Jacob Morgan

There are effectively two approaches to collaboration in the enterprise; structured and unstructured.  But which approach should organizations go with and which is more effective?  The structured approach involves more rules, guidelines, and restrictions.  For example one pharmaceutical company executive I spoke with told me that his employees are not allowed to mention the names of the products that the company produces in their internal environment.  Other examples might include strict naming conventions for groups or files, specifications on types of content that can be shared, or perhaps restrictions on types of groups or discussions that can be had (for example everything must be work related).  An unstructured approach usually has some guidelines and best practices but relatively leaves the employees unregulated in terms of how they can collaborate and use internal tools and platforms.  Clearly for some companies such as banks, pharmaceutical companies, and other regulated...

As I’ve stated before organizations today are focusing too much on “busy metrics” as their way to define engagement.  Blog comments, ideas, number of groups, and amount of content shared are all variables that organizations are looking at trying to justify and explain engagement.  Again, the problem with this is that it focuses on the result of what an engaged employee does but does not address the cause behind what makes an engaged employee.

Gallup defines an engaged employee as someone who “works with passion and feels a profound connection to their company (thanks to Chris McGrath from ThoughtFarmer for giving me the idea for pointing me to this).  They drive innovation and move the organization forward.”  So what does Gallup look at to help understand engagement?  No, it’s not “busy metrics.”  Instead Gallup asks 12 questions which are...

In our “State of Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration Report” we found something interesting when we looked at manager resistance to these new tools  and strategies.  Some of the top reasons for manager resistance included uncertainty of tangible ROI and uncertainty of overall value of how emergent collaboration can meet business objectives.  Fair enough right?

But then we looked at how organizations are measuring success of these efforts and found something far more interesting.  We asked organizations if they were defining any type of key performance indicators and found that only 60% of organizations are doing so (only 25% said yes, the rest weren’t sure).  So then we took this one step further and asked those organizations that said they were defining KPIs how close they were to achieving them. Almost half of these organizations (48...