Reducing information asymmetry with Enterprise 2.0

Balanced Score Card and Strategy Map for
Enterprise 2.0
Reducing information asymmetry in 21st century organizations
Jeroen Derynck . Jean Jaurèslaan 48 . B-9050 Gent . T + 32 476 96 17 49 . info@thinkingape.be 1
“Every knowledge worker in a modern organization
is an executive if, by virtue of his position or
knowledge, he is responsible for a contribution that
materially affects the capacity of the organization
to perform and to obtain results.”
Peter Drucker, The effective executive, 1966

I. Abstract
In the new market reality of rapid change, increased globalization and virtualization of the enterprise,
companies are looking for new ways to improve corporate performance. In the aftermath of the
recession and the economic meltdown, companies are not only struggling to launch and sell new
products and services, they are also faced with a knowledge drain as a result of an aging workforce,
redundancy waves and dysfunctional knowledge ecosystems. With the advent of Web 2.0 and social
media, we have witnessed the rise of global communities connecting millions of uses around the globe.
The term "Web 2.0"1 is a cover term for web applications which facilitate interactive information sharing,
interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Examples of Web 2.0
include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-
sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies. A characteristic of Web 2.0 applications is that it
allows users to interact with other users or to change, amend or update content (User Generated
Content) in contrast to non-interactive platforms where users are limited to the passive viewing of
information. Leading social software platforms such as Facebook, Digg, Blogspot, Amazon, Wikipedia,
Linkedin, Youtube, Flickr or Slideshare, enable consumers to join a global conversation and share
thoughts, ideas, comments, videos, photos and bookmarks with each other.
This is the age of mass collaboration and Wikinomics:
where consumers, employees, suppliers, partners and
competitors are encouraged to share information and ideas.
In this paper, we will examine how Web 2.0 in the Enterprise
(commonly referred to as Enterprise 2.0) can positively impact
corporate performance by means of social software
technologies that
• Reduce cost of email traffic & data redundancy
• Provide alternatives for on-site meetings
• Decrease training & internal recruitment costs
• Improve communication and collaboration
• Enable the virtual enterprise & distributed teams
• Increase speed of information
• Reduce time searching for information
• Enable to quickly locate expert knowledge
• allow to Integrate partner/supplier networks
• Manage knowledge drain
• Improve quality of information
• Prepare for the changing demographics in the organization
1 first used at the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004 - www.wikipedia.com
A powerful global conversation has
begun. Through the Internet, people
are discovering and inventing new
ways to share relevant knowledge with
blinding speed. As a direct result,
markets are getting smarter—and
getting smarter faster than most
companies.
The Cluetrain Manifesto - 1999
The end of business as usual
www.cluetrain.com

Corporate Culture 2.0 drives Enterprise 2.0
However, to realize the full potential of enterprise 2.0, organizations will have to transform the way they
are working today and grow towards a culture of openness. Enterprise 20 can be the catalyst but In
order to achieve sustainable value creation, organizations have prepares themselves for a radical change
in corporate architecture, strategy, behavior and management. These will be the revenue generators in
the long term. The Bottom line of this paper is that Enterprise 2.0 - thanks to its nature and people-
centric approach - will positively impact the intrinsic motivation of the employee workforce thus driving
corporate performance.
Enterprise 2.0 works on the (soft) dimensions of recognition, autonomy and relatedness and has a direct
link with individual and corporate performance. In order to accompany this transformation, it is
recommended to envision the use of a Strategy Map and Balanced Score Card to align people,
processes and technology with this new collaboration-driven strategy. In this paper, we refer to
collaboration2 as value-adding interactions that enable employees, consultants, customers, suppliers,
subcontractors and partners to achieve business objectives, resolve issues and share knowledge
effectively and efficiently.
Information Asymmetry
In economics and contract theory, information asymmetry deals with the study of decisions in
transactions where one party has more or better information than the other. This creates an imbalance
of power in transactions which can sometimes cause the transactions to go awry.
Enterprise 2.0 outlook
In 2006 HBS professor Andrew McAfee was the first to coin the term Enterprise 2.0 in an MIT Sloan
Management Review article entitled “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration”. An early
definition of E2.0 was: “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between
companies and their partners or customers”. In this article, McAfee also introduced the acronym
SLATES to describe a usage framework for web 2.0 in the enterprise. SLATES stands for Searching,
Linking, Authoring, Tagging, Extensions and Signals. With this acronym, the author wanted
to describe how Web 2.0 technologies could be used in a business context. Since then, the market of
Enterprise Social software has been increasingly growing and US researcher Gartner expects this
market to grow to $ 4,646 million by 2012. Companies - mostly globals and multi-nationals - have been
implementing Enterprise Social Software Platforms (ESSP) with growing success. Helped by the
secularization of IT, the growing maturity of the web as platform and increase in broadband and mobile
infrastructure and a technology-savvy workforce - these companies have seen performance
improvements. IBM was able to save $ 4,6 million on a recurring basis as a result of introducing an
Enterprise Tagging System on the Intranet. Tag-based searching reduces personal search time and
discovery time and will generate serious productivity gains for the user. With the launch of their wiki
software, Dell managed to save $ 4 million annually in its call center - and reduced call handling time
with 2 to 3 minutes as a result of fewer-clicks-to-solution. I believe that E2.0 stands for sustainable
2 Productivity in Collaboration-intensive Knowledge Work: The Collaboration Management Imperative (Kjetil Kristensen, Björn Kijl)

innovation and that the new generation of tomorrow’s workers - Generation Y - will join me in this
thinking. So let’s see how we can take the jump to the next curve.
Welcome to the age of Wikinomics

II. The collaboration imperative in the information age
In the 1960s we saw the transition from a post-war industrial society to an office-based society. This
era marked the emergence of the information society where people increasingly depended on
information, knowledge and technology. The information society also gave rise to a new generation
of workers: the knowledge worker. In 1959 Peter Drucker first coined the term “knowledge worker”
to describe “someone who adds value in the workplace by processing existing information to create
new information which can be used to define and solve problems”.
The knowledge (or information) worker deals with information work: this is the act of creating, using,
interpreting or sharing information as part of a business process. In his daily activities, the typical
information worker relies on the ability to work collaboratively, leverage relationship capital,
discover tacit knowledge and deliver new solutions. With the increasing specialization of work and
complexity of products and services, the need for intensive coordination and importance of interaction
also grows. Our globalized and virtualized work environment has lead to an interaction & collaboration
overhead that becomes substantial, and effectively managing this overhead becomes critically
important.
Collaborative activities typically consume 370-80% of an information worker’s time, the relative gain of
improving the performance of those activities is significantly higher than improving the performance of
individual activities. Understanding how Information workers perform their jobs and what their needs are
is a critical step toward creating tools and strategies that enable them to perform more efficiently. But
tools are only one part of the equation - in this case Information Technology enables to leverage the
information capital and serves as lever for connecting Human and Organization capital. Enterprise 2.0
also requires a new mindset (behavior), corporate culture, decentralized structure, leadership style and
as such centers on what Norton and Kaplan define as the intangible assets of the organization.
• Human capital (employee skill and knowledge)
• Information capital (databases, information systems, networks and technology infrastructure)
• Organizational capital (culture, leadership, employee alignment, teamwork & knowledge management)
Norton & Kaplan state that none of these intangible assets has value that can be measured separately
or independently and that the value of these intangible assets derives from their ability to help the
organization implement its strategy. We will refer to studies that show a strong correlation between a
collaborative culture and corporate performance: collaboration, knowledge and interaction (i.e. intangible
assets) can create value for the organization and impact overall corporate performance in the long run -
if these dynamics are well understood and managed.
The typical knowledge worker spends the majority of his time on collaborative activities such as
meetings, communication, brainstorms, knowledge sharing or information distribution. In this
3 Meetings around the world: the impact of collaboration on Business Performance - Frost & Sullivan white-paper

perspective, overall (corporate) performance can be improved by addressing collaboration and
interpersonal productivity rather than improving individual work performance.
The Connected and Collaborative Enterprise
Despite the problems with evaluating and measuring collaboration, recent studies emphasize the
importance of collaboration as a key driver of business performance. The study What's driving the new
economy? The benefits of workplace innovation shows that workplace innovations account for 89% of
multi-factor productivity gains (Black and Lynch, 2001). The research paper Meetings around the world:
the impact of collaboration on Business Performance (Gofus et. al., 2006) concludes that collaboration
positively impacts an organization’s business performance, as collaboration constitutes twice the impact
of a company’s strategic orientation and more than five times the impact of market and technological
turbulence influences.
The data collected in the study indicates that collaboration counts for 36% of overall business
performance and confirms that collaboration is a business area to be monitored, facilitated and
managed. This links closely with Kaplan and Norton’s vision and definition4 of the so-called intangible
assets: “knowledge that exists in organization to create differential advantage” or “the capabilities of the
company’s employees to satisfy customer needs”. I agree with the authors when they state that human,
information and organizational capital are “the ultimate source of sustainable value creation”.
Enterprise 2.0 will help organizations to deal with the new collaboration paradigm as it provides an
ecosystem of web-based technologies (tools) that provide rapid and agile collaboration,
information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise. With
proper change management initiatives, this can result in a productivity increase for the knowledge
worker which - in turn - has a substantial impact on business performance.
III. Darwinian IT systems
Knowledge-driven industries are characterized by the fact that they generate revenue from the output of
their employees’ information work. Over the past decades, the ratio of knowledge workers has
substantially increased and now constitutes almost 75 percent of the workforce in industrialized
countries. Closely intertwined with the rise of the information age was the birth of a totally new industry:
Information Technology. Thanks to the first Electronic Data Processing (EDP) systems that entered the
market in the Sixties, knowledge-driven industries could now start to automate many of the typical
information tasks. Since then, we have seen the rise of new technologies such as SCM, CRM, ECM or
payroll systems that aim to capture the information flows in specific domains such as manufacturing,
customer relationships, content management and Human Resources.
The 1980s witnessed the emergence of Enterprise Document Management and Enterprise Content
Management systems aimed at capturing explicit knowledge in a structured and consistent way. But
where most of these (Darwinian) systems are transaction-oriented and center on capturing the explicit
knowledge in an organization, the real value of information is to be found in the tacit knowledge of the
organization. Unfortunately, this tacit knowledge mostly resides in the heads of the information workers
4 Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible Assets into Tangible Outcomes (2003 Harvard Business Publishing)

or is scattered amongst multiple systems and enterprise repositories.
The typical nature of the information work is that there is no upfront
workflow or as George Macgregor5 puts it: “Ultimately information
behaves in a unique manner when compared to other resources
because it essentially represents the genesis of human thought,
and is heterogeneous and intrinsically intangible. The laws of
thermodynamics are of little consequence to the existence of
information. (…) Therefore, unlike traditional resources of land, labour
and capital, information rarely yields any physical output. Perhaps more
importantly, and as Cleveland 6 noted in his 1982 article for the
‘Futurist’, information also differs from traditional resources in that it is
expandable, compressible, substitutable, transportable, diffusive and
sharable. To handle knowledge and intelligence in an effective way,
organizations need a new generation of enterprise systems that are
user-centric - not transaction-oriented. These platforms have to be
easily scalable, widely accessible and - in alignment with the very nature
of information work - expandable, compressible, substitutable,
transportable, diffusive and sharable.
IV. Knowledge: the ultimate source of sustainable value creation
Knowledge is the lifeblood of many organizations but most fail to see it as an asset or a true resource.
Information as a (corporate) resource has been a topic of discussion of academics and practitioners in
various subject fields. Economists such as Machlup, Porat and Bell pioneered the ideas of information
economy with information as the transforming resource for postindustrial society. Authors such as
Horton (Marchand & Horton 1986) pioneered the view of information as a corporate resource, which like
other resources such as people, money, raw materials, equipment and energy, should be managed to
give a competitive edge. These thinkers helped develop both the idea of information as a resource and
the idea of information-resources management (Badendoch et al. 1994: 26). In this context - there is
clear parallel with Robert S. Kaplan & David P. Norton’s view on knowledge. In the book Strategy Maps,
the authors first describe7 intangible assets as “knowledge that exists in organization to create differential
advantage” or “the capabilities of the company’s employees to satisfy customer needs”. Intangible
assets encompass such diverse items as patents, copyrights, workforce knowledge, leadership,
information systems and work processes. They conclude with (...) these (intangible) assets (read
knowledge) are “the ultimate source of sustainable value creation”.
5 The Nature of Information in the 21st Century: Conundrums for the Informatics Community? George Macgregor
6 Harland Cleveland, "Information as Resource," The Futurist, December 1982, 34-39
7 Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible Assets into Tangible Outcomes (2003 Harvard Business Publishing)
“So the flow of information is
changing us at a far deeper
level than we realize.
Knowledge was once power.
Now it’s becoming freedom. If
knowledge were power we’d
have good cause to be
secretive. But secrecy isn’t
only becoming impossible. It’s
proving dysfunctional as well.
We begin to see how much
better our decisions are when
we work together, openly”
(Lienhard, 1997).

V. Information bottlenecks lead to reduced throughput
With the rise of the information age, companies have also been faced with a growing information
overload. Especially widespread communication mechanisms like email have created an uninterrupted
flow of information for the knowledge worker. This has an adverse impact on the productivity. In
addition, the proliferation of enterprise IT systems, file servers and user-created applications across the
organization resulted in a fragmentation of information and knowledge. This proliferation of systems in
combination with the time-consuming email makes it increasingly complex to search, capture and
publish relevant content and knowledge. Research by
IDC8 - as well as many other studies - found that the
typical information worker spends 24% of his time on on
searching and analyzing information. The average time
spent on email even amounts to 14,5 hours per week
including the document workflow, sales, scheduling or
other business processes. As a result, traditional IT
systems are more likely to inhibit effective knowledge
sharing and reduce throughput of the Information
worker:
• Corporate knowledge resides in multiple repositories that cannot be accessed centrally
• Information is poorly organized/scattered across the organization
• The amount of information is growing to quickly to keep up with
• Ineffective search tools in place which makes locating new information hard
• Inability to integrate internal and external data sources.
These bottlenecks impede the information worker to perform at optimal capacity and induces a serious
amount of waste in the process leading to suboptimal productivity as a result of:
• Reformatting from multiple formats into one (document) format
• Searching but not finding information
• Recreating content
• Multichannel publishing with multiple applications
• Version control issues
The IDC study concludes that an organization employing 1000
knowledge workers (with an average salary of $ 60000) loses
$ 5,7 million annually just in the time wasted by employees
having to reformat information as they move among
applications. Although both Kaizen and Lean Six Sigma can
be used to identify waste in the organization’s knowledge
processes (or information work manufacturing), it is much
harder to define a one-size-fits-all solution due to the very
nature of information work (which is by nature not repetitive).
8 The hidden costs of information work - IDC white paper 2005
information overload costs the U.S.
economy $900 billion per year in
"lowered employee productivity and
reduced innovation." The reason?
People are spending up to half their
day managing and searching for
information.
28%!
25%!
20%!
15%!
12%!
Interruptions (Email, phone, ...) !
Productive Content creation !
Meetings!
Searching through content!
Thinking and reflecting !

VI. Boosting information worker productivity
One of the major hurdles in implementing “knowledge initiatives” is measuring knowledge worker
productivity or in a more holistic perspective: the value created through information work. Knowledge
work involves complex interactions with others, and many intangibles that are difficult to relate to metrics
of corporate performance. Typical metrics are profitability, growth or customer satisfaction.
It’s the technology, stupid
Many tools (ECM, CRM, ERP,..) promise efficiency gains but today’s knowledge work often depends on
creativity and innovation capabilities that require a more comprehensive definition of productivity.
Productivity is concerned with achieving business objectives faster, but these business objectives may
be difficult to measure quantitatively.
One approach to measure the output of an information worker is by the level of knowledge work
productivity. Wikipedia defines the knowledge work productivity9 as the measure of the efficiency and
effectiveness of the output generated by workers who mainly rely on knowledge, rather than labor,
during the production process. While there is no real standard measurement of knowledge work
productivity, it can be analyzed along several dimensions such as: quantity, cost, quality, timeliness,
autonomy, project success, customer satisfaction, creativity, responsibility level, perception, and
absenteeism.
In terms of evaluating efficiency and effectiveness of the information worker, we might now start to think
of some straightforward measures: time spent on searching, analyzing, interpreting, creating and
distributing information (assets). Research suggests that there are several examples of organizations
that have made real progress thanks to innovative combinations of enabling technologies and new work
and management practices. Collaboration is the secret ingredient of high-performing companies which
are more productive, profitable and innovative than their competitors10 (Dorgan and Dowdy, 2004,
Beardsley et. al., 2006). Technology can definitely change the way collaborative work is organized and
facilitated. In turn this affects the nature of interactions, and these interactions’ ability to support
fundamental business processes - in this perspective, these technologies have to be embedded in the
core processes of the organization to generate sustainable value from collaboration.
9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_work_productivity
10 Dorgan, Stephen J., Dowdy John J.: When IT lifts productivity. The McKinsey Quarterly, Number 4, 2004

VII. The Return On Investment Information
Strategy maps describe how companies manage intangible assets to positively affect company
performance and deliver value to key stakeholders. In our strategy map, Enterprise 2.0 clearly centers
on learning and growth objectives which describe how the people, technology, and organization climate
combine to support strategy. Kaplan and Norton see improvements in Learning and Growth as lead
indicators for internal process, customer and financial performance”. ”Enhancing and aligning
intangible assets leads to improved process performance, which in turn, drives success for
customers and stakeholders”. Although they state that “Intangible assets should not be measured by
how much money was spent to develop them (..) and that the value comes from how well they align to
the strategic priorities of the enterprise, most organizations still use the more traditional approach of
calculating the Return On Investment on Enterprise 2.0. This would be the same as saying that you
want to measure the ROI of a cultural change program.
Emerging value
This puts us in an odd position because the
strategic capabilities represented by Enterprise
2.0 are primarily emergent in nature, instead of
carefully aimed at and unleashed at specific
problems11 (Dion Hinchcliffe). In practice this
means that it is difficult to measure the direct
value of a culture of openness, open knowledge
management, social networking or emergent
collaboration. Only when you look at the overall
cause and effect chains with Enterprise 2.0
tools, it becomes clear that the trade-off effects
will generate sustainable value. In the long run
technology-enabled collaboration leads to new
products & services (innovation), increased
profitability, higher quality, more efficient operations, higher customer satisfaction and employee
retention. In this particular case, you could even see this as technology-enabled innovation. This is pretty
much in line with the research by Frost & Sullivan. In their research paper, they have measured how
"collaborative" a given organization is and how this impacts business performance. They measure the
impact of Collaboration Quality and Collaboration Capability on Business Performance along several
quantitative dimensions: profitability, profit growth, sales growth, and labor productivity. Frost & Sullivan
also evaluate performance along qualitative dimensions such as product development, product quality,
customer satisfaction, and innovation.
The authors define collaboration along two axes: Quality and Capability. Collaboration Quality is how
an organization uses its collaboration technology and processes to drive business performance. CQ
influences an organization's ability to compete today. The second component in the equivalence is
Collaboration Capability or the driver of collaboration quality. Their study shows that a culture of
11 http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=334

openness, as a factor within capability, is the most important determinant of collaboration quality. A
culture of openness is defined as to the ease of talking to anyone within the organization, the regularity
of cooperation between units within the organization, and the accessibility of persons to those in other
departments.
A culture of openness (the Connected & Collaborative Enterprise) is an asset that is difficult for
competitors to detect or imitate, making it a strategic advantage over organizations that are... not open
(Enterprise 1.0). A culture of openness contributes to collaboration quality, more than twice the impact of
a structure of decentralization or the use of collaborative technology in strategy implementation. Culture
accounts for more than five times the impact of the breadth of collaboration in strategic planning, and
more than seven times the impact of the use of collaboration technology for strategic planning. They
conclude that collaboration does generate positive returns and that collaboration significantly impacts
profitability, profit growth and sales growth. They add that the impact of strategic orientation is also a
strong contributor to these performance dimensions hence the importance of dealing with Enterprise 2.0
on a strategic and executive level.
But what is striking is that the most significant impact of collaboration on a single measure of
performance is in the attainment of customer satisfaction, where of the three factors measured
(collaboration, market turbulence and strategy orientation) it is the sole influencing factor, accounting for
a whopping 41% of the forces driving customer satisfaction. The evidence that collaboration is such
strong driver of this component of business performance underscores the importance of collaboration to
success.
A Spongebob SquarePants approach to labor productivity
In their study they found that Labor productivity is also positively influenced by collaboration - which is
consistent with the known synergistic effects of collaboration within an organization. They promote a
holistic approach to collaboration which calls for both the utilization of
1. collaborative technologies (i.e. Enterprise 2.0)
2. The development of the company's absorptive capacity (i.e., how well a company is able to
integrate new knowledge and technologies and use them to improve overall performance) to optimize
the benefits of technology in the workplace. Such absorptive capacity is largely a function of corporate
culture, structure, and decision processes.
Product quality and product development are positively influenced by
collaboration, as is innovation. Although innovation and product development
are also influenced by the degree of market turbulence and strategy; their
impact is relatively weaker than collaboration.
In other words, a good strategy and market opportunities can impact product
quality, development, and innovation, but when these activities are performed
collaboratively, it is collaboration that is the stronger catalyst. This is quite
logical, since changes in the tastes and needs of customers, and the
possibilities offered by new technologies represent an opportunity to satisfy
the customer through new and innovative products. Yet with the known
benefits of concurrent and collaborative approaches to product development and innovation,
collaboration is indeed a key ingredient. To wrap up their findings, we can say that Collaboration
The Strategic Role of
Intangible Assets Cannot
Be Addressed on a
Stand-alone Basis. An
Integrated Program is
Required to Support the
Enhancement of All the
Organization’s Intangible
Assets (Norton & Kaplan)

Capability and Collaboration Quality are key ingredients for effective collaboration. A Culture of openness
is a strong driver of corporate performance but a critical driver for customer satisfaction. A connected
and collaborative enterprise will have a competitive advantage as a result of:
• Improved productivity of collaborative efforts to achieve a given task,
• Increased effectiveness of supporting business strategy
• Growing recognition that collaboration is a sustainable, competitive advantage,
• Growing # teams committed to driving collaboration as a process in the path to success.
VIII. Wrapping it all together: The strategy Map
The Strategy Map by Norton and Kaplan helps organizations to describe the link between strategy
formulation and strategy execution. Strategy Maps show the cause and effect linkages (critical success
factors and causal relations) between four perspectives: Financial, Customer, internal business
process and Learning & Growth. However, in our perspective the overarching (financial) strategic
objective is not to create shareholder value but stakeholder value. In an E2.0 context, primary
stakeholders are 1. management, 2. employees, 3. partners, 4. suppliers and ultimately 5. the
“customer”. The underlying strategies will center on improving (knowledge worker) productivity as well
as growth (improving profitability of the knowledge worker).
Let’s reformulate the definition of Enterprise 2.0 and convert it into the program’s mission:
Incorporating these Enterprise 2.0 fundamentals as part of the value proposition helps us to achieve
results by combining two strategies: A stakeholder intimacy strategy focussed on improving
stakeholder engagement as well as an operational excellence strategy which aims to improve the
quality, price and ease of performing information work. At this level, it is important to highlight the
personal and business benefits of the strategic direction - and finding a common cause to engage all
stakeholders in the action plan towards success. Identifying critical success factors and translating
these into enabling strategies means that organizations also provide tools, resources and budgets to
make this all happen.
The following table suggests a number of critical success factors and enabling initiatives. In absence of
a dominant (or guiding) coalition, we have used sources from a variety of research companies,
universities, blue chips and industry vendors.
By allocating the proper tools, resources and budgets to these initiatives, organizations can execute the
underlying strategies in a structured and step-based way. It is worthwhile noting that only 20% of all
efforts involves technology and the remaining 80% goes into changing the information behavior of the
To create a culture of openness amongst our stakeholders enabled by an
effective ecosystem of social software technologies that provide rapid and
agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration
capabilities.

company. In this particular instance, Technology-Enabled Collaboration a.k.a. Enterprise 12 stands for
the deployment of enterprise social software platforms that
• Facilitate stakeholders in joining the company conversation
• Enhance online community building
• Encourage internal networking and online presence
• Are freeform and emergent by nature i.e. where people’s interactions become evident over time
• Accept all types of data and is freeform in its usage in the sense that there is no upfront workflow
The underlying technology deployment, has to go hand-in-hand with a change management program
that centers on an effective communications & collaboration climate. Specific initiatives focus on
adoption of new information processes or on the marketing of the personal benefits in using social
technologies. For the sake of simplicity, we see communication, marketing and change
management practices as E2.0 overarching strategic themes and only center on actions and
initiatives13 that provide technology-related quick wins and sustainable frameworks for future expansion.
C r i t i c a l S u c c e s s F a c t o r S t r a t e g i c i n i t i a t i v e
Create a culture of openness Learn for life program
Reduce cost of email traffic Market ESS messaging capability
Provide alternatives for on-site meetings Deploy conference & whiteboard functions
Decrease training costs Launch eLearning space
Reduce data redundancy Create central information repositories
Improve communication & collaboration Roll out user friendly collaboration platform
Enable virtual enterprise Provide virtual meeting spaces
Create distributed teams Lower threshold for social linking
Increase speed of information Enable broadcasting and live streaming
Reduce Search time Enterprise Social search and collaborative tagging
Quickly locate expert (knowledge) Rich user profiles & identitags
Integrate partner/supplier networks Create virtual business communities
Manage knowledge drain Create personal workspaces
Improve quality of information Introduce rating and favoring mechanisms
Prepare for changing workplace demographics Open up Gen Y communication channels
Centralize knowledge Market the corporate plaza & forum
More collaborative project management integrate time, scope, & budget features
improve internal recruitment Harvest talent through viral campaigns
Improve communication effectiveness Everybody’s entitled to tweet
Improve innovation cycle Launch creativity & innovation contests
Reduce publishing time Multi-channel sharing features
12 Shattering myths about Enterprise 2.0 - Harvard Business Review 11/2009 - Andrew P. McAfee
13 List has been composed on the basis of own research, client programs, teaching & lecturing

These critical success factors are the result of consolidating various studies, research, publications and
web-based postings between 2006 and today. They serve as a blueprint for defining CSFs and enabling
initiatives but represent a sample set of possible cause and effect factors.
This also applies to the definition of the key performance indicators and targets. It is highly likely that the
proposed indicators cannot be measured today. Fortunately, most of these Enterprise Social Software
Platforms have an embedded analytics module that allow to report and measuring the collaborative
capabilities in the enterprise. Target figures are consequently blank but can be added based on a
guesstimates and data consolidation and interpretation.
As a consequence, most indicators are platform and network activity based but one can imagine other
measures in the field of adoption, marketing and promoting a “new way of working”. Indicators such as
# of change campaigns, employee meetings, executive road shows, management dialogues etc can
complement the rating card.
IX. Balanced Score Card 2.0
At the highest conceptual level, the Balanced Scorecard is a framework that helps organizations
translate strategy into operational objectives driving both behavior and performance. A Balanced
Scorecard Program is not a “metrics” project, it is a “change” process. Below table can be used as
balanced score card to measure, control and steer the strategic initiatives linked to the execution of an
Enterprise 2.0 program. We assume that all indicators are understood - or at least raise an Aha-Erlebnis
for the technology-savvy reader. Likewise, all CSFs and dimensions should be well defined and agreed
upon before data collection. Typical data sources for populating the suggested indicators are:
Email systems, CRM systems, eLearning & Development solutions, Intranet, ECM/EDM systems, Net
Promoter Score surveys, Customer satisfaction surveys, employee satisfaction polls...
Whereas most of the data will require a well defined input source, for the moment we assume that
social network activity is our primary indicator for the level of collaboration in the organization. As-is
metrics might be hard to obtain but intranet, extranet and the corporate website might reveal some
“hidden” knowledge about social network dynamics. But remember that a successful Balanced
Scorecard program starts with a recognition that it is not a “metrics” project, it’s a “change” process. It
should help to craft the right climate for change, create the vision & strategy, establish a guiding
coalition and center on measuring the changes in corporate culture and behavior. As a consequence,
measuring how E2.0/collaboration impacts profitability, profit growth and sales growth at this stage
would be too soon - the trade-off effects will only emergence later on in the adoption curve (Rogers -
Diffusion of innovation model) However, customer satisfaction can be included as CSF - as an indicator,
a Net Promoter Score: By asking one simple question — How likely is it that you would you recommend
[Company X] to a friend or colleague? — you can get a clear measure of your company's performance
through the eyes of the customers (or employees, partners,... ) On 0-to-10 point rating scale 10 are the
loyal enthusiasts whereas 0 to 6 are unhappy customers that give your brand a bad name. To calculate
a company's Net Promoter Score (NPS), take the percentage of customers who are Promoters and
subtract the percentage who are unhappy bunnies.

C r i t i c a l S u c c e s s F a c t o r I n d i c a t o r Ta rg e t
C u s t o m e r S a t i s f a c t i o n N e t P ro m o t e r S c o re
C u l t u re o f O p e n n e s s N e t P ro m o t e r S c o re
C o s t o f e m a i l t r a ff i c # e m a i l s p e r u s e r
O n - s i t e m e e t i n g s a l t e r n a t i v e s # w e b - b a s e d m e e t i n g s
Tr a i n i n g c o s t p e r u s e r Tr a i n i n g c o s t p e r e m p l o y e e
D a t a re d u n d a n c y p e r u s e r G B s t o r a g e p e r u s e r
C o m m u n i c a t i o n / c o l l a b o r a t i o n m i x # a v a i l a b l e s o c i a l m e d i a c h a n n e l s
D i s t r i b u t e d E n t e r p r i s e # C o m m u n i t i e s
S p e e d o f i n f o r m a t i o n # c o n t e n t p o s t s
E n t e r p r i s e S e a rc h t i m e t i m e p e r p a g e v i e w s
F i n d e x p e r t ( k n o w l e d g e ) # s o c i a l n e t w o r k c o n n e c t i o n s
I n t e g r a t e d p a r t n e r / s u p p l i e r n e t w o r k s # o f h y b r i d w o r k s p a c e s
K n o w l e d g e re t e n t i o n # u s e r g e n e r a t e d c o n t e n t u n i t s
I n f o r m a t i o n q u a l i t y # t a g s
Wo r k p l a c e d e m o g r a p h i c s R a t i o G e n e r a t i o n Y v s . b a b y b o o m e r s
C e n t r a l i z e d k n o w l e d g e # i n f o r m a t i o n a s s e t s
C o l l a b o r a t i v e p ro j e c t m a n a g e m e n t # p ro j e c t m e m b e r s i n w o r k s p a c e
I n t e r n a l re c r u i t m e n t % i n t e r n a l e m p l o y e e s / n e w v a c a n c i e s
C o m m u n i c a t i o n e ff e c t i v e n e s s C l i c k r a t i o p e r m e s s a g e
I n n o v a t i o n c y c l e # i d e a s i n i n n o v a t i o n p i p e l i n e
C o n t e n t c re a t i o n t i m e T i m e p e r p o s t i n g
The final step in the process requires to reflect and evaluate the overall program, goals, strategies etc. in
terms of benefits i.e. what-is-in-it-for-us as an individual or an organization? How will the new strategic
direction help me/us in achieving our professional (and individual) objectives. It helps to evaluate the
completeness of the mission, goals and see it through the eyes of the stakeholders. The what-is-in-it-
for-us in an E2.0 context means breaking down corporate information silos, reduce search time, enable
knowledge sharing, foster collaboration, mashup data and enhance integration capabilities. Most
information workers will quickly see the benefits of (social) software solutions that
• Allow easy access to corporate knowledge repositories
• Facilitate sharing, tagging and structuring of information assets
• Enable information pulling and content aggregations
• Leverage the organization’s social brain by harvesting the wisdom of the crowds
• Facilitate mashup and integration of internal and external data sources.
Integrated collaboration suites a.k.a. Enterprise Social Software suites can easily remove the current
information bottlenecks in the organization. Technology-enabled collaboration will enable the information
worker to perform at optimal capacity and promises to reduce the waste in information tasks by means
of social media and ESSPs. These Facebook/Youtube/Linkedin-like platforms enable
• Aggregation of multiple information sources
• Extended and Semantic Search capabilities
• Multichannel publishing across multiple applications
• Golden record creation with integrated authoring functions

Social features including web-based communities,discussion forums, social bookmarking, blogs, wikis,
social networking, media-sharing, mashups; folksonomies bref, user-centric applications will create
personal and corporate benefits. A possible value proposition that can engage all stakeholders could
sound like “We enable you to be more creative and innovative in a climate of effective
collaboration“
Developing strategies and their associated outcomes is the easy part in the equation. However, most
organizations fail when it comes to changing or enabling the required processes and aligning them with
the wanted outcome. As a consequence, the strategy map must not only identify and link the
performance drivers to the desired outcome but also give a clear direction for aligning HR and IT
‘strategic) programs. Linking individual goals to corporate goals might be an initial step to further
investigate how enterprise-wide collaboration initiatives contribute to both the individual and corporate
performance.
I n d i v i d u a l b e n e f i t s O rg a n i z a t i o n a l b e n e f i t s I n i t i a t i v e s
-Reduce search time
-Find expert knowledge
-Work in virtual teams
-Works across traditional silos
-Be Productive
-Conduct Business,
-Be Responsive
-Reduce Travel time F2F Meetings
-Work in Teams
-Effective Demand Management
-Leverage social network
-Reduce information overload
-Create communities (of Practice)
-Effective communication
-Location-independent
-Effective learning system
-Increase presence
-Easy access to expertise
-Enable knowledge sharing
-Enhance Team work
-Reduce Search Time
-Improve content creation
-Enhance speed of delivery
-Reduce Travel costs
-Reduce versioning problems
-Create better bonding
-Reduce cost of storage
-Technology-enabled innovation
-Reduce innovation cycles
-Improve decision making
-Retain knowledge
-Cultivate weak ties
-Improve discovery
-Foster collaboration
-Manage cost of Information
-Break down knowledge silos
-New workplace demographics
-Learn for life program
-Market ESS messaging capability
-Deploy whiteboard functions
-Launch eLearning space
-Create information repositories
-Provide virtual meeting spaces
-Lower threshold for social linking
-Broadcasting and live streaming
-Enterprise Social search
-Collaborative tagging
-Rich user profiles & identitags
-Virtual business communities
-Rating and favoring mechanisms
-Gen Y communication channels
-Corporate plaza & forum
-integrate PM features
-viral talent-hunting campaigns
-Corporate Twitter
-Creativity & innovation forum
The level of "collaborativeness" of a given organization has a direct impact on several business
performance dimensions such as profitability, profit growth, sales growth, and labor productivity. In
addition, Enterprise 2.0 also works along qualitative dimensions such as product development, product
quality, customer satisfaction, and innovation.

However changing attitude and working on a culture of openness has to be the priority - alongside
with the roll-out of (low-cost14) social software suites that facilitate
• Talking to anyone within the organization
• Enhancing the regularity of cooperation between units within the organization
• Improve the accessibility of persons to those in other departments.
14 Prices start at $ 3 per user/per Month or around $ 300 per Month for SMB - Enterprise pricing on Demand

X. Conclusions
A culture of openness is an asset that is difficult for competitors to detect or imitate,
which makes it a strategic advantage over organizations that are stuck in the 1.0
thinking. In this paper we have identified several drivers that will contribute to both
collaboration quality and capabilities. We have shown that creating an ecosystem
of social software technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration,
information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities will generate sustainable value
for the organization in terms of business performance.
The successes of social software platforms such as Facebook, Digg, Blogspot, Amazon, Wikipedia,
Linkedin, Youtube, Flickr or Slideshare show that millions of consumers are willing to join a global
conversation. The web - or in this case the intranets & community sites - are increasingly becoming
global collaboration platforms. Enterprise 2.0 will help our stakeholders to discover and inventing new
ways to share relevant knowledge @ blinding speed. Markets will get smarter—and the challenge for
companies will be to outsmart the smart. Getting in tune with the Wikinomics paradigm means that even
in the digital age, some old Darwinian statements are still valid: "It is not the strongest of the
species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most responsive to
change" (C. Darwin).
Enterprise 2.0 enables knowledge-driven organizations to jump to the next curve with the help of
technology-enabled collaboration. In combination with effective change management initiatives that
focus on information and knowledge behavior - organizations will realize quick wins in the field of
knowledge management, communication effectiveness and internal networking. Enterprise 2.0 is about
how an organization uses its collaboration & social platforms and processes to drive business
performance. But Enterprise 2.0 is mostly about a culture of openness - a strategic advantage that
contributes to collaboration quality, more than twice the impact of a structure of decentralization or the
use of collaborative technology in strategy implementation. E2.0 will put steroids in the breadth of
organizational collaboration for strategic planning, innovation and customer relationships building. But
then again, are they ready to jump to the next curve?
Ideas are easy. It's
the execution of
ideas that really
separates the
sheep from the
goats...
Sue Grafton

Reducing information asymmetry with Enterprise 2.0

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