The value of a random stumble is really underrated. I've known of Thomas Vander Wal for several years, when I first became involved as a member of AifiA (now The Information Architecture Institute), and his very early work in Folksonomies, and helping to bring tagging on a broad basis to light. Great stuff - and I've referenced him in many a presentation.
Haven't had a chance to peek at his blog in, well, ages. Happened to see his commentary on the Yahoo! and Microsoft conundrum recently, and jumped into some of his other, more focused writing on tagging, IA, etc..
Which leads me to his blog entry "Getting More Value in Enterprise with Social Bookmarking" and a few points I'd like to call out.
"The last few weeks I have been running across a few companies
postponing or canceling their social computing or Enterprise 2.0
efforts. The reasons vary from the usual budget shifts and staff
changes (prior projects were not delivered on time), and leadership
roles need filling. But two firms had new concerns of layoffs or budget
cuts."
Ok, so since we're just putting the finishing touches on our big research piece on Enterprise 2.0, that first line gave me a bit of a gut-wrenching experience - here I thought (and still do) we were fairly early on in this. But hold on...
"To both firms I pointed out now was the exact time they really needed
to focus on some Enterprise 2.0 efforts, particularly social
bookmarking as well as wikis and blogs. These solutions help gather
information, find value across the organization, capture knowledge,
build cohesiveness for members of the organization in time where there
there is uncertainty. One of the biggest reasons that these tools make
sense is their cost to deploy and receive solid value..." (emphasis mine)
Ah, there we go. While it is certainly possible to break the bank when buying Enterprise 2.0-related technologies, it is much more difficult to overspend in this area, than in most. It's a benefit of SaaS and open source, as well as much more pointed, and easily (relatively) "loosely coupled" solutions. And in the case of social bookmarking specifically, the costs and complexity to deploy are about as inexpensive as anything ever could be. What exactly is the ROI time frame for a solution that literally cost nothing more than the time to install it, which itself, is measured in seconds, minutes, hours, perhaps? I smell a DIVIDE BY ZERO error coming...
Proving the value derived, however, is a much more challenging thing. As anyone who knows me will attest, there are almost no "hard numbers" in my mind, that can ever be completely "trusted" - and whether most organizations actually value their employees (or customers for that matter) wasted time, sorry, that IS something worth addressing, and measuring.
The value of smarter, more informed, more collaborative, and yes, perhaps even "happier" people is certainly worth something. What's the value of information locked away that nobody can ever find? (which happens all too often in ECM deployments) Tell me how you justify spending millions to manage buried content? And how the "high value" yet "work in progress" content can be completely unmanaged and flopping around in e-mail folders? (yet another topic for another day)
And while the benefits of social bookmarking in an Enterprise is definitely for the common good of other users, it's also very self-motivating, as people can (finally) tag the content that they most care about, specifically so they can do their own job. If only all enterprise solutions were actually tailored towards helping the general population, instead of just managers or IT.
The biggest trick of anything even remotely smacking of Knowledge Management, is to stop thinking that magic (technology) can do all of the work for you, or to insist that professional librarians are the only ones that can categorize and organize information.
Every tool or capability has it's place. For tools that are available at no to low cost, it's worth experimenting, and as search vendors such as Vivisimo are showing, integrating tagging within enterprise search, or as Thomas mentions, ConnectBeam and their integration into FAST (and therefore, Microsoft), Google Search Appliance et al, adds even more value than if these capabilities are separated. But that is a topic for another day - and will be part of the discussion in our Q2 Market IQ on Findability.
So for those of you doing "enterprise social bookmarking" whether a specific standalone solution, embedded in a search solution, or perhaps in a wiki or other solution. What say you? Getting value? Significant? What was the cost?
