What is the CIO’s role in encouraging Enterprise 2.0 and managing the risk?
It reminds me of the situation we were in about a dozen years ago, when over and over again CIOs would say, “The CEO just walked into my office and said, ‘What’s this Internet thing, and what’s our Internet strategy?’” These days the conversation is, “What’s this 2.0 thing, and what’s our 2.0 strategy?” So a lot of the CIOs that I work with are very clearly in the hot seat for articulating what’s going on and what they’re going to do about it as an organisation. A lot of them see their roles as essentially conservative, though. In other words, “My job is to not increase the risk profile of this organisation before everything else.” That’s a legitimate concern, it’s a legitimate job for the CIO, but all my experience so far tells me that Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t increase the risk profile of an organisation. One really clever approach I heard was from Lockheed [Martin], which is a large global aerospace and defence company. It has a lot of risk concerns, a lot of very legitimate security concerns. Their executives actually got pretty excited about Enterprise 2.0 and rolled out tools that very easily could be misused in this organisation. When they rolled them out, though, they made sure that every kind of contribution could be flagged if it was inappropriate. That gave everyone a sense of calm that if something bad happens, all the eyeballs in this organisation can help us find it. And they have a mechanism to flag it so that it comes to the attention of the compliance department. I asked them how many posts or how many contributions had been flagged in the history of Enterprise 2.0. I believe the answer was zero.
What does this mean for middle managers?
If you’re a middle manager who essentially views your job as one of gate keeping or refereeing information flows, you should be pretty frightened by these technologies, because they’re going to greatly reduce your ability to do that. They’re going to reduce your ability to filter what goes up in the organisation and what comes down in the organisation. And they’re going to greatly reduce your ability to curtail who your people can interact with, talk with, and receive information from. So if you’re inherently a gatekeeper, this is a real problem for you.
If you’re someone who sees your job as managing people and fundamentally getting the human elements right that will lead your part of the organisation to succeed, these technologies are not at all harmful to you. One of the things that we’ve learned is that there’s no technology — even these great new social technologies — that’s a substitute for face time, a substitute for understanding the human situation in your organisation and trying to mould that situation to the best advantage. So if you’re fundamentally a human-centric manager, these tools are not going to put you out of a job, are not going to reduce your influence at all.
If you have another view of yourself, which is that you’re someone who’s responsible for output, you’re someone who’s responsible for making good things happen in your team, then these tools should be your best friend. Because all the evidence we have suggests that Enterprise 2.0 helps you turn out more and better products and actually is not a vehicle for time wasting or for chipping away at what you’re supposed to be doing throughout the day.
How should companies measure the success of Enterprise 2.0?
I haven’t come across people who have done our old-fashioned technology return on investments (ROIs)and are happy with it. What I’ve seen instead is organisations that do a bit of thinking about: What do we want to have happen? What business need are we trying to address? What challenge, what opportunity, are we trying to seize here? And then think about which exact technologies they can deploy to help them with that. So, for example, inside the US Intelligence Community, they had a really severe knowledge-sharing problem and a problem with locating expertise — throughout this huge sprawling bureaucracy of 16 federal agencies — who knows a lot about the following topic. That was their huge challenge. (The events of) 9/11 made it very clear that that was a problem inside the intelligence community.
In their case, some of the most useful tools they’ve deployed have been simple tools like an intelligence communitywide Wiki and blogging environments where people can, the great phrase I’ve heard is, narrate their work. They can talk about what they know, what they’re doing. If you add a bit of Google-flavoured search on top of that, suddenly you have a very good way to find expertise, even in a very large, very decentralised organisation. So that’s the challenge they’ve faced.
Other organisations that I’ve looked at faced a challenge of, “We just feel like there’s too much redundancy here. People are asking and answering the same questions over and over again.” So they set up one central environment where you can just float up your question.
The phrase I heard for that is broadcast search — where you’re talking not about what you know but about actually what you don’t know, and you’re letting all the eyeballs in the organisation help you with your question.
Again, you see a lot of energy, you see a lot of people very willing to take a few seconds to answer a colleague’s question — even if it’s a colleague they don’t know. So when I see successful companies tackling this tool kit, I see them doing a little bit of thinking upfront about what problem or opportunity they’re trying to address, then deploying an appropriate technology in response to that. They then measure progress: How much uptake are we getting? What’s the traffic look like on this? Which is very different than measuring ROI, I think.
This article was first published in November 2009 on The McKinsey Quarterly website, www.mckinseyquarterly.com. Copyright © 2009 McKinsey & Company. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
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