kissin' babies - trying to get to boston for enterprise 2.0

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference running in Boston this June has decided to allow an open submission & voting process. I have three submissions entered & I'm focusing my efforts on this one relating to RoI getting through. So if you could register on the site & vote for me before 20 January, I'd be much obliged.

I also thought I'd give you information about the other papers that stood out for me:

• In terms of "voting for your mates", I like Patti Anklam & think her 3 efforts could be most interesting: NetWork, KM & Leadership (Doug Cornelius & Jack Vinson are also involved).
• In terms of "full disclosure": I may well be on the panel for Ephraim Freed's learning culture session if it goes through.
  
• I have also liked the look of sessions by Jon Ingham, Paula Thornton & MITRE.

There are 463 proposals - vote for mine & I will kiss your baby!

why roi is a terrible place to start

This started with Stephen Bounds and then moved on to Sameer Patel. He's along the right lines but I don't think he's pushing hard enough.

Many people in the Enterprise 2.0 community are pondering RoI. It seems to be the Holy Grail of E2.0. This pursuit demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how decisions are made.

If you are selling something that meets a need, it has to be a need that people feel. Not that they see reflected in a spreadsheet that features numbers you've either made up (sorry estimated) or taken from other situations.

Once they feel the need, then you bring out the RoI to keep the CFO happy. RoI follows need.

What does this mean?

• It helps if your E2.0 solution meets a need that the organisation and senior management feel. That problem may be around connecting my staff in multiple offices. That be around enabling my research team to share their activities & outcomes better. It may simply be about helping me turn my Sharepoint investment into something that I don't cry myself to sleep at night over.
• Finding an immediately felt need is easy. That means that lots of people will probably have done it already. Finding a need that is on the verge of being felt is a lot harder but more rewarding. Ellen di Resta writes about this well.
• Once you have identified a problem, shown you have a solution and found those people with that problem then (and only then) does the RoI come into play. The RoI should show that your solution is the best and most cost effective solution to that problem (Remember: All RoIs are always comparative - the alternative is often "do nothing"). That should keep the CFO happy.
• If the conversation starts with RoI, you are sunk. Walk away. Or find out what the conversation is really about. Conversations about "RoI" are never about RoI.
• Don't just focus on the numbers, focus on stories & status as well.
  

Until you can do all this, you are not ready to sell - so how can you expect people to buy?

white paper - justifying your km programme

A new white paper over at the other place.

presentation - showing the value of km

A presentation on demonstrating the ROI / Value of Knowledge Management to beancounters - based various experiences. Of course, I can't put the really juicy stuff in the presentation - you'd have to get me in to deliver it for that...

View Upload your own

ROI encore

Luis continues to write about social computing ROI here and here. I admire his tenacity. Remembering that ROI calculations are an attempt to render assumptions, beliefs & wishes into a quantitative language, then surely the ROI for social computing tools (& I agree with Luis that these are fundamentally social tools) will vary from depending on the assumptions, beliefs & wishes of the organisations concerned.

The point that they can improve social capital is valid one - but only if senior management in an organisation care about it. How robust are most attempts to quantify social capital?

Maybe you can quantify it into "improved customer satisfaction" or "decreased marketing costs" or "higher employee engagement".

I still believe (& I will repeat this until I am blue in the face) that showing the value of social software is problematic precisely because we have a poor collective understanding of what our employees do & how they do it. And provided they keep churning stuff out, we don't really care.

Don't get high in your own ROI

Luis is writing about ROI here and here. So we cannot ignore ROI or label it "uncool". ROI is a way for certain groups of people (mostly with MBAs) to understand something. These people have a lot of power so it behoves us non-MBAs to learn how they speak. Dennis Howlett has some interesting things to say:

Instead of panning CFOs as looking at the ‘wrong’ stuff and generally pillorying them as retarded, social computing pundits might ask how the flat world of which many profess becomes a reality.

And Dennis right. However the issue is that the links between actual knowledge worker activities and revenue/profitability/etc are often pretty sketchy. Our bean counters cannot count their beans finely enough to make sense of them. Performance is important. But our understanding of it is partial. We must often make educated guesses.

Frankly, I think that the ROI for wikis is pretty clear = Email + Word - A World of Pain = Productivity but I would agree that more research would help here. I would also add that the best research takes place within organisations. Piloting E2.0 tools can give very useful indicators of potential value of comparatively little investment. Any manager about to bet the farm on E2.0 tools without a pilot is a headstrong idiot. One step at a time eh?

However actually constructing an ROI argument is a messy, political activity. That world of pain just popped up again (wow, version 97 of the ROI spreadsheet, boy oh boy) and it's ugly. Very ugly.

ROI & productivity

One question that came up on the Wednesday night of wikis was around ROI. What is the ROI for a wiki?

Olivier Headshift talks about ROI. And I agree with Simon Carswell's comment that the "I" should be low. This statement provoked the justifiable question about the effort involved in wiki development & management. Sven made the excellent point that there is little "extra" effort that goes into wiki activities. People are sending emails and messing about with Word documents anyway. But these activities are largely invisible.

All the Enterprise 2.0 stuff is really about collaboration in organisations. And collaboration is all about improving productivity and nuturing creativity. However most organisations do not measure their worker productivity well (and they have no idea whatsoever about worker creativity). This is especially true for organisations with workers who think for a living. Professional services firms tend to measure productivity as billable hours. However the billable hour model simply means that you've spent an hour doing something. The only incentive to do it better or quicker is the possibility your competition might.

If asking the ROI question prompts you to discuss the productivity & practices of your workers with them then it could be useful. Otherwise I share Olivier's concerns about playing ROI games.