Feature-driven projects are destined to fail.

After the solution is in place, it will need to be maintained. This means that a clear owner must be defined for the outputs of the project. This owner will need to obtain any requisite training to support and enhance the solution going forward.

Based on the purpose of the deployment, it is essential to identify what information will be committed to these spaces. Will a space contain information that is sensitive and in need of being secured? Who will have access to modify, edit, or add information to this space? What level of auditing needs to be put into place? Knowing the answers to these questions upfront will allow you to set up the correct access permissions to enforce business policies within the workspace.

Finally, a plan for periodic review of the project’s outputs needs to be defined. This review acts as a checkpoint to make sure that not only technical but also business process rules are being adhered to. The review should also contain procedures and metrics that measure when a space should be discontinued due to nonuse.

Outside of security, at the end of the day, much of the governance with toolsets that pose a low barrier to entry will boil down to business processes. People in organizations need to be responsible for their actions at a business level beyond the technology. This is where a clearly defined plan based on the above elements is crucial if people are to succeed with enterprise 2.0 technologies.

Education

User-driven products that provide expedient gratification with regard to the reduction of daily burdens and processes have exceptionally high levels of adoption. Public examples of such systems underscore this trend, including the social networking site MySpace and blogging tools like Blogger and WordPress; these are definitive examples of tools that self-educated users have quickly adopted and gained value from, without extensive formal education.

The low barrier to usage can be attributed to the toolsets’ small, but often highly used feature sets. For users experienced with complex enterprise applications, this is a refreshing change. At first seemingly confining, the limited feature sets allow for maximum usability. Tools like Basecamp from 37signals also embody this ethos, providing a small, but often used feature set. This drastically reduces the need for education and increases the rate of adoption and speed at which value can be delivered.

That being said, it is beneficial to offer formal training classes to outline the available functionality of the tool and review how it might be applied through an examination of a series of use cases in order for the end users to obtain the greatest benefit. Once an initiative has been able to conform to the governance requirements for a project, a quick boot camp-style training curriculum led by an experienced user or company teacher is an excellent way to jumpstart the project in an effective manner with minimal resources.

Value

Given the current unmanaged whitespace within organizations, these tools provide substantial value from both a business and information technology management standpoint. Business users are able to realize new value by quickly reacting to their current and emerging business challenges, and authoring solutions for them. Blogging and wiki-style mechanisms provide an excellent platform to facilitate knowledge transfer and knowledge management not possible before, allowing for the actualization of all-important tacit knowledge. Information technology management groups can benefit from cost savings by consolidating some existing, moderately used applications and from a never-before-possible degree of auditing within the whitespace.

Complex decision making

Tools that allow the business to paint a canvas of dynamic collaborative functionality allow for an endless possibility of “applications” to be created. Imagine a situation in which a major decision needs to be made among a number of players from across the business. The decision might hinge on information from a CRM, ERP, or custom application. This critical data can then be incorporated into a space where users can contribute to a wiki or share documents and various other artifacts around the data to ultimately make a decision or select a strategy on the matter. This would have historically happened in a disjointed way across email where the process would take longer and the knowledge work potentially would be lost beyond the final decision.

Collection of tacit knowledge

The creation of a low barrier to the collection of tacit knowledge cannot be understated and can have a direct impact on the bottom line of a business. Imagine a vendor consulting group that is helping to increase product sales. Ensuring their field methodologies, such as best practices and critical product issues, are easily captured and shared among resources, can have a direct impact on deployment success. This deployment success translates literally to increased customer satisfaction, which, in turn, increases product sales.

Value through iterative contribution

User-driven authoring really shines when we examine how quickly we are able to realize value throughout a project. User-driven collaborative frameworks accelerate the time in which business value is delivered due to the ability to iteratively author. Unlike building with traditional software, requirements do not need to be completed for the business to begin constructing a solution. This allows business users to continuously focus on small, high-value components, which lets them realize value early and often throughout their process.

Cost savings and control

As IT departments attempt to keep costs down and monitor what transpires within their systems, controlling application sprawl is a top priority. We can look toward these new tools to act as a platform for consolidation of existing, lightly used legacy applications. This reduces cost not only from a server perspective, but also from a code maintenance perspective. Potential “would have been” custom development initiatives can now be handled through the framework. This can also stunt ongoing development maintenance costs as development efforts can now be directed at furthering core elements of the business and not providing the “one off” solutions that the user-driven collaborative suites now fulfill.

To measure the value that the suites deliver, key performance indicators such as email usage, the amount of resource and time to onboard a new employee, and the length of time to resolve a problem or complete a research assignment can all be captured. Additional quantifiable justifications can include servers and the knowledge, staff, and time to maintain many small, infrequently used systems.

Final Thoughts

Enterprise 2.0 collaboration suites are an investment in an organization’s production capacity. The possibility of being able to harness and navigate whitespace within organizations through business user-authored environments is an exciting, powerful vision. To drive these efforts and expose new business value, both education and governance must form the pillars that the newly created solutions will stand upon. In addition, a business champion must be able to firmly grasp these concepts and understand that value will not be delivered on the basis of the toolset’s features, but on solving key business problems and using the toolsets to manage the solution. With this foundation we are on our way to unlocking the value of enterprise 2.0 collaboration technologies.

* Originally published on BEA System’s Arch2Arch 03/05/2008

It is time to revisit business analysis basics and be careful to make sure we have not started focusing entirely too much about the perceived need for these tools, opposed to a specific need. These tools are powerful and attractive, but we really need to understand if and how these technologies should be leveraged – pinpointing where they can alleviate business pains. In the work that I have done with a range of enterprise software deployments there is a consistent trend demonstrating successful implementations result when done to address a specific need, tools that were put into place because the technology was in vogue failed. Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise fit the same bill. Do not look to implement them because eWeek magazine or another publication has labeled it as the thing that other IT executives will implement this year.

I hope to clear the air in this post by outlining the virtues of each tool (specifically tagging, blogging and wikiing) and through a series of questions add clarity to where they would make business sense and allow the virtues to be realized.

Tagging
Social tagging technology excels at handling large amounts of unstructured data that is not served by traditional knowledge management systems (i.e. folders upon folders buried in a large, somewhat static hierarchy). Given this power it needs to be considered as part of an overall knowledge management strategy for information workers, but it also needs to specifically address some pain or a specific need of the business.

As information volumes continue to rapidly expand in the enterprise it is very difficult to organize and catalog assets, even with the support of full-time librarians. Additionally, in a world of M&A and constantly shifting organizational structures, it can be all the more important in helping people to reign in and make sense of this data. It is not uncommon for users to spend an extra fifteen minutes searching for an article within traditional search engines when they could not explicitly state their query to return satisfactory results. By contrast, tagging technologies have allowed them to see what other, related categories materials might fall into, speeding their searches drastically. Here are some questions that may help your organization determine if tagging would support the business by meeting specific business needs.

• Is your company currently experiencing quantifiable issues finding documents or other digital assets within your network? Is it a big enough of an issue to act on?
• Is a technology like social tagging something that your organization’s culture would embrace? Is the user base directly asking for it? It is important to keep in mind that tagging will only benefit end users if they are willing to contribute to the tagging of document. As enterprise tagging matures it is likely that it will gain acceptance in much the same way instant messaging has within the enterprise.
• Is there any research or knowledge intensive work at your organization that tagging may accelerate through more effective discovery of information?
• Are there opportunities to use this technology to help external customers more easily do business with your company?
• Would it be possible to designate someone to own and manage the platform from a business standpoint at a department or enterprise level?

Blogging
Blogs are great tools to rapidly publish and share expertise within an organization. Unlike email, a blog posting persists and is generally visible to a large audience which is able to engage the author in a dialog with comments or questions for everyone to see. Unlike a discussion forum, a blog posting provides detailed information around a particular topic, rather than a brief comment or question. A blog is also generally associated with a single person, allowing them to gain recognition in their organization or respective field. In your organization it might be a software developer, operations specialist or researcher that is able to provide a significant amount of value with this tool.

It may sound strange, the key to enterprise blogging is not about creating blog entries to be consumed by the entire enterprise, but about providing a single, unified platform that specific business participants can use to write posts for discrete audiences. Blogging within departments or to specific niches where the information is most relevant is the most valuable use of the technology. One of my prior postings (Niche Cooking for Portal Success) details a philosophy aligned with this approach which will work equally well for blogging. The following questions will help you to identify if it makes for your organization to deploy this technology.

• Do you have experts in your organization that have pointers that others would benefit from in a measurable way?
• How often would there be something that someone would blog about that people across the enterprise could really benefit from? Our foremost needs revolve around what it takes to get our work done, so any blogging that takes place in an organization has to help meet this need. With rare exception anything else is not providing value that can justify putting a platform into place and taking the time to manage it.
• Would connecting with customers, partners or external constituents add value for your business? Would it be worthwhile enough for the investment?
• Would people be allowed to have time to contribute to their blogs during work hours?
• Would your organizational culture be tolerant of people posting with limited supervision?

Wikiing
Due to the allure of ubiquitous knowledge capture and propagation, a wiki deployment requires an extra amount of careful thought as to why and how it will be deployed to the enterprise. Given the potential, as demonstrated publicly by Wikipedia, many companies entertain having a wiki tool whose content expands into all sections of their business. This risk is that this generic, organization wide deployment, would most likely bring little business value to the enterprise and leave people wondering why they ever made an investment into the technology.

Similar to blogging technology, Wikis are going to be most effective when deployed for a very specific reason. A deployment could occur within a department, across departments or even with areas outside of or around the company, but should always tie back to a specific need that the tool is supporting. Wikis do an excellent job of helping knowledge workers collaborate on projects or support a function or process, by capturing tacit knowledge, sharing “facts”, presenting methods and or publishing best practices. Instead of being done by a single user, a Wiki allows a team to work together – enhancing and updating areas to evolve with the business. There is no better “living document” than a Wiki. Take a moment to think about the following questions to see if a Wiki might make sense for your business.

• Does your business have undocumented processes or knowledge that could help a specific department or function perform more effectively if captured in a Wiki format?
• Is there a simple place where new employees could go to learn during an on-boarding process? As policies, procedures or reporting structures and processes change within an organization a Wiki does an excellent job of making sure people can get up to speed.
• Does an identifiable bottleneck exist with some members of your organization that could be alleviated if they were able to share their knowledge collectively with other employees?
• Given the categorization that a Wiki imposes would it make existing knowledge more accessible if placed into the a unified format that a group could manage and edit? Since a Wiki can be an authoritative place for a collection of related materials it requires far less maintenance than a series of disparate files to maintain, enhance and manage.
• Would people be allowed to have time to contribute to the Wiki during work hours?
• Would your organizational culture be tolerant of people posting with limited supervision?

Final Thoughts
There is not doubt that a range of social computing technologies in the enterprise can assist businesses to run more effectively. However, we want to make sure that we do not implement technology in search of a problem. The challenge is connecting them with the business in the right way. Do not find a use for tagging, blogging, wikiing. Find the business need or pain point – then examine what technologies best support meeting that need or eliminating the pain point. Hopefully some of the above questions can help your organization to focus, clarify and be successful with where and how these emerging technologies can benefit your company.

The next wave driving business value via tagging is here and it is being done through creative design and deployment. At this point the value proposition of tagging enterprise artifacts by and for knowledge workers is generally understood. Given this, it begs the question as to what additional value an organization can gain if they have invested in or plan to invest in an enterprise tagging platform. With the recent release of enterprise tagging technologies our options have become even more expansive as to how we can interact with our data by way of an extensive REST / JSON based, platform independent API . This new flexibility offers the possibility to leverage tagging as more than just an add-on or nice to have feature, but as the core component for dealing with data within a business application.

Traditional Challenge

Just as a folksonomy provides users a way to impose structure on unstructured data like a flat document collection, with some creative design decisions tagging can be extended to components of a business application that to date have historically not been able to benefit from the dynamic nature of community wisdom – only because of the way in which they were traditionally designed and developed. With a creative approach to application design we can now explore the use of tagging as the foundation of an application, rather than just a tool to augment existing data. Seem crazy? Let me explain.

For this discussion let’s focus on the application needs of the fictional technology analyst company, Socrates Research Institute (SRI). SRI is getting ready to provide a new release of a major research application that they are developing for their business users and reflecting on the challenges presented by their prior version.

The research application was designed on the basis that SRI had a set idea of things that they would like to capture around various research topics. Over time SRI found it very challenging to maintain the system given the quick market changes that can occur within research that SRI conducts. Emerging market trends and new technologies often forced SRI into a position where their prior application left them incapable of tracking and filtering on new data since they were bound by the static design of the system. SRI now knows that they will want to filter and collect data over time in categories that could rapidly change and they will need to adapt to situations that they cannot currently anticipate. SRI is hoping that beyond initial development they can do this without intimate involvement from IT.

New Approach

Driving the SRI research system by way of tagging will make it open ended and able to meet the rapid pace of emerging business needs. Data will now be applied by way of user defined attributes at runtime, enabling a limitless amount of sorting, filtering and consumption of the research without involving IT. How is this done you may ask?

1. The actual research itself will be collected on specific products that they are providing analysis on by way of a reference. In this case it will be a hyperlink to a product page on a vendor’s web site submitted through browser toolbar that interacts with the tagging engine API.

2. For each one of these products, tags will be applied that supply the type, price range, vendor and other information for that product. These tags will be made mandatory and selection will be enforced through the application interface, calling back to tagging REST APIs.

3. Beyond these tags all other information will be applied at the discretion of the research teams. Any additional data from the vendor around their product (PDFs, web pages, etc) can be pulled into the system and auto-tagged, saving time and effort.

Now it really starts to get interesting… once the data is applied to the object of research there are an expansive set of views that can be created on top of this data based on the filtering capabilities for searching tagging data. This means that IT can develop a single component that will allow users to define set views around products, research events and any other criteria that may be collected based on the context that the component is used in.

Ultimately the data can be presented based on filtered queries to give the end users very traditional application views, even though the data is stored within the tagging engine. This can include filtering different views of the data to provide context sensitive interface, drilling down into the data to provide more refined views and reporting on data that may be relevant to a certain, product, event, market condition, etc.

Final Word

There are many possibilities for application design and development using a framework as I have outlined above. Leveraging a tagging system as an application platform allows for a highly dynamic, user driven, application experience – while cutting down on development and maintenance costs. If you are curious about seeing how this approach might work for your next project, drop me a line and I would be more than happy to brainstorm around it.