As I discussed in my previous post, in every collaboration instance, the returns on collaboration must be greater than opportunity costs + collaboration costs.The cost involved in such an implementation is not just a social business software or purchasing some SaaS product online and get people to use it. I believe its more than that. In many large organisations, they do not have a central ERP, CRM, Data warehouse and so on. Enterprise 2.0 is not just about getting people to social network together or work on documents together or “tweet” each other. We need to strategically think about why we need employees to collaborate and share information.

Let me provide you with a simple case study. A large company with multiple units across the world would like to get two business units to collaborate to cross sell products to both business unit’s customers. Both business units have their own CRM and ERP systems running. A social business software was introduced hoping to achieve the benefits of Enterprise 2.0. It didn’t work. The following points were attributed to its failure:

1) Teams didn’t trust each other.
2) Performance review of teams was still focus on the individual business units. They were not judge on how effective the collaboration arrangement was
3) They didn’t had a common CRM system to track who did what to which customer. Data was inconsistent, errors were plentiful.

The above three points tells me there are three areas that needs to be targeted.
1) Change in organisational culture
2) Change in organisational performance management and structure.
3) Change in technology systems.

If you are an seasoned profession in the IT industry, you can roughly figure out that just accomplishing these three objectives will not be cheap and would take time.

My experience with such implementation is that many leaders do not know when to collaborate and when not to. One classic example is when teams can’t decide on a specific problem or find the best route of advancement. I do not think the relationship works this way – the more people collaborating, the better result is achieved. Just like a 2 hour meeting with 20 people in the room is generally a waste of time. Leaders must target collaboration strategically.

Collaboration takes time and effort of employees and teams and this translates to opportunity cost. Employees from both sides of the team could have spend doing something more useful. The exact time spent on collaborating could be translated to a cost (based on salary of employees). Employers needs to ensure that employees are using their time effectively and help their organisation make money.

Collaboration between teams also cost money. There is a cost for the technology platform, telephone calls, traveling to other sites and so on. These costs should not be under estimated – small amounts can roll up to be a substantial amount.

Based on this, the returns of a collaboration arrangement between teams should be greater than the sum of opportunity costs + collaboration costs.

Returns on collaboration > opportunity costs + collaboration costs

If a collaboration arrangement does not fulfill this model, then it would be better to stay status quo or find another way to maximise the returns on other investments.

I will not discuss in detail game theory. However, it is widely known that game theory consist of five elements – Players, Added values, Rules, Tactics and Scope, PARTS in short.

Players
If there were a situation where two teams would not collaborate together, it could be wise to introduce another team to the collaborative platform or even changing one of the teams and replacing it with another team that is more interested. There is no point pushing and trying, if the team is not interested, it would be too much pain and effort to change the culture.

Added values
When two teams are collaborating and one slacks away, this could be sign that there is not enough incentive for the team that is slacking away. This calls for more added value to be provided to the team that is slacking away. For example, if a car product innovation team is collaborating with the tyre department and the product innovation team is just sucking information out of the tyre department and not contributing back, this would not provide any incentive for the tyre department to collaborate anymore. However, if the product innovation team is to provide feedback and ideas for the tyre department to improve on their operations, design and efficiency, this could improve the collaboration.

Rules
Within an organisation, rules could always be used to force people to collaborate. However, I have never been the sort of person who will try to force something down someone else’s throat.

Tactics
In Game Theory, tactics refer to changing the way players perceive the game and thus changing the way they compete. In the context of this post, an organisation could use other success stories within the organisation that has delivered high growth and efficiency and present it to teams who are against collaboration. Changing the perception of losing control and power and providing these teams with greater benefits could be a way to go.

Scope
Finally, scope refers to the boundary of the game. I have seen some team collaborate only on certain things and not others. By increasing (or decreasing) the scope of the collaboration, it could ultimately improve the net benefit of collaboration. The last thing management would want is to over collaborate and start discussing things that are not to the point and doesn’t provide any benefits to the organisation.

What do you think of the methods I have presented above? Is this something you would consider when performing Enterprise 2.0 change management?

Alot of my friends asked me to wait for other ebook readers to be released. But after I checked out the price, it didn’t make sense to wait. Based on the two books I bought over the weekend, I save approximately $15 – $20 per book. Let’s say on average I save $20 per physical hardcover/paperback book (inclusive of shipping), for me to break-even the cost of my kindle, I will need to buy approximately 14 books. For me, 14 books will take me anything between 6 months to 9 months to read. However, if you check out the prices of other ebook readers, they are generally double the price of the Kindle and my break-even point will double as well. I think the Kindle is very well priced and despite some features that it lacks, I am sure for an average reader like me, its fit for purpose.

I totally recommend Kindle to anyone who reads a fair bit of books and you get magazines delivered to your kindle as well! Woo hoo!

Let’s forget about all the tools of Enterprise 2.0 for one moment. What are we trying to achieve with Enterprise 2.0? Innovation, communication, connecting people together, coordination and knowledge management are the few high level aims I can think of. However, all these can be sumed up easily into the concept of collaboration.

Collaboration is not about team building. Collaboration is about getting a whole organisation to work together and connecting teams with other teams within the organisation (read: connecting people together and communication). Collaboration is also about getting teams to work together to think about new ways to create new products and/or strategies to provide a sustainable future of an organisation (read: innovation). Collaboration is also about ensuring cross geographical teams to communication and achieve production goals efficiently and effectively (read: communication and coordination). With all these activities performed online, knowledge management and retention is achieved as a by-product of collaboration.

From the above, I would like to propose that Enterprise 2.0 is an organisational collaboration platform that aims to help organisations innovate, communication, connect and coordinate more efficiently and effectively.

What do you think?

Consulting firms must be able to formulate a rigorous methodology to approach Enterprise 2.0 change management effectively. Potential areas that needs to be covered are like strategy, communication plan, C-level adoption, integration of current business process and many more. This is where consulting firms can make money as quite a substantial amount of time needs to be spent at the client side to work things through with the client. Consulting firms have a presence in many firms and that’s the best place to start.

Consulting firms should formulate a strategy, business plan, objectives and impact analysis of the Enterprise 2.0 platform for their clients. They can then do a technical product selection based on the requirements, implement the solution and move the change team into the organisation. Pilot teams could potentially start with the combined team between the consulting firm and the client, however, this could not be ideal depending on the situation and environment.

Selling Enterprise 2.0 to existing clients has a few benefits.
1) Since consulting firms have a presence within the client, there is a better understanding of the issues the client is facing and there are some levels of trust that is already established. Trust within a Enterprise 2.0 platform is critical for its success. Consultants can then show the client teams how to use it and demonstrate the many benefits of Enterprise 2.0.

2) With a presence within the client firm has another advantage where change consultants can act as champions and provide initial support for the clients.

3) Consultants on the ground also have the ability to identify areas where the platform needs to be modified and changed so that the platform constantly evolves to meet the client changing needs.

4) Lastly, when the implementation is successful, there will be greater rapport and trust built between the two parties.

Since Enterprise 2.0 is a rather new technology and concept within the organisational context, many clients do not understand what they can have and what they can’t. Many clients also do not know what and how to do stuff on the platform (i.e. when should I write a write a wiki page versus a blog?). I feel that that professional advice needs to be provided for the successful implementation of such projects. The last thing that should happen is the misuse of the platform (i.e. using the wiki as a document repository and a dumping ground). Consultants on the ground has the power to walk to most of the different scenarios that the client organisation is facing and tackle them one by one.

The response were as follows:
1) An organisation with these tools – approx 75% of students raised their hands
2) An organisation without these tool – no one raised their hands

I guess just this simple 1 minute survey with the future of working generation says alot about what organisations need to do to improve their internal systems.

Anyway, the presentation as below:

I think both Clay and Steven have made excellent points and I do think there is a fine line as to when a user would or wouldn’t pay. In simple economics, when there is a demand, there is a supply. I feel that online content will be the same too. Let me give some examples 1) Movies, 2) Books, 3) News / magazines. I will describe when consumers would pay for content and when they wouldn’t. I believe these are popular content types that are used by the average internet user.

1) Movies. Would you pay of it online?
Yes and no. Its becoming slightly harder to download from illegal sources. Even though its still rampant, laws are been erected to protect media companies. Its only fair that way, they make good movies, someone pays for it. Some people are also watching these shows being streamed online in places like Hulu. Since there are quite a few channels for free movies, why would anyone buy? I would for sure.

Movies from other sources are not fully trust-worthy, troublesome to get and potentially of a lower quality. With a media device like Apple TV, you rock up at home after work, really tired and feel like a movie and a beer. Switch on the TV, select the movie you want to watch and buy it. At the same time, whip up a simple dinner and movie is ready to be watched. There is a demand here – a demand for the latest blockbuster which is easily accessed, high quality movies with no security risks and almost real time. I would pay in this instance.

2) Books
eBooks is pretty much a double edge sword. eBooks allows publishers to reach consumers faster and environmentally friendly. As compared to paper books, ebooks are cheaper as well. However, that allows consumers to start trading it online and uploading it to random sites. Opps, that’s a problem – free books online. However, if ebooks publishers could restrict ebooks from being shared, they could create a demand. As far as I heard, ebooks takes a long time to get “shared” online and the demand for such books online could potentially be slightly lower and since we could assume that people who buys books are slightly more educated, there is an ethical commitment to pay for it. Moreover ebook readers are still not extremely common and downloading an ebook would mean users would have to have their laptop (not everyone has one) to read their book in bed before bedtime. All these reasons could contribute to the reason why book publisher’s revenues are not as affected as media companies.

3) News / magazines
News and magazines are an interesting one. If it is straight up world news on the latest bombing or political news, I won’t pay for it. There are way too many sources to get it free. However, certain news, especially financial news and business commentary, could potentially be worth alot because of the structure and data. These information is not freely available or requires time to consolidate and for busy people in the world they could be willing to pay to reduce some redundant work load. In my opinion, people will be willing to pay for quality data and information at top tier news sites. This could potentially be a problem for regional publishing houses with a small circulation. Their revenue stream will be deeply affected.

In many magazines that are still surviving, what could be done to provide a demand is to aggregate information for readers. Let’s take the popular female magazine – Cosmopolitan (or Cosmo in short) as an example. Alot of the gossip news published on Cosmo can be found online and readers could get it free. However, what Cosmo does is rather interesting, they have articles about fashion, love, cooking, leisure, gadgets and a whole heap of other content. They aggregate content for their target readers which then allows their readers to benefit from a one-stop shop for all their feminine informational needs. Would their target audience pay for it? Well, my female friends do.

Conclusion
I guess in any case, there must be a scare resource/content for people to pay for content. Companies must create a specific demand and meet specific requirements that will convince users fork out and part with their money in exchange for the content and/or services. Content by itself is freely available and I agree with Clay but we can always bundle content up with some value added features and sell it at a premium.

What do you think?

Below are somethings I really like:
1) Playback feature. With a tool with Google Wave, version control is necessary and playback does the job very well.

2) Commenting, discussion and collaborative editing. This is quite powerful, taking the idea of collaborative editing (google docs) and discussions/commenting into one platform allows uses to all work at the same time. No more check in, check out problems.

3) Highlight changes. With any version control, sometimes it might be hard to know what really changed. Google Wave allows highlighting of changes inline.

4) Drag and drop. This might be a rich user interface feature and might not provide much value for the tech savvy, but for the average joe, drag and drop makes wave alot easier to use.

5) APIs are pretty cool and the tools that can be generated for Wave will be limitless.

However, besides all these cool stuff. I felt that many features of Wave are marginally better than emails and with emails used as the incumbent communication tool. I really wonder if Wave will take off. The biggest issue is that Wave and traditional emails are not compatible at this point of time and for Wave to be useful, it has to be compatible. Google might be big and powerful but I am not convinced that they are powerful enough to change the traditional email way. The last thing Google should do is to compete directly with traditional emails.

Also for Wave to be successful, Google needs to get people on board quick! While the iron is hot, get people to start using it and start collaborating. I can see that they are signing people up somewhat quickly and I generally have one friend added to Wave a day but this needs to be way faster. The longer the people wait, the more frustrated they become and if they do not find benefits for themselves, they could just leave the platform.

This is just a quick review of what I could see over the last few days and I am sure what I think will change soon enough when I start discovering more and understanding wave better. Please do not take this as a full final review of the product. I am sure there’s alot more to Wave than what I wrote and we shall discover and see how things pan out.

I can see some kinds of trends here. According to the stats provided above, it seems like women prefer social networking sites whereas men prefer information driven sites like Digg and De.li.cious. I am not extremely surprised by the stats provided and was just wondering based on these stats, more research could be conducted to understand how gender differences could impact the usage of an Enterprise 2.0 platform. Does that mean that men will be more active in an information driven internal Enterprise 2.0 platform? Does that also mean that social networking within an organisation could potentially not be very successful if its a male dominated workplace?

More research needs to be conducted to find out more regarding usage patterns, types of activities, cultural differences and geographical differences to uncover more underlying information.