So I’m almost at the end of a series of posts that started with my core beliefs about E2.0 and is working through each of them in turn to explore their implications for E2.0 strategy and practice.
In this post we’ll look at my sixth core belief: E2.0 must justify its existence in the same way that E1.0 business practices have, i.e., by demonstrating tangible, meaningful business value.
If you’ve been following any of the earlier posts in this series, it should come as no shock that I treat E2.0 as a natural extension of E1.0, that I think it can and should be held up to the same standards of accountability as E1.0, and that many of the same core competencies that led to success in E1.0 will do so in E2.0.
The situation is no different when it comes to E2.0’s impact on an organization: no amount of “wow” or “we have to do it or we’ll get left behind” is enough to justify it—as with E1.0, the business has to realize some value from the effort, and that value needs to be both tangible, i.e., we need to know that we’re realizing it, and meaningful, i.e., we need to care about realizing it.
Just because you can measure it, doesn’t mean you should
At many organizations, just be able to measure anything is an accomplishment, given the current state of cost accounting, process control, enterprise reporting, and so on. I’ve actually worked with organizations that didn’t have a way to accurately calculate the total cost of manufacturing their products—arguably one of the most important pieces of data you need to run a business (in the same category with what price the market will bear for your product, your margins, and the cost of sales).
But even if most organizations aren’t quite this backward in their understanding of their own business processes, getting to the level of reporting detail required to measure and manage processes related to applications or capabilities is a challenge no matter where you work.
So it’s understandable that folks, E2.0 or otherwise, would take whatever metrics they can get when it comes to measuring their performance—beggars can’t be choosers, after all. In most situations, you’re just fortunate to have something tangible to measure your performance against.
A waste of time
In terms of CYA, tracking your performance against any old metric may be fine; but in terms of making a real impact on the organization, it’s probably worse than not measuring at all.
I say this not because I have anything against metrics and measuring, but because measuring the wrong (or irrelevant) thing can lull you into a false sense of security that you’re making progress, having an impact, moving in the right direction, etc., when that may not be the case at all.
Time to get real
Rather than implying process control when we can’t be sure it exists (which is what measuring against the wrong metric does) it’s better to be transparent about the fact that we don’t have metrics because the conditions that would allow accurate measurement aren’t in place.
This transparency is a way for the organization to “get real”—a phrase Mahan Khalsa uses to describe the process of acknowledging and addressing business-critical issues. Getting real does the organization a service, because, best case, it paves the way for the work needed to create the conditions that would allow accurate measurement of the right things.
But even worst case, even if you have no effect on the organization and measurement is as impossible as it was before you got real, at least you’ll know where you stand and you can more accurately set expectations of what you can deliver.
The final word
Although everything I’ve said in the post relates to E1.0 as well as E2.0, as E2.0 practitioners we feel the pain around metrics more acutely than out E1.0 counterparts. Given the relative newness of the domain, given how tricky the measurement of marketing and customer outreach efforts is even in E1.0 organizations, and given how strong the sentiment for and against E2.0 is out there, accurately assessing what we’re doing, the impact it’s actually having, and what we need to do to improve it can be daunting.
But that’s not a reason either to give up on measurement altogether or to succumb to measuring whatever happens to be available. Instead, it’s a call to action to get real at our organizations: about metrics, about process control, about reporting, and about E2.0. Doing so gives us a much better chance of succeeding in our efforts while also contributing to the evolution of the organization—something that should be the goal of all E2.0 practitioners in the first place.
#e2.0