Building Enterprise 2.0 into the Product Development Process

As enterprise 2.0 matures, its uses are getting more focused. I have been hearing more about it use in product development. Here is a timely Forrester report on the topic, Use Social Computing To Build Differentiated Product Development Processes by Roy C. Wildeman.  As the summary states, “in recent years, leading product development organizations have proven the value of greater cross- functional collaboration to harness contributions from across the business and bring great products to market. With the rise in Social Computing among consumers and enterprises alike, development teams are further seeking to transform how they collaborate both internally and externally in key processes like ideation, requirements management, detailed development, and aftermarket support.”

It makes the claim that “succeed in the future, business process professionals must expand their thinking beyond traditional product development solutions and start experimenting with new social technologies.”  I certainly agree. As another Forrester report (The HERO Index: Finding Empowered Employees by Ted Schadler and Josh Bernoff) notes, the more extensive and creative uses of social computing within the enterprise have often come from marketing. To be really competitive, companies need to embed social media and enterprise 2.0 throughout the organization and certainly in the product development area.

Forrester found three main opportunities exist for development teams to further innovate with enterprise 2.0. Note that Forrester uses the term social computing technologies and I am converting this to enterprise 2.0 to go beyond technology. The first one is to enable teams to better collaborate across distance or silos. The second is to bring in outside communities for product ideas, answers, and feedback. The third is integrate new services through social computing into traditional product offerings.

These all make sense. The second (aka crowdsourcing) as certainly got a big play in the press. I have a seen a number of R&D teams move from traditional reporting through email and attachments to blogs and wikis with great productivity increases.  One satellite radio firm had its first on-time and on-budget development effort when it switched to a social computing platform for project reporting. One of the reasons attributed to this success was the increased transparency and its effect on individual and team attention to quality. The MIT Sloan CIO found that using blogs for project reporting greatly increased his efficiency in program monitoring and team mentoring. The Forrester report has a great chart on how social networking expands knowledge capacity beyond the usual “Go-to” resources for project development teams that makes explicit some of the possibilities for improvement.

The report also points out some of the potential obstacles to achieving success in these three areas including concerns over intellectual property and security, as well as the potential chaos from too much unstructured information and the need for clear governance. It also suggests some useful ways to address these issues.  The report concludes with a set of recommendations for taking advantage of the opportunities within social computing. 

Comments

[Gavin Heaton]

As with most things, the challenge is not just the framework, but the organizational fit. We can put wikis and blogs and all sorts of technology in place, but unless we have created a culture of participation, we just won't get past the first hurdle.

[bill Ives]

Gavin Thanks for your comment and I could not agree more. Bill

[Allen Bonde]

Hi Bill - great post and topic. As someone who started in corp R&D I think there is amazing potential here. And crowd-sourced innovation (like Innocentive and the like) is pretty exciting. To me challenges are balancing broad participation with structure, trust models (related to IP point I guess), and finding beachhead applications to show value. Also I agree with Gavin's point that it's just not about tools - but rather culture and incentives...and recognition: e.g., who gets the patent? the team lead, or the community ;-)

Allen
http://twitter.com/abonde

[bill Ives]

Allen thanks for your comment. IP is certainly a key issue. The I-prize, Cisco let all contestants keep their IP and they licensed the winner. This was a good move. They also had a clear process for that balance of structure with participation. I was struck at the recent TEDxBoston that the real innovations were more in how people were engaged than the tech. Bill

[Jordan Hydro]

I like the layout of your blog and Im going to do the same for mine. Do you have any tips? Please PM ME.

[twitter.com/driessen]

Nice post, Bill. Still have to get my hands on that Forrester report... I think the movement of e2.0 towards business processes is logical. One of the reasons e2.0 (and social media in general) is such a success has to do with business processes being too rigid and the tools that support them being hated by its users. Another reason is that social media helped us see that information is social. We already knew that (refer to the book 'The social life of information' for instance), but tools didn't account for it. IT helped us think information without (social) context is useful. We're learning that it's not or at least not complete.
As you know I've been writing and thinking about this topic. For you and your readers I'll point to one post here. I've also been collecting posts on this topic here, written by much smarter people than myself. ;-)

[twitter.com/driessen]

Great, the links didn't show up. Here nr 1 http://info-architecture.blogspot.com/2010/05/is-your-organization-process-or-network.html and 2 http://www.diigo.com/user/driessen/process

[bill Ives]

Samuel thanks for your useful comments and the links.

[Lindsey Niedzielski]

Great post Bill. You put together some very good resources on the evolution of E2.0. We have a community for IM professionals (www.openmethodology.org) and have bookmarked this post for our users. Look forward to reading your work in the future.

[bill Ives]

Lindsey - Thanks for your interest. Bill

[Ashwin Jain]

good work bill. This will get me updated with my Building Enterprise 2.0.
Again great work. U ROCK!!!!