For an actual study, McKinsey asked nearly 1,700 executives from around the world, across a range of industries and functional areas how they are benefiting from Web 2.0 technologies and how their organization is using these technologies. The executives were asked about the value they have realized from their Web 2.0 deployments in three main areas: Employees, customers as well as partners, suppliers and external experts.

Today I want to summarize the key findings of this survey for you.

The Benefits of Web 2.0 Technologies

According to the survey, the three major benefits of Web 2.0 technologies are better knowledge access, reduced costs and increased stakeholder satisfaction. Let’s have a short look at the TOP 5 benefits for the single stakeholder groups:

TOP 5 Benefits for Employees:

1. Increasing Speed of access to knowledge
2. Reducing communication costs
3. Increasing Speed of access to internal experts
4. Decreasing travel costs
5. Increasing employee satisfaction

TOP 5 Benefits for Customers:

1. Increasing effectiveness of marketing
2. Increasing customer satisfaction
3. Reducing marketing costs
4. Reducing support costs
5. Reducing travel costs

TOP 5 Benefits for Partners/Suppliers/Experts:

1. Increasing Speed of access to knowledge
2. Reducing communication costs
3. Increasing Speed of access to external experts
4. Reducing travel costs
5. Increasing satisfaction of suppliers, partners and external experts

The Usage of Web 2.0 Technologies

The survey shows that the most popular Web 2.0 technologies among enterprises are blogs, wikis, social networks and (video-)podcasts: Not very surprisingly the same tools that are popular among consumers. Here are the TOP 5 Web 2.0 technologies for the single stakeholder groups.

TOP 5 Technologies for Employees:

1. Video sharing
2. Blogs
3. Social Networking
4. RSS
5. Wikis

TOP 5 Technologies for Customers:

1. Blogs
2. Social Networking
3. Video Sharing
4. RSS
5. Wikis

TOP 5 Technologies for Partners/Suppliers/Experts:

1. Blogs
2. Video Sharing
3. Social Networking
4. RSS
5. Wikis

Who is gaining the Web 2.0 benefits?

• High-Tech companies benefit most from Web 2.0 technologies, followed by business-, legal- and professional services.
• Manufacturing and Financial industries gain 25% to 50% less benefits from Web 2.0 technologies than the High-Tech and Service Industries (depending on the stakeholder group).
• Companies with a revenue > $1 billion benefit more than smaller companies.
• Most benefits result from the internal usage of Web 2.0 technologies. Fewest benefits result from the interaction with suppliers/partners and experts.
• By function: information technology, business development and sales report more benefits than finance or purchasing.
• IT managers mostly focus on internal improvements. Business development and sales functions want to deliver better insights into markets or to interact with customers.
• The benefits in India and North America are higher than the benefits in Europe.

What are the critical success factors of Web 2.0 adoption?

The survey results confirm that the tool integration into the daily workflow is the most important success factor. To encourage the continuous use, traditional approaches such as financial or performance measurements are inappropriate. In the Web community, status and reputation is often the No. 1 driver for making meaningful contributions. These findings confirm the Web 2.0 success factors I’ve posted earlier in this blog.

For more information, please find the entire survey on mckinseyquarterly.com. I also want to recommend an interactive presentation, which visualizes the key findings of the survey in a very pleasant way.

The Web 2.0 technologies created a new type of online customers. Web users consume and create content and share experiences and opinions directly with each other. So, what does this mean for your organization? Your company needs a strategy to thrive in the online world’s environment of constant change.

The article “Managing beyond Web 2.0” proposes a strategy called LEAD (listen, experiment, apply, develop) that will help companies to manage the external image.

Listen: The organization needs to monitor and analyze what the customers are saying about the company. Use this information as an early-warning system. Probably customers are already talking about you on Facebook or Twitter? Sounds a bit like paranoia, but don’t underestimate the rapidness of change. If your organization says or does something right now, it may be discussed in the web community a couple of hours later. Instead of pushing your message to the customers, you should listen to them engage with them actively.

Experiment: There are a lot of fancy Web 2.0 tools out there – play with them. Create a company profile on social-networking sites, a blog or a daily tweet. There is no proper ROI metric available yet for measuring the effect of the Web 2.0 technology usage, but for sure it will pay off in greater customer awareness and brand engagement.

Apply: After your experiments you should apply the technologies in your company. Stay in touch with your customers; make it simple for them to communicate with you. Optimize your social-networking sites for search engines. Be visible for your target audience. To measure your success in this process step you can use web tools and quantitative analysis to track the results of your experiments. For example, every bigger blog hosting site offers tools to analyze the traffic on your blog.

Develop: The Internet is a social medium and therefore a very important part of any company’s marketing mix. But don’t see just another marketing channel to put all your messages in. Get rid of the mass-media broadcast mentality and make interactive Web 2.0 elements part of your marketing program.

I found this four-step-strategy very logical. It’s easy to understand and simplifies the Web 2.0 adoption process. What’s missing is the organizational impact. Who is choosing the Web 2.0 channels? Is the Web 2.0 communication centralized or decentralized? Who is creating the content – the marketing experts or the experts in the functional teams?

What do you think about the LEAD-strategy? Did you already implement a strategy for adopting Web 2.0 technologies? What are your experiences with Web 2.0 technologies so far? How did you organize the adoption process?

One of my favorite metaphors to aid in the creative search for sustainable systems and architectures is the ecosystem. Although much is written nowadays about organizational ecosystems, SOA ecosystems, ecosystems of webservices etc. the most important part is missing in almost every buzz cascade: the answer to the question »What the heck is an ecosystem?«.

The thoughts of Fritjof Capra provided the desperately needed de-buzzing for my part. Although having absolutely nothing to do with IT or business systems, his basic principles of ecology provided what I was looking for.

Capra assigns five basic attributes to ecosystems:

1. There is no waste. The waste of one member of an ecosystem is the food of another.
2. Matter cycles continually through the web of life.
3. The energy driving these cycles flows from the sun.
4. Diversity assures resilience.
5. Life thrives not by combat but through cooperation, partnership, and networking [1].

All principles together culminate in a sustainable system of cooperating but essentially independent (sub-)systems.

To get the most out of this metaphor we have to interpret it for the context at hand.

What does principle number 4 e. g. mean for the field of enterprise architecture? One interpretation could be that there is no need searching for the one technology to serve them all. Treat the separate units and divisions as the individual organisms they are and specify just the interfaces and cross-cutting concerns (web of life, no waste) connecting them. If you interpret the sun as an orientation point towards the single organisms can navigate by, the governance bodies and the sponsorship needed to organize such a web of life bring principles 3 and 2 to life.

The interpretations and possibilities of these principles are seemingly endless and powerful. As with every powerful thing the danger of misusing (misinterpreting?) them are there, too and can’t be denied. As a tool to break out of internalized mindsets and (in this case) transfer knowledge between different domains, metaphors are essential.

What are your favorite metaphors?

Read Capras original paper here. Get the slides on the subject from OOP2009.

Update:

[1] It always seemed to me that a sort of »proof« was needed for this statement:

»In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned
to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed«
Charles Darwin

Great overview over the roots and main branches of complexity science inlcuding actual hot topics like self-organization, emergence and ecologies.

Found at Wikimedia.

All those latest been there – done that management fads by well-know gurus based on the scheme 7 or 10 simple steps to illumination/success/world-domination/greatness or things like that want to make you believe that cause and effect is exploitable to your favour in any system.

What is your guess? Is an enterprise architecture deterministic? Yes or maybe?
Ok, lets add all the partners, customers, suppliers, competitors to grab a bigger picture. If that is still not enough please remember that even in IT we deal with people, lots of people.
Those people tend to have multiple identities besides their identity as an employee in the system you are trying to control.

Lets think of a complex adaptive system as something which behaviour can only be explained in hindsight as cause and effect is not stable over time. How much sense does it make to try controling the future behaviour of the system with best practices from the past and from a different environment? Not so much I think.

What could be a solution to this? To gain as many perspectives as possible by studying the system and then test incremental changes one at a time to better understand the current nature of the system. No bold movements here!

Fight your must-win-battles with a strategic 10 step master plan elsewhere in a known and simple territory. All bold managers please climb your carreer lader this way.

Your smartest brains on the other hand should exactly do the opposite and try to work out complex adaptive problems and make small steps daily in pushing the output of the system in any desired direction as far as possible.