Why web 2.0 doesn't work in the enterprise (yet)

Be prepared. This is my first controversial post and you may find that you disagree with my views.

Let me say upfront that I love collaboration, I love connecting people, I love doing it so that people in our company can deliver what's important. blah blah blah, but is web 2.0 really the best way of helping our people do that?

Firstly, I'm going to assume the definition of web 2.0 as the ability for anyone to publish and create content (and a bit of people connecting with others)

With that in mind here are my reasons that web2.0 doesn't work in the enterprise

1. Not enough people in your company understand it
You would not believe the number of people who I meet who don't know what a blog is, haven't tried facebook, or used a wiki (although I'd have to admit that nearly everyone I meet has used wikipedia). Even if they did understand those things, I would suggest that it is not these things that define web 2.0, they are examples of possible web 2.0 executions. If you can't understand something at a practical level, how are you going to exploit it? - which leads me to point no. 2


2. it needs to support your strategy
I don't mean the strategy that says we 'need to communicate openly' and so on, I mean the basics of your business - deliver car parts on time, get the right products to market, reduce costs, increase quality. Until you can connect web 2.0 concepts to those things then I would doubt that you can make much impact.

3. It challenges existing structures
When the web arrived into the mainstream big companies had to learn how to do e-commerce and existing structures were challenged and changed. This change had to be sponsored from the top and had to have major investment in all kinds of things. Some companies haven't quite worked it out even now. If we are hoping for web 2.0 to 'just happen' from the ground up then I think you are being overly optimistic.

4. Just because something is popular in life in general doesn't make it worthwhile in business.
I love watching TV soaps. I don't do it at work - neither is there any value in it if I did.

So what hope for all our web 2.0 projects? I fear that most of them are doomed, but if we can address these kinds of challenges and ensure alignment between opportunity and capability then new and exciting ways to exploit the web will surely appear. I'm just worried it's going to take a very long time.

The importance of metrics

I met up with some intranet managers the other day and there was a lot of talk of metrics. How many page views, how many users, who had clicked what and so on.

The conversation swiftly turned to which software each of us was using. However, I am sure that this was missing the point of metrics.

Here are my thoughts and experiences of metrics

1. In dealing with your stakeholders you always need to think about what you want your metrics to say. At first this seems counter to logic. Surely if we produce some standardised numbers then the 'truth' will appear before us? I would argue contrary to this and say that you need to use your site stats to support your strategy. If your intranet is about costs then show graphs about cost, if your intranet is about communications show graphs about communications. If you are forever getting into unproductive debates about something then use your stats to put a lid on it.

2. Design your stats to support your arguments. If you are doing this then it is unlikely that a standard stats package does the job. One of the things that I needed to do in my role was convince stakeholders that using the intranet was something that our staff did do. Back then nobody believed that the intranet was a viable platform for our business. I selected a metric that would convince those around me of this and also had some likelihood of success.

3. Put in the hard work to get the stats. If you need to collect stats by hand and process them in long convoluted ways then allocate resources to just that. Spend time in the presentation and rigour of your charts and graphs and perhaps prepare a dashboard.

4. Spend time communicating. Use your stats as a regular part of your governance meetings and carry them with you at all times. My dashboard is always with me and I find I use it in half of all my meetings.

By doing a good job of your metrics you will keep focus on output measures of success rather than random opinion of 'what makes a good intranet'.

Using Community Forums to create business value

We were privileged to be awarded the steptwo gold award for innovation for the use of community forums on our intranet. The system is being used for real business value and has rapidly become part of the way we do things around here.

James at steptwo recorded the following video

Comments welcome!

Save me from amateur web designers!

You know them don't you. They open the meeting by saying "We need something different for our site. I've drafted something in powerpoint and need you to put it up". After asking a couple of questions you realise that this person is wedded to their new website design and it has become their life's work to publish it on your company's intranet.

You make some comments about user centred design, design standards, usability testing and then having debated the pros and cons they land their killer argument as to why none of these apply to their design "I have used hundreds of websites and I know what makes a good one".

Aaargh! This drives me crackers. Over the years I've listened to many songs by Paul McCartney, I know none of them have more than 4 chords, (how hard can it be?) and yet I'm pretty sure I'll never write a song as good as a Beatles classic.

If things go badly you meekly counter with some mumbling about how the content management system can't handle that layout and blame the IT people.

You can avoid this situation though. Get together some successful publishers in your organisation. Jointly develop some design guidelines and principles. Make them as open as possible and use some of the latest research to support it. Create an approval governance for non-standard designs.

Give people reasons to follow your guidelines (DDA compliance, Search engine friendliness - everyone wants their page high up in the rankings, Browser compatibility, etc.)
Get your governance to support it.

What are your best tips for getting new sites to integrate with your design?

10 ways to kill your intranet

Just read a great presentation by Sam Marshall called '10 ways to kill your intranet' (1mb pdf) - it made me laugh, and created a great opportunity to have a discussion with my team.