After my post on Wiki ROI which looked at Luis Suarez’s experiment of not replying to email but instead responding through social software tools such as wikis and instant messaging, several questions arose from friends and colleagues. At the same time, I made contact with Luis, and this morning we went into some detail on what it is like to stop using email in a corporate environment, and use Web 2.0 collaboration tools instead.

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I have finally got round to setting myself up on Twitter. You can follow me on Twitter or see updates on the sidebar.

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The “long tail” or “power law” is an often mentioned phrase in the world of Web 2.0. To target the long tail means to attack the tail end of the market, going for niches rather than traditional and conventional large popular markets. It is important in the world of the web because whilst these niche markets have always existed, it was simply too expensive to serve them on a scale that was profitable. The web reduces the cost of reaching these niches, allowing organisations to focus on millions of markets of tens of people, rather than tens of markets of millions of people. Shown graphically, it looks like this:

Barack Obama has done exactly the same with his fundraising. Whereas Clinton attacks the head of the curve, getting a lot of money from a few large donors, Obama has gone for the tail. By using the internet to get a small amount of money from a large amount of people, he has shown how the long tail has beaten the head in terms of available cash. It is only because the internet is such a cheap channel that he has been able to do this – raising $234 million to Clinton’s $189 million (http://www.opensecrets.org/).

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I’ve known about Ideastorm for some time, but admittedly have never actually visited the site. I finally did so a while back and I have to say I absolutely love it. The compelling element for me was to see that there were several real Dell employees on the site responding to customers and prospective customers. The volume on the site is significant, and I can’t imagine any other company getting the sort of honest feedback that Dell is getting on its site.

Some of it is very painful to hear, but Dell are evidently not deleting critical comments. They’ve obviously taken the decision that if someone is going to say something negative they would rather hear it, and they would rather hear it in a forum where Dell has the right of response, rather than the conversation being owned by someone else.

Starbucks have already copied the idea, I wonder how long before these are standard for most companies?

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When I talk to customers about how to ensure they get new social software platforms such as wikis and bogs adopted in their organisation, I often set their expectations around the 90-9-1 rule. This has roughly corresponded with most consumer based platforms such as Flickr which shows only 1% of users actively initiate new contributions. A further 9% will ‘follow’ and are happy to contribute once they see the 1% in action. A further 90% will only ever take content out of a system, they will not contribute. This seems to follow most people’s experience in a seminar. At the end when the speaker asks for any questions there is an uncomfortable pause, then 1% of the audience might ask a question. Once the mould has been broken, a further 9% are keen to ask the second, third, fourth question etc. The remaining 90% may never ask a question (if they are desperate, they may hang around after the seminar to try and grab the speaker privately!) I use this analogy to try to set expectations around usage, but also encourage organisations to find that 1% early and nurture them as champions and evangelists.

Sherif Mansour has posted a great blog post about his experience of wiki adoption in his organisation. What was exciting for me was he saw 90-9-1 hold initially, but with internal adoption it’s more like 60-20-20. This is great news for enterprise wiki adoption. I think I’ll stick to 90-9-1 for now to set expectations, and if they end up with 60-20-20 they will be pleasantly surprised!

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Was watching a Stephen Fry programme last night about the Gutenberg printing press. What struck me was the similar language he used to describe the barriers and effect the printing press had compared to how we describe blogs and wikis. There were three main points of similarity:

• The invention of the printing press democratised ownership of information. The power was no longer held by the scribes who uniquely owned the means of production. In the same way, today’s media no longer owns the means of production or the content. Bloggers take up authoritative positions once held by news anchors. BBC News actively courts phone camera images of people who are at the scene before their news crew.
• The scale and pace of change was unbelievably quick. According to the programme, in 50 years over 20 million books were published from a standing start of 0. Some probably had a readership of 1, whereas others (such as the Bible) had a fundamental effect on the culture of the time. Similarly, there has been a massive proliferation of blogs in the last 5 years, many with a readership of one. Yet the popular ones rise to the top and the insignificant fade away
• There was a lot of fear about this revolution in information ownership. The Church, in particular, feared the end of their monopoly on interpretation of the Bible. Yet others recognised that if there was a widely available, universally consistent text (as opposed to messages transmitted verbally which were error prone, and even the scribes making copies were subject to error) this could allow a consistent understanding of faith. In the same way, some organisations fear the new world – Blockbuster, for example, seems fixated on a retail strategy whilst NetFlix, AppleTV, and even iPlayer and BT Vision clearly show the way of the future in on demand.

Could this change the world in the same manner as the printing press? Probably not on the same scale, it seems more of an evolution rathern than revolution, but the similarities were stunning.

Speaking of iPlayer, those within the UK can watch the programme here.

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Really interesting post from Stuart over at the Quickr blog – initially about migrating his blog to a new platform. The interesting sideline is about living inside his email client (which happens to be IBM Lotus Notes). Part of the problem for enterprises adopting Web 2.0 communication/collaboration platforms is that there are new applications to learn, which can create barriers. Social networking, blogging, wiki contribution, instant messaging, not to mention email, are all to often separate self-contained applications. When organisations try to roll them out there is often a negative reactin towads “yet another application”, and users have to manage switching between them, sometimes with different usernames and passwords!

Whilst I often encourage clients to move away from email as a form of communication, this doesn’t necessarily mean moving away from their email applications. Instant messaging can now be plugged into both IBM and Microsoft platforms – so you can reply to an email with an instant message, or a pc-to-pc phone call right from within your email client. This significantly increases the chances of your users to actually try the new communcation features rather than simply reverting to habit and relying on email. Stuart’s post shows that blog and twitter posts can now be managed alongside email and instant messaging from a single application. If Web 2.0 collaboration features can be provided within existing applications, the chances of people actually using them is likely to increase.

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Social software/Web 2.0 tools such as blogs/wikis/instant messaging can be a great way to manage the exceptions to your business processes. Here’s why…

In a previous life, I was an SOA Evangelist for IBM’s WebSphere integration suite. A large amount of IT spend in the early 2000s went on systems like this one to integrate processes, both internally and with suppliers and customers. The idea was one of cost reduction, reduce the cost of doing business by reducing the time it took to add a customer to a vendor list from 3 days to minutes. The ROI cases were strong and compelling, and many customers managed to get ahead of the market through early adoption.

Now, however, such integration capabilities are more commonplace. Most business processes have been automated to the point where there is not a lot of cost left to be squeezed. Further, (and this is something that bugged me at the time) the vast majority of ‘real’ working practices don’t actually follow the process. The process becomes more of a guideline than a set of rules – exceptions to the process are the norm. Once you have an exception (payment terms are 30 days, but they’re a really important client so we won’t send them a nasty letter until 60 days) – the ROI breaks down as humans have to get involved again. Also, because the ROI cost case relies on people following the process barriers are often put in the way of breaking it, making it even more costly to “do the right thing”, be innovative, and follow an exception.

I was trying to find some stats on how much impact exceptions have on business processes. I am convinced somewhere I found something about 80% of processes resulting in an exception at some point. Vitria are so concerned about exceptions in business processes they’ve created a product for it and claim 50% of process related costs are down to exceptions.

Vitria (and others – I’m not picking on Vitria, they just happened to come high up on Google for “Business Process Exceptions!” offer exception management, but it sounds like another process. To quote from their site:

“Vitria’s Exception Manager is a purpose-built application that provides a systematic approach to resolve exceptions across your enterprise. Exception Manager classifies incoming exceptions, automatically resolves problems, guides resolutions with context-sensitive workflow when human involvement is still required, restarts the normal process flow, and provides full visibility and audit trails across the entire exception resolution lifecycle. “

So what happens when there’s an exception during the classification process. Or an exception during automatic problem resolution? The point is that Business Process Management vendors try to solve the exception problem with what they’re good at, a process. Where Web 2.0 can help here is by providing a tool that fits the problem at hand. What you really need when an exception arises is to communicate with the person who can fix the problem or authorise the exception. The problem is, traditionally, it’s hard to get hold of this person or even know who the right person is! That’s where enterprise social networking, blogs, wikis and especially instant messaging can become vital tools in resolving exceptions whereas email is not that helpful at all. This is why instant messaging is fantastic for large organisations during quarter end – the conversations are all around exceptions to the process – the key is to get the order in the books in a legal manner. We work with one of the world’s largest IT vendors who told us that the accepted downtime for instant messaging during quarter end is measured in seconds, whereas email is hours. Tools such as social networking can also help you find the right person in a time constrained situation, especially if your ‘usual suspect’ in finance or HR isn’t around and you need to find someone similar with the same skills quickly.

The aim of a lot of social software tools is they are based around tacit knowledge. Business processes, however, are all about explicit knowledge. Social software is the yin to business process yang. Exception management definitely falls into the ‘tacit’ space, however, which is why the explicit, systematic approaches to exception resolution fail. The exception is an exception precisely because a systematic approach does not work in this instance, and it is down to employee initiative and innovation to find a solution.

Looks like we’ve found another ROI for Web 2.0 – reducing the cost of business process exceptions which can be up to 50% of the cost of a process.

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