In early December, I kicked off a series of posts on my core beliefs about E2.0. Since then, I’ve been devoting a post to each of them to work through some of the implications for E2.0 strategy and practice in greater detail.
In this post we’ll look at my fifth core belief: E2.0 is a means to an end, not an end in itself—an organization must accomplish something with E2.0 beyond simply embracing it.
Because I said so, that’s why
I come across lots of organizations involved in E2.0 that have little to no idea why they’re doing so in the first place. They’re caught up in the excitement and fervor of it all, the urgency of being a part of something new—or better yet, not being left behind by the next big thing.
This isn’t exclusively an E2.0 phenomenon. Every few years a next big thing comes along and, leaving aside any judgment about whether any particular big thing is more hype than reality, there are plenty of organizations that rush to embrace that big thing because, well, we have to or we risk getting outpaced by our competition.
Advanced case management, the cloud, taxonomy, service oriented architecture, knowledge management, six sigma, CMM—who hasn’t gotten dragged into a corporate project to adopt at least one of these current or former big things that was undertaken seemingly for no other reason than “we have to do it”?
I had a client once who called this “18 hole architecture”, meaning that their CIO would play golf with business associates, hear about some hot new trend on the course, and return to work fired up to be on the leading edge of the next big thing—without the due diligence required to determine whether it was the right direction for the organization or not.
Dial tone versus business driver
This all brings us to the raging debate about whether E2.0 needs to be justified in the first place or whether it’s dial tone, “must have” plumbing like email, voice mail, or shared drives.
But to me, nothing is dial tone; or better yet, even something as fundamental as a dial tone needs to impact a business driver positively—otherwise why support it?
We forget that the dial tone was not a given. It was a technology decision to solve a problem. Had it not met that need, or had it been too difficult or costly, another solution would have been used instead. It’s only because the dial tone (or email, or voice mail, or shared drives) meets our needs so well and at the right level of cost that it’s indispensible, beyond ROI, a must have, and so on.
The same is true for E2.0: when you leave aside all the excitement, momentum, and enthusiasm, in the end it has to meet some business need, otherwise why embark on it? The time, resources, money, and political capital required to do E2.0 effectively are too great to risk squandering them on an effort that has little chance of succeeding because its goals are non-existent or haven’t been articulated.
It’s not all about the Benjamins
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that unless there ‘s hard ROI attached to E2.0, it’s not worth doing. I talk about business drivers rather than ROI because I believe that there are important non-monetary benefits associated with E2.0, as well as benefits whose monetary benefits are difficult or impossible to calculate precisely.
Things like employee or customer satisfaction and loyalty, productivity, brand perception, the quality of the overall organizational culture—these are hard to attach dollar figures to, but are important to the success of a business nonetheless. And it’s precisely these kinds of business drivers that an E2.0 initiative needs to impact in order to be truly successful, to go beyond merely being the latest big thing to fundamentally transforming the organization.
The final word
In the next post we’ll explore in more detail what I mean by business drivers as we look at my sixth core belief: E2.0 must justify its existence just like E1.0 business practices, i.e., by demonstrating tangible, meaningful business value.
In the meantime, jump in and share your thoughts. I know there are horror stories about next big thing initiative out there (ill-fated six sigma programs alone could produce more comments than the AIIM servers could handle) as well as strong opinions on E2.0 as dial tone—lets’ get the conversation started!
#E20