Anthony Bradley

Today I reviewed a client’s draft social solution strategy document. It was comprehensive and well researched with several references from analyst firms, media outlets, and academics. Unfortunately, some of the analysis and advice in the references is, well, just bad (in my experience, of course). Also, in doing my daily Web scan of what’s going on, I sometimes come across “less than best practice” advice and poor analysis (again, in my experience).

So, I have the idea of starting a 2009 Bad Advice Awards for Social Software Solutions competition through this blog where we can illuminate and discuss what we think is bad advice or poor analysis. At the end of the year I will post the winners based on your feedback. My viewpoints are also up for examination. I only ask that we be professional about it and view it as an intellectual exploration. So let me know what you think of my idea for the 2009 Bad Advice Awards.

I will offer two entries to start.

Bad Advice: Fail Early, Fail Often

The notion of failing early and often is the complete opposite of what I’ve seen. It almost tells you that you don’t have to take a social initiative seriously to garner success but just wing it until you get it right. IME, that is bad advice. It turns out community members are not so resilient to failure. If you fail a community even once there is a good chance you will never get them back. My research indicates that if a participant visits a community environment and doesn’t see value the likelihood of them returning a second time is less than 30%. If they still don’t see value returning a third time drops to almost 0%. Start with the expectation of success not failure (even if it is early). See “How to Apply the PLANT SEEDS Framework for Enhanced Enterprise Web 2.0 Adoption” and “Toolkit Sample Template: PLANT SEEDS Checklists for Planning an Enterprise Web 2.0 Initiative” for information on how to take it seriously and plan for success (available to clients or for a fee). I actually have updates to both of these that will publish within 2 weeks.

Bad Analysis: “But I don’t see Enterprise 2.0 becoming a big area of corporate spending. The tools are too cheap and easy to replicate with tons of free alternatives, and many of the vendors are just not ready for prime time.”

Social software is far more about the social than it is the software. Even if the tool costs were negative (that is they pay you to use them), the costs of catalyzing, growing, and maintaining a community are not at all trivial. Also, this is a growing market with plenty of alternatives. As the market matures and consolidates the cost of tools will increase and by then the value proposition will be better understood and people will pay. Also, many of the free tools are not enterprise ready. But there plenty of “ready for prime time” enterprise vendors and 100s of enterprises with thriving communities with thousands upon thousands of participants that gain value for themselves and deliver value to the enterprise. Although enterprises need to make careful decisions, they shouldn’t be waiting “for prime time.”

What do you think of these two? Do you have any submissions you want to nominate?

Blatant Disclaimer: These awards are determined by myself and the community of those that follow my blog and are not representative of any Gartner stance.

Recently the NY Times and Wikipedia conspired to keep a story on the kidnapping of a Times reporter off of Wikipedia.

A “sanitizing” team of Wikipedia editors, led by Jimmy Wales himself, worked to keep the story from posting by deleting, blocking and freezing. The story quotes Wales as saying, “We were really helped by the fact that it hadn’t appeared in a place we would regard as a reliable source,” he said. “I would have had a really hard time with it if it had.”

This seems like a convenient excuse to me. A much more common practice with Wikipedia is to leave the information, at least for some period of time, with a disclaimer that the information needs more citations.

I realize that lives may have been at stake here but don’t you think this sets a dangerous precedent? Some immediate issues jump to mind.

• Will Wikipedia set up a new process now for “sanitizing” information and how would one go about requesting “sanitization?” Clearly the normal editing process was not sufficient or the “sanitizing” team wouldn’t have been needed and the story would never have been told.
• What is the line between editing and censorship? Do they need to define what humanitarian circumstances qualify for sanitization? This action blurs the line.   
• One of the benefits of Wikipedia is the speed at which information is posted even though it may not be fully supported by citations (very current events rarely are). Will Twitter replace Wikipedia as the information source for events as they happen relegating Wikipedia to a historical account that can be verified by suitable citations?
• What if this “editing” approach spreads thru social media? Could it impact credibility of the whole movement? Will it impact Wikipedia credibility (positive or negative)? Does anyone care anymore or do we just accept Wikipedia now regardless of how they edit?
• “Sanitizing” content implies that the content was dirty (pornography, bad language, etc.) but this wasn’t the case here. This was a decision to actively stifle legitimate information that others may have corroborated had it not been deleted. Building on one another’s contributions until the content is more complete is a fundamental premise of the social computing movement. Did Wikipedia break a fundamental tenet?  

I am ambivalent on this one since the whole concept of “sanitizing” in social media is generally anathema, but in this case, lives may have been at stake. What do you think? Was it censorship in the form of exuberant editing? Was it justified? Where do you draw the line?

I just returned from a tour in Australia that took me from Brisbane to Canberra to Melbourne to Sydney where I met with 25 organizations in five days (which is why I have not posted much in the past few weeks).

Most of my meetings concerned SOA and many of the orgs were in the midst of or just beginning SOA initiatives. Very few were interested in social software and the couple that were interested were in the very early stages.

A few of them brought up Burton Group’s “SOA is Dead” shock marketing campaign [my categorization not theirs] and were concerned that their efforts are now somehow obsolete. I addressed Burton Group’s bad analyst behavior (I consider sensationalizing to be bad analyst behavior. Leave that to CNN and assured them that SOA was alive and thriving.

Why Enterprise 2.0 (social software use by the enterprise) isn’t catching on down under is an interesting question. I had a quick discussion with a local Oz analyst and we postulated that, since Australia is relatively small, maybe they don’t see the value in mass collaboration. I fully admit that this is speculation and I’m not saying that there is no value in Enterprise 2.0 for Australia because of its size. On the contrary, engaging effectively with the broader community can give smaller organizations the Web presence of much larger ones and can pay solid dividends. Australia doesn’t quite seem there yet. Maybe when I’m back to Australia in November I’ll investigate further.

These are observations from my trip and 25 organizations is not representative of the entire country. Any thoughts on my observations?

I cover how enterprises can build better IT solutions by capitalizing on Web 2.0 and SOA. The common thread here is really on gaining better sharing including both content and capability sharing. SOA, social solutions, cloud, and mashups all demand sharing and reuse. You’ll never achieve significant success in any of them without developing a culture of sharing and reuse. This is an immutable reality. I realize the above is a fairly obvious statement. I’ll follow this with another seemingly obvious statement. Here it is.

You will not develop a culture of sharing and reuse unless you systematically measure and publicly reward sharing and reuse.

If this is so obvious then why don’t more organizations do it? Is it that organizations don’t really want to encourage sharing and reuse? Is it because changing performance evaluation, corporate compensation, customer incentive, etc. programs is too difficult?

When I talk to enterprises about SOA and Web 2.0 and the necessity of rewarding sharing and reuse, I am surprised how few do it and am even more surprised when I hear a response that goes something like this, “We have a very structured approach to performance evaluation and compensation and we can’t [or won't] change it.”

What gives?

Luckily, we do have some research on this (available to clients or for a fee).

• Q&A for Knowledge Management: How Can We Get Our Experts to Share Expertise?
• Key Issues for Social Software and Collaboration Initiatives, 2009
• What Sharing Means in the Context of SOA
• The Five Core Principles of Enterprise Mashups

OK, now it is starting to seem gratuitous after my post titled “You Can’t Build a Business Case for Social Software.” But I do actually have a point.

Like social software, you can’t build a universal business case for mashups but need to examine how you can apply mashups to gain business value. In other words, although you can’t build a general business case for mashups, you can build a specific mashup-centric business cases.

With today’s economic climate business cases are becoming more of a requirement to gain IT funding. Whereas I used to hear clients talk more about the use case for mashups as enabling new types of applications, now I hear clients asking more about how they can save money with mashups. I talk to them about looking at their application and integration project portfolios for the mashup 80/20 rule. The 80/20 rule for mashups being the identification of application delivery or integration projects where mashups can deliver an 80% solution at 20% the cost (or less).

A major reason for this post is that I just finished (and published today) three mashup papers including (available to clients or for a fee):

• A Gartner Reference Architecture for Enterprise Mashups
• The Five Core Principles of Enterprise Mashups
• Building a Business Case for Enterprise Mashups: A Gartner Framework

In keeping with the subject of this post let’s explore the last paper.

Last year I published Building an SOA Business Case: A Gartner Framework. This framework was a year in the making and, as part of the effort, I assembled a underlying approach to building IT based business cases that trace the fundamental principles of the technology through to technology benefits, business benefits and ultimately to business bottom line. It is a fairly sophisticated model that assists in assembling an end-to-end story for business justification. I have now applied the underlying model to enterprise mashups and have begun to apply it to social software (will probably publish in late August 2009).

Here are some of the basics on the underlying model (i.e., there are no specifics on SOA, mashups, or social software in this description).

The Gartner IT business case framework is a tool to assist enterprises in building project-specific IT business case justifications. The purpose of the framework is to assist enterprises in understanding, identifying and assembling value information to support a business case document with traceability from business value back to the fundamental principles of the relevant technology (SOA, mashups, social software). Due to the variability in implementations Gartner can’t provide a universal finished business case justification, nobody can, but we can help you to build one.

The framework consists of a few fundamental components: elements, chains, bundles, profiles, and resulting business justifications. The elements capture fundamental value and cost characteristics. An element falls into one of six categories, including technology principles, technology costs, technology benefits, business costs, business benefits and business impact. Each element has a descriptive profile that captures relevant value applicability, benefits, costs and risk information. The elements are assembled together into chains for end-to-end traceability from the underlying technology principles through to the ultimate business impact. The chains are grouped into bundles that can address a large initiative in its entirety. The bundle assembles a group of relevant element chains (and their associated profiles) into a business case justification that serves as the foundation for a complete business case document. Figure 1 depicts the general components of the framework.

Figure 1. The Gartner IT Business Case Core Framework

Source: Gartner (June 2009)

Figure 2 depicts a single chain built from the enterprise mashup framework that assembles six elements across four categories (a second step of applying the technology and business cost elements is not depicted here). This example chain is assembled by selecting the development productivity element. This tells the basic story of how the mashup principles of web oriented architecture and composite application leads to the technology benefit of development productivity which leads to cost reduction and operational effectiveness and ultimately delivers better profitability.

In the enterprise mashup business case framework we identify and define 36 elements across all six categories and the relationship mappings between them. Like I said, it is a fairly sophisticated model. I hope the glimpse I gave here provides some insight into its value.

Figure 2. The Development Productivity Chain

Source: Gartner (June 2009)

I used Twitter ages ago and never really got into it (didn’t see the value). But now that Twitter has gained more participants and I’m being asked more and more for my Twitter name, I’m going to give it another shot.

I’ll try to tweet useful insights as I get them (obviously in sound bite form) and keep people abreast of what I’m working on.

My Twitter name is BradleyAnthonyJ.

This week I am at the Gartner PCC Conference June 8-10 in Orlando FL and here is my presentation schedule.

Tomorrow morning at 9:45 AM ET Nikos Drakos and I are delivering a social software best practices session entitled “Social Software: Think Big, Start Small, Move Fast.” It should be both enlightening and fun. I’m looking forward to it. I’m also presenting in the afternoon at 2 PM ET with Ray Valdes on “The Promise of Portals and Its Fulfillment with Mashups and WOA.”

As I said previously, I’m psyched about unveiling my new framework for building an enterprise strategy for social software solutions. I have been working on this for the past 8 months and it will guide the bulk of my research in 2009. It is entitled “Enterprise 2.0: Building a Corporate Strategy for Social Applications” and will take place Tuesday at 9:45 AM ET.

Tuesday at 4:30PM I’m teaming up with two other analysts (Whit Andrews and Carlo Rozwell for the “Cool Vendors in Portals, Content and Collaboration” session where each of us will champion two cool vendors and the audience will determine the “coolest.”

I’ll also be facilitating two user round table discussions on successful practices with Web 2.0 and enterprise mashups.

Anyone who attends and has any comments or questions is welcome to raise them here in the blog.

In the course of my work advising clients I review numerous enterprise policy documents on social computing. Yesterday I spoke with an organization that was stipulating in their policy that employees could spend no more than 15 minutes per day on social networks. A different company last week had verbiage in their draft policy that set a 30% social computing limit on employee time. In both cases I asked the how they arrived at those blanket numbers. They were arbitrary. I also asked to see the rest of the story. How much time were they allotted at the vending machine, water cooler, bathroom, neighboring cubicle, or on the phone. I then asked how they were going to measure, monitor, and enforce the restrictions. How were they going to discern productive social networking time from unproductive? Are you going to adjust that number as the technology and its utilization evolves? If, so, when and how? Coming up with the restrictive number was the easy part. One other tough question, “How will these blanket restrictions be viewed by prospective employees (of any generation) who use the social Web and believe it is a tremendous productivity tool?”   

Social software policy is not a substitute for good management that measures results not whereabouts. Social computing policy is about the how, not the where and the when. Guidance on how to participate and behave when participating (positive as well as negative) in the social Web is appropriate and necessary. Dictating where (e.g., a facebook policy, a blog policy, etc.) is incomplete and full of holes. Instead you need guidance on overall Web participation (reading and writing). See Gartner’s publicly disclosed Web Participation Guidelines. Establishing when (e.g., 15 min max per day) is an arbitrary blanket restriction that can negatively impact productivity, encourage people to waste that amount of time on the social Web, or more likely, cause a loss of organizational credibility because employees won’t pay any attention to the unmeasurable and unenforceable restriction.

Guidance for productive Web participation is not easy or trivial. It should be well thought out and both strategic and tactical. Here are a few key Gartner documents to assist in these efforts (available to Gartner clients or for a fee).

• Establishing Policies for Social Application Participation
• Toolkit: Establishing Policy for Social Software Applications
• The Business Impact of Social Computing on Company Governance
• Social-Networking Sites Present Real Business Risks and Benefits
• Move From Technical to Social Controls to Boost the Value of Social Applications

Has anyone experienced success in blanket restrictions? I’m all ears to counter arguments (or supporting statements).

Let’s face it, searching is mostly a waste of time. I don’t like searching the house for my keys, I don’t like searching my closet for the right shirt, and I don’t like searching my systems (or the Web) for information. All of these are a waste of my time.

Let’s examine information search. So I’m getting some work done in some electronic form, say writing this blog, and I realize that I am in need of some information. Now I have to go out to another application (search engine) try to find what I’m looking for, and then transfer that information back to the application I was working in. Does this seem like a good use of time? Not to me. I want the information I need delivered to me when I need it and where I need it. I don’t want to have to look for it. Do you? Then let’s end the search madness and start pushing for something more. This is, for me, the best use case for the semantic Web. Understand what I’m doing and proactively deliver to me the information I need. Of course this requires all applications to be context aware and semantic-enabled (add this to the enablement list; web-enabled, service-enabled, WOA-enabled, mashup-enabled, and social media-enabled).

Some technology providers are getting it. A 2008 Gartner Cool Vendor System One out of Vienna, Austria (www.systemone.net ) was one of the first I’d seen that delivers content in the context of work by combining a wiki offering with a underlying semantic engine that exposed content and people relevant to what the author was writing. GroupSwim (www.groupswim.com) is a Gartner 2009 Cool Vendor that employs semantic constructs to identify relevant community assets and alleviate the search burden. I also recently met with Exalead (www.exalead.com) a “search based applications” technology provider. They have an interesting spin. Why not build purposeful applications that capitalize on information discovery. I use information discovery because I don’t want to lean too heavily on search. With Exalead search is the entry point but the technology also enables rich surfing in a RESTful manner thus enhancing the application navigation experience. Some of you who have heard me speak about Web oriented architecture and RESTful applications know that I use Wikipedia as an example (BTW, notice how RESTful this post is). People land on a Wikipedia page through search but then can experience a rich surfing experience in their knowledge acquisition endeavors. Exalead endeavors to provide all of us with that type of experience around solving business problems.

I know I have harped before about an enterprise over reliance on search as their information discoverability capability with my 5 Ss of discoverability (search, subsetting, surfing, subscribing, and social). I think I might now need to add a 6th S for semantic.

Can you imagine high quality and relevant information delivered to you when and where you need it or even applications that anticipate your information needs? There would be no need to search. What a wonderful world that would be.

Late last week I had a conversation with a client who was asking for a standard set of value or ROI metrics for social software. The client asked me to address this blog post in particular. At its foundation, the request was asking for a “standard” business case for social software investments. Building a business case for social software is proving very difficult and I get many client requests for help.

There is a good reason why it is so difficult to build a generic, universal business case for social software. You can’t do it. Social software is a set of mass collaboration principles and technologies that apply to the construction of a solution, not the solution itself. Social software business value can and does vary widely from one solution to the next. Trying to build a business case for social software is similar to building a business case for a toolbox. In establishing the justification for purchasing a toolbox, you can talk only in generalities. You can build things better, faster and maybe with fewer accidents. This is the same situation when trying to justify an investment in social software. You can’t get concrete unless you know what you are building. Those of you who read my blog regularly are probably thinking, “Here he goes on about purpose again!” You are correct! You simply can’t talk business justification, estimate investment, calculate ROI, or build success measures unless you know why you are engaging the community…to what business relevant end. Although you can’t build a generic universal business case for social software, you can build a business case for a specific well defined business purpose that is enabled via social software.

Now you can build metrics around social activity (registered participants, visits per month, posts per month, average time between visits, pages viewed, etc.) which is important and can be indicative of a thriving community. However, the activity may or may not be delivering business value. Business value is measured separately from activity. 

I bring this up because for the past number of months I have been building a Gartner business case framework for social software that links the foundational social software principles with technology benefits, and business benefits, and business impact in a trace-ability chain that tells an end-to-end business case justification story for a social software enabled solution. This framework reuses the constructs from last years Gartner paper, “Building an SOA Business Case: A Gartner Framework” (available to Gartner clients or for a fee). The framework is fairly sophisticated and will still take some time to finish. I’m hoping to publish the “Building Social Software Based Business Cases: A Gartner Framework” by fall 2009.

I’m interested to hear who out there is building (or trying to build) a business case(s) for social software and how it is going. Care to share?