It’s not often that my two worlds of basketball and Enterprise 2.0 collide – but here’s a great article by Slam magazine (can you still get that in the UK?) on how blogging affects bench players in the NBA.  Apparently in can affect your playing time – looks like the NBA is missing another trick that benefits the Euroleague…

Here’s another ROI case study of social software from IBM - in short social tagging saves the average user 12 seconds when searching for information.  As there are 286,000+ searches every week, this equates to 955 hours per week resulting in productivity savings of $4.6million per year.

This is similar to the ROI approach I examined earlier where you take the average time saving and extrapolate it across an organisation.  Does it really make sense to talk about 12 seconds worth of savings?  Do those 12 seconds really add up to enough time for an individual to do something else more useful for your company – or do they take an extra minute on their coffee break?

Social tagging’s benefit is not that it helps you find information more quickly, but that it helps you find things that otherwise you would be unable to find

From a company such as IBM’s perspective, the benefit is not that a sales rep can find a compelling reference 12 seconds faster, it’s that they can actually find that compelling reference at all!

The productivity gain is less about how quickly you find information but the quality of information you find, which leads to a more compelling sales proposal which means you win the deal that otherwise you would have lost.

Extrapolate that across the company and you may end up with much more than $4.6m

Spent a great afternoon with Headshift the other week, where I shared my thoughts about Enterprise 2.0 needing to be in the flow of existing collaborative tools.  I was challenged by Tom (blogs here) who made a strong case that collaboration always has context - and the reason we have different tools is because we need to communicate in different ways.  The way I communicate over email, twitter, instant messaging, SMS etc. is fundamentally different, in terms of tone, formality, and who I feel comfortable talking to using different modes of communication.  I may not want to instant message my customers whereas I am happy to do so with colleagues.  The danger, Tom put forward, was that if Enterprise 2.0 tools are put in the flow of existing applications, the wrong tool may be used for the wrong type of communication.

As usual – I think the there is a pendulum at work here, and the answer is somewhere in the middle.  I am absolutely convinced that integrating instant messaging, for example, within an email client can dramatically improve the update of IM within an organisation.  This is particularly true when someone receives an email, and the appropriate response is an instant message.  Even advanced Enterprise Octopus‘s can automatically fall into the pattern of using the same tool a message was sent with without thinking. 

This screenshot of how Office Communicator prompts people whether or not to respond via instant message instead of email can significantly drive up adoption.  I am not advocating that we need one ubiquitous tool to cover all our collaboration requirements.  However, there is no reason why at the front end we cannot combine communication tools at the presentation layer so that people don’t have to think as much about how they are going to communicate and which tools they are going to use.  There is a scale here in terms of how advanced people are in their adoption and usage of Enterprise 2.0.  Once people are comfortable with the concept of Enterprise 2.0 then they will naturally and intuitively know which tools to use without thinking.  At the initial adoption stage, however, putting guidance and pointers in the flow of existing tools can have a significant impact in terms of alleviating any fears of using a new system.  Some users may always stay in this mode, where they need the system to do the thinking for them in terms of which tools to use, and others may move to a position where the thinking becomes more intuition.

Tom’s concern about using the wrong tool is perfectly valid, but I think it can be allayed by gradually introducing tools which fit in the flow for users unfamiliar with Enterprise 2.0.  Introduce the tools gradually rather than all at once so that people can use them in the flow of their everyday working patterns and it is clear what they are for.  As people get more comfortable they will then know which tool to use when, whether in the flow or out of the flow.

The Enterprise 2.0 community needs to decide whether or not it is going to demand that everyone thinks about how they communicate.  I fear that if we make people think too much it will be seen as ‘yet another IT fad’ as opposed to something that could revolutionise the way we work, by making what appear on the surface to be rather minor changes.

Over the last week, without consciously deciding to do so, I’ve been leaving my laptop at the office.  This happened one Friday when I was going away immediately after work and didn’t want to carry it around all weekend.  But it’s stayed there and I feel liberated.

I’ve even worked from home a few days without it.  I have an iMac at home which can access all my email, contacts and documents through our online email and document management system.

I have an iPhone so I can pick up email and work the web on the move.

And when I am in the office, my laptop is there.  And it might as well be a desktop.  Is the need for laptops declining?  I’m not saying we don’t need them, I can’t exactly run a client presentation from an iPhone (yet…) – but the automatic assumption that every employee needs one doesn’t necessarily hold true, and could save some money (until to take into account the cost of equipping everyone with an iPhone of course…)

An exciting announcement over at Grow Your Wiki – Stewart Mader is leaving Atlassian (although he will continue to work part time on special projects) to start a new venture focusing on Wiki Consulting.  I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Stewart both on-line and in the real world, and I think this is a great move for him and his customers.

I’d particularly recommend his concept of BarnRaising workshops – check out his services for more details.  BarnRaising workshops solve the problem of having an empty wiki when you first launch, which no-one will use.  The wiki is actually built during the BarnRaising workshop so that when people go back to their desks, they have something of value they can use together.

Congratulations Stewart – and good luck!

I don’t usually blog about toys but Shazam has to be one of the cleverest iPhone apps yet.  A few years back I was wondering whether digital radio would allow you to hear a song on the radio, not be sure what it was or who it was by, but nevertheless could still purchase it whilst listening to the radio in the car or something.

Shazam is the closest I’ve seen – you play it a track, it recognises it and allows you to link to iTunes to purchase there and then.  What’s scary is it works – I tried some tracks off Radio 1 with my tinny laptop speakers and it just worked.

What’s even better is it’s free!

Just finished Blink by Malcolm Gladwell which is a fascinating read.  One of the concepts he discusses is being “in command but out of control”.

The context is a U.S. war game in which Van Riper was placed in command of a rogue state (Red team) engaged in conflict against the U.S. (Blue team).  The U.S. had overwhelming numbers and data, and the Red team needed a way to counter their advantage.

Van Riper achieved this in part by going against the conventional wisdom of strategy meetings and terminology such as “Operational Net Assessment”.  He deployed a messy system of decision making where he provided overall guidance and intent, but the forces were trusted to use their own initiative and wisdom to make rapid decisions and rapid assessments without having to constantly explain themselves.

The key is that the sub-ordinates were trusted to do their job well.  Often when talking to clients about Enterprise 2.0 (or even something as basic as instant messaging) I’ll get the feedback that “they might spend all their time messing around”.  I have to respectfully suggest they have seemingly well behaved employees up to today, and something as simple as instant messaging turns them into serial time wasters then a) they have the wrong employees and b) they have employed some rather strange people who will transform from productive worker to time waster just because they have discovered instant messaging!

If trust in your employees is a legitimate reason not to deploy Enterprise 2.0 then you have serious problems within your business that need fixing first before you even consider Enterprise 2.0.

In fact – I’d be surprised you’re still trading at all and that some employee hasn’t sold the company CRM data to a competitor.

We see this outside of business to – there has been a pendulum swing recently on the value of setting targets in the public sector.  When the Labour government came to power, NHS waiting lists and police accountability were serious issues.  Targets were the answers, with the NHS and the police having to meet targets and fill in the required paperwork.  They were not able to operate spontaneously as Van Riper’s Red team could – they had to constantly account for what they were doing.

Recently the pendulum has swung back.  The targets started to be gamed – and there was serious public concern that police and healthcare professionals were spending far too much time filling in forms and not enough time doing their job.  Worse, on occasion the target encouraged un-desirable behaviour, such as only focusing on crime that was easy to solve (such as speeding tickets) in order to boost ‘solve’ figures.

So this has nothing to do with instant messaging, blogs, wikis or social networking.  This is about whether or not you trust your employees enough to be in Command but not Control.  And if you don’t, is the answer to impose a bureaucracy of targets and accountability or find new employees?

Van Riper’s Red team thoroughly beat the Blue team by the way.  The U.S. re-wound the war game and put someone else in charge of Red.

Sometimes you spend so much time thinking about things you over-complicate.  Enterprise 2.0 can be very simple.

• Do you believe that there is business value in who you know as well as what you know?
• Do you believe that a strong network of contacts can help you get things done and make things happen?
• Would you like to help your employees get things done and make things happen?

If so, then the question is not why would you use social software, but why would you not?