The Connected Web

Back in the late nineteenth century, when wealthy residents of big cities started to install telephones in their homes, people were not quite sure what purpose they would solve. Perhaps the Mayor would use them to address the populace on matters of importance? Many were dismayed when it became evident that most domestic subscribers simply used their telephones to keep in touch with their friends. Idle chat and gossip seemed such an unworthy use of this important new technology.

We face a similar problem with today's Enterprise 2.0 technologies, which aim to adapt social computing to business needs. Technology is supposed to automate purposeful activities, so that it can satisfy a defined business need and generate a measurable return on investment. But social computing automates activities that appear largely unpurposeful. So how can we justify investment in Enterprise 2.0? Sure, we can demonstrate that the technology can make better connections and enable faster, more effective social networking. But their very lack of structure makes it almost impossible to link these activities to business results, and thus ROI. If we are to make a business case for investing in Enterprise 2.0, we must find some way to demonstrate that the unpurposeful has a useful role to play in a business environment.

A thoughtful blog post last month by Bertrand Duperrin, Enterprise 2.0 as a part of the Global Enterprise, may point the way. In it, he analyzes how companies "organize themselves in order to produce as efficiently as possible." To which he adds an important grounding statement, "Becoming an enterprise 2.0 is not a goal for any enterprise and should not be. The only one is: improving the way things are done everyday, the way it produces."

He suggests that companies engage in three types of activity in pursuit of that goal:

• Formal Production Capability: "Being able to produce something defined, following a processus in which everyone knows exactly what he has to do, when, and how."


• Adhoc Production Capability: "Being able to overcome any breakdown or insufficiency in the above mentioned processus." Such incidents are increasingly prevalent in a world where customers increasingly demand a custom product or service, he notes.


• Serendipity Production Capability. "Being able to innovate and produce unexpected things." This covers the creation of new, permanent solutions to recurring adhoc problems as well as outright innovation.

A useful table in Duperrin's post compares these three types of activity and arbitrarily suggests that people spend about 40 percent of their time on formal processes, another 40 percent on ad hoc workarounds to breakdowns or shortcomings in those process, and finally 20 percent on serendipitous innovation. This leads to a justification for enabling Enterprise 2.0 capabilities — not, he stresses, as a separate, sandboxed experiment, but as something that equips all employees to do a better job of delivering adhoc and serendipitous processes:

"The big issue for companies is to build on both management, organization and technical side, each employee's ability to switch from a production mode to another with the appropriate rules. Not for the pleasure of changing but because it makes people able to deal with more than 40 percent of their needs."

If Duperrin is right, there is ample justification for automating the apparently unpurposeful in the average organization — and Enterprise 2.0 is not a waste of time after all.