You calling me a consultant?

Adriana Lukas was the person who first opened my eyes to the potential business value of social computing. She starred in an Online Information conference a few years ago and, soon after, I trotted round to her office for some indoctrination. We talked about blogs, IM, wikis, RSS, feed readers and all the other technical paraphernalia that supports this new form of collaboration.

Today, Angela Ashenden (she works for Macehiter Ward-Dutton) and I whizzed over to the same office to get an update from Adriana on some project work she's been engaged in. A huge organisation knows that it has to engage more effectively internally and externally, but it is tightly regulated and is fairly traditional in its approach to business. Hierarchies come more naturally than networks. And, quite rightly, reputation has to be protected at all costs.

The user-driven style of social engagement does not sit comfortably with this organisation. Yet it is willing to experiment and find out whether there's anything of value to be had from this dangerous new activity. The fact that the project has been going for a couple of years suggests that it is tolerated at least and that some parts of the organisation are extracting benefit.

To cut the story brutally short, Adriana introduced people to information discovery, sharing and collaboration opportunities, then demonstrated some tools which might help. The list included blogging, wikis, Skype, RSS and social bookmarking. The tools are just the supporting mechanism for new ways of working together.

Prompted by our visit, Adriana posted What’s the real value of social software in enterprise  to her blog a few hours after we left. She gave the example of a wiki which was introduced for one task but which touched 41 people. Some of them, in turn, found other uses for wikis to accelerate and improve their collaboration.

Adriana says, "I’d argue that this is the most significant and long-term value of social media and social software tools at this stage of their use in enterprise. If anyone tells me they can put metrics on that, I’ll just call them a consultant (not a nice thing in my book!)."

I'm inclined to agree with her about determining the metrics beforehand. After all, no-one could have predicted these time-saving uses of the technology. So no IT department, or anyone else for that matter, could have planned and cost-justified the introduction of the software.

But, after the event, I'm sure that metrics could be applied and value measured. This would form a useful backdrop for future discussions about the benefits of introducing social computing to other parts of the company. So, I only half agree with her. And if that makes me a consultant, I guess I'll just have to live with that.

Comments

[Jon Unger]

Evaluating the effectiveness of a Wiki by measures of how many articles, how easy there are to find, how many people utilize these services, etc are all great numbers, however, they do not show an accurate portrait of their effectiveness. I like to think of wikis and blogs as Knowledge Base Content. The most effective way to evaluate if a Knowledge Management System is working is does it reduce the total time to solve a question or inquiry? Does it allow an solve an employee's question quicker than waiting for the HR administrator to return their voice mail? Does it reduce the time for an employee with an IT problem to fix their problem without assistance from the Help Desk? What does it cost for that employee to use means outside of the wiki to solve their problem? Once a company determines the cost they can begin to determine if the cost of dedicating knowledge material to be created is worth the effort.

If a company does not have the experience internally, they will need to find someone that has the experience or will have to pay the cost of a poor quality implementation of social tools. Hence consultants have the experience and do not need to be trained they are able to deliver the wiki and other tools at a much reduced total cost than using internal inexperienced staff.

[Benjamin]

I'd love to hear how anyone could take such measurements. Wikis are most effective as knowledge worker tools. Creating a taxonomy of knowledge worker tasks and measuring 'before' and 'afters' is a lifetime's work. Then how do you measure the content that got put onto the wiki that would never have made it onto a standard intranet CMS?

Getting anything usable, let alone scientifically valid, is going to be hard.

I'm probably overly vexed, as I wish I could get good data. I'd be very happy some someone to prove me wrong. I think wikis are amazingly beneficial and wish I could convince more businesses of their benefits.

[me, myself and I]

I disagree! (how otherwise to make my post interesting? -D)

Fact is, anybody who has ever experienced the power of a wiki or a forum, and also knows the way an organisation works without them, can come up with several real-life situations in which significant time savings would arise from usage of social software. Then, by doing some measurements/estimates on how often such situations occur, and putting in some former experience, I think a pretty accurate estimate of overall savings could be done in advance. Which is something cusomers like to get from consultants!