CIMS, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 -- the 2008 version

I recently had the opportunity to listen, learn, and think at the Center for Information Management Studies at Babson College, and the topic, "From Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0," held much interest to me. The program was divided into two parts.

Part 1 was some broad analysis, led by the wildly entertaining and insightful futurist  (a/k/a "anthro-futurist teacher boy") Thornton May.  Mr. May's analysis of what he calls über-patterns helped set the stage for Part 2 of the program, a case study of how Mitre Corporation is bringing Web 2.0 technology to their organization, and how they are measuring the value of doing so.

Under Mr. May's direction, we broke into groups, with each group synthesizing two "provocative facts" about Web 2.0.  The assembled IT leaders, vendors, consultants, academics and students came up with the following data points, with refinements and differing points of view in italics:

1. Web 2.0 is free.  [Web 2.0 is "free like a puppy," requiring infrastructure and expertise to make the free stuff happen.  Web 2.0 is not free, but we generally haven't figured out how to price it yet.]
2. Web 2.0 is 2-way, interactive, and personalized.
3. Web 2.0 is dynamic, live, and real-time.
4. Web 2.0 lacks centralized controls, but transparency and the wisdom of crowds rule. [The noise-to-signal ratio varies widely. See "trust" below.]
5. Web 2.0 is ubiquitous and tightly integrated into people's lives.
6. Web 2.0 is blurring many traditional lines, e.g.,  business/personal, opinion/truth. [Collective endorsement of a "fact" or point of view becomes truth, thoughts about privacy and security rights are rapidly evolving, etc.  Trust becomes critical!]

We carried these themes into Part 2 of the program, a case study of Mitre Corporation's use of Web 2.0 tools for social networking, collaboration, and knowledge management.  Mitre is a large, complex, international enterprise with a common dilemma around collaboration: 

• They know they can't afford to stand still and not implement technologies such as blogs, wikis, social tagging, list servs, portals,

BUT

• They need to actively govern them and to understand and measure their business value.

Mitre uses objective metrics (e.g., listserv traffic, numbers of tags, wiki content, team sites, etc.), and subjective techniques (e.g., surveys, interviews, feedback) to assess business value. Even so, they lack benchmarks to provide objective performance measures, and engaged a team from Babson College to research and measure Mitre's "technology-mediated networks" and their business value.

The Mitre and Babson team presented their analysis of Mitre's social networks, including who collaborates with whom, what boundaries typically limit effective collaboration, and how effective collaboration tools improve productivity.  The study is still in process, and I look forward to this research being published.  It is of great interest to me and great import to business decision makers investing in collaboration and social networking tools.

A couple points I found of interest based on practical experience in this field:

1. There was a significant amount of emphasis placed by Mitre on finding out "who knows what," with emphasis on searching for people rather than documents (emphasis mine).  This is something our firm often discusses with our customers deploying KM and search tools.
2. I was *very* surprised to learn that there are not explicit reward systems in place at Mitre for people who contribute to these communities and organizational knowledge stores.  I hope to see more research in this area, because this was a surprise to me -- I wonder if this holds true in a different community or culture (i.e., not full of scientists/engineers who are trained to publish what they know in order to be peer-reviewed, recognized as experts, etc.)?