Andrew McAfee's Blog - Latest Comments in Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

Victor M. S. — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 11:12:43 -0000

But you need to measure the quality of contributions... Post hundreds of empty content is better than just 1 top contribution?

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

Theresa — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:58:34 -0000

This information means a lot in terms of business collaborations. It is the significant element nowadays that every entrepreneurs must imply.

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Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

Free Backlinks — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 08:44:29 -0000

To rate workers can be a good idea or a bad one. The working crew must also have say in that.
I think it is a bad idea to participate in ESSPs.

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

Best PTC Sites 2011 — Mon, 02 May 2011 22:50:56 -0000

I think it's maybe it depends on the worker, I guess other's have and some not. Btw good flow chart mister.

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

George Zapo — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 05:57:20 -0000

Thank you for this valuable information! I especially like the Radar Chart Graph. Quantatatiive measurements are far more reliable--they deal with facts. In addition, Enterprise 2.0 ratings can add quality to social platforms which, in my opinion, is necessary.

Thank you for leading us into unchartered territory!

George Zapo
http://georgezapo.com

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

bunchball — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 22:49:59 -0000

Hey Andrew - we should talk - my company has a platform that measures participation online and then uses the statistics combined with game mechanics to incent and motivate behavior. Drop me a line at partners [at] bunchball.com if you'd like to learn more.

best, - rajat

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

Mike Ricard — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 14:30:29 -0000

I think it can be like wielding a hammer in a china shop if you expect everyone to come out and 'be social' and expect to measure outcomes on an equal basis. The truth is that some people are more social than others (human nature). If you force the unsocial to participate for the sake of their KPIs then their lesser quality submissions will mitigate against them when they may otherwise do their jobs very well.

Don't get me wrong, I'm an enterprise community manager for a global publisher and my job is to get everyone on the employee community to become active members. But some will take to it better than others (the old 1-9-90 rule). We should accept the reality that people are infinitely variable and avoid shoe-horning them with arbitrary ratings and measures.

What these ratings and measurements may be validly used for is to identify those social high-flyers who can be co-opted for innovative, knowledge-based or more customer-focused work. It will be interesting to see when HR starts hiring on the basis of social reputation/capital; some jobs will be more relevant to this than others.

I'm writing this comment after having read a reference to this post from Hutch Carpenter in his topic called Reputation and Game Mechanics Are the Future of Social Software. http://bit.ly/deQOxo. He calls us to 'Mix fun with achievement'. This approach may work better at Toys 'R Us and Google than at my legal publishing and B2B company. There is too much corporate stodginess still in place to allow for fun in most workplaces.

A great provocative post as always Andrew.

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

Pete Modigliani — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 16:21:49 -0000

Another option is establishing E2.0 rating levels. Level I requires users to setup profiles, add a document, contribute to a wiki and author a blog and microblog post. Additional levels could be attained by a certain number of contributions to the Enterprise: followers, retweets, engagement, connections, influence, etc. Once you obtain a certain level, there would be minimum requirements to maintain it (contributions, followers). I would love to see companies and Government agencies establish cash awards to employees with the top E2.0 ratings or a bonus for achieving the next E2.0 level.

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

Swan — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:42:08 -0000

Adding information to a knowledge base only has value if others are deriving value from it. One of the best things we can do as an employee is use or improve upon a corporate best practice as much as possible.

Thus, shouldn't one of the most important metrics be how much what we draw from the e20 environment is improving our work? Hard to measure, but a lot more meaningful than number of edits or number of authorings.

Andrew, would love to have you moderate a chat at http://KMers.org on this topic. Slots are open for Tuesdays in April.

Swan

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

harobu — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:49:25 -0000

We believe that in order for such tools to work, i.e. the employees to use them, the company culture has to enable / support this.

Our own personal incentive derives from the participation in internal Wikis. However, this is not the sole reason for the participation. In addition to this, we enjoy sharing and spreading our own knowledge, and we see this as advantageous for our reputation.

For us, who actively participate in the company Wiki out of conviction, the ranking is not a disadvantage, instead we consider this a confirmation of our position.

On the other hand, what about employees who only participate in ESSPs for the ranking? We consider this a "mechanical" participation, and this brings up the question on whether time will transform it into conviction.

We believe that currently these ESSPs are still in an early phase considering their use in the industry, and that therefore they need certain degrees of freedom regarding the measurment / ranking of the employees. As mentioned before, a change in culture is required, which can be reached, in our opinion, rather by convincing people than forcing them into participation. One way to do this is to present successes achieved by using ESSPs to the employees.

Once such a change of culture has begun, it may make sense to implement a ranking. The presented 6-point radar chart, generated automatically, would allow each employee to check their status and to determine, which aspects can still be "improved".

Not least, such a chart will reflect the methods and the social competence of the employees.

One issue not considered is the following: what happens to an employee who has reached the maximum in all six dimensions? Will they continue their participation or rest on their laurels? Hence, measurement and ranking can serve as a personal determination of the status, but not as a comparison to co-workers.

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

reanmw — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 05:22:26 -0000

We would advise against the use of such ratings for measuring the performance of any employee. While we do not have statistics on the main reasons why people use social software, their motivations seems to be largely intrinsic (i.e. making the best use of one's tools to do great work, connecting with colleagues, working in groups, sharing). Theory of motivation clearly shows that any form of extrinsic motivation comes with the danger of eliminating present intrinsic motivation. Possibly to the point where it does more harm than help.

However, such ratings show great promise for reviewing the general use of the available infrastructure as well as tendencies amongst employees. Social software is most likely not adopted at the same speed everywhere. Improvements to the software and specific training can be offered to those groups of employees that have not yet adopted new possibilities.

The diagrams do have another potential weakness. As a power law distribution will most likely always be present, most of the rating charts will consist of a mere blip in the very center. The graphs will possibly need to be improved, so that the lower percentages account for more space on the chart.

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

micheleadrian — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 10:25:51 -0000

We think its difficult to create a sencefull rating which would create more and better i.e. post, wiki entries. it's better to have a look on your knowledge workers and tell them to use the E2.0 framework. We don't use E 2.0 ratings, because we think the E2.0 platform would lose on quality. So we, the management looks that we are a good example for our knowledge workers by using our E2.0 platform.

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

Dereck — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 06:14:23 -0000

I would like to make some suggestion. Great deal of money is spent on some knowledge or skill upgrade on workers on any level. Yet, there are no methods, at least I havenÂ’t encounter, to measure whatÂ’s the life time of knowledge upgrade and how much money are lost with not taking measures to refresh the skills and knowledge learned. I think this is the start point and after would follow some of your suggestions.

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

Kuba — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 04:46:19 -0000

Great Post, In my company we are currently
implementing set of web 2.0 tools (Blog, Wiki's) our main focus right now is to attract all the early adopters and creators. I believe we should offer them some incentives, mainly not financial as most of creators and contributors seek recognition and feedback from the community. Still I'm not sure how to approach it long term, I will be following this post Thanks.

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

Patrick McHugh — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 09:02:26 -0000

While tracking participation on social networking sites is important for understanding I would not broadly incorporate such measures into the formal objective or performance reviews of all the participants. Research on virtual groups indicates that the dearth of social cues in the available media enhances those cues that are available and increases their impact. I would be concerned that broadly implementing a scheme such as proposed could have negative impact on the quality of the participation and overall group trust.

Interestingly virtual group research also indicates that the active behavior of a small number of individuals in a group can drive overall behavior norms. Given this fact I believe leveraging the proposal to set objectives for a small group of "rainmakers" responsible for the success of the social networking site could prove effective.

Patrick McHugh
Managing Director
BitInsight LLC

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

Samuel — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 06:58:04 -0000

It would be really if we could do this. But doesn't KM research show KPI's hurt knowledge sharing? Would measuring E2.0 contribution do the same? Furthermore there have been some interesting experiments trying to measure social media ROI. But it's still hard to do this objectively. Will the comparison between my e2.0 contribution and that of my colleague be fair? Can't we 'just' ask for stories and try to quantify them? Ask employees to tell managers how the tools helped them or others become more productive.

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

James Robertson — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 17:43:06 -0000

Like others, I'd highlight that this is really a business issue. Or perhaps an HR issue.

If these activities are part of peoples job/position descriptions, then let's measure them as part of people's performance reviews. This type of graph could then be one good way.

If it's not part of their job, then who are we to impose this measurement? And to what end? How is this aligned with their job and business performance, not to mention business outcomes?

I think it's great to talk all this through, but we have to keep reminding ourselves that collaborative organisations will be created by management decisions, not our enthusiasm.

Cheers, James

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

Chris Rasmussen — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 12:08:09 -0000

In any open social system you're always going to have a power law distribution (long tail). You can generate what the "average" user does, but it doesn't tell you much about the system as a whole. So when it comes to performance evals comparing against the average doesn't help.

There are all sorts of neat mashups that can be made to help judge interaction, but when it comes to qualitative measures the best approach is for both worker and management to work in the tools together. I could easily write my colleagues' performance evals because I read their blogs, subscribe to their social bookmarks, and watch the same wiki pages.

Management cannot view this interaction from a distance.

Clay Shirky does a great job of explaining power law distributions in this talk

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

Oyun — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 16:39:03 -0000

I often experience that lazy or uncommitted managers favor and rely on ratings.

I think that E2.0 ratings can indeed visualize the productivity of a knowledge worker, but ratings shoud really only be the affirmation of what you already have experienced. In my view it is best to review the actual (E2.0) ‘products’ of a knowledge worker, to ask him or her what he or she is proud of and finally, in asking a few peers for review. Ratings can then affirm your conclusion.

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

Daniel Mintz — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 13:08:06 -0000

Right now at the US Department of Transportation, my focus is on getting 2.0 pilots started so people can get familiar, and less fearful, of doing so; thus I am not sure I can draw upon practical experience to respond to this kind of suggestion.

My thoughts are that focusing on what we are trying to use Enterprise 2.0 'stuff' for might be a more useful focus than measuring the 2.0 activities themselves. OR if possible some combination.

For example, in a performance plan require at least one cross-organizational project with a 2.0 technology. It seems to me that sometimes we focus too much on symptoms and work hard to mask or overcome them, rather than looking at the problem and how to solve for that.

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

Lim Boon Chuan — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 21:10:59 -0000

IMHO no, it is hard to quantify tradition work and services, till no there isn't really a good measure of the current not to mention Enterprise 2.0 which is much more abstract. Measurement can help gauge the level of effectiveness of an enterprise. I qualify it by adding "accurate measurement". To date I do not see any accurate barometers or quantitative tools to measure Enterprise 2.0 performances. Inaccurate measurements are worse than accurate measurements as it will bring uncertainty, frustrations and distrust which will work against the organization.

It is certainly useful to be able to quantify some aspects of Enterprise 2.0. But until we do have sufficiently accurate tools, lets not even try it.

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

Fenton Travers — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 07:04:40 -0000

I think people need to think about this without fear...that always screws it up. E2.0 is about embracing the good, and not being afraid of the 'bad'. A rating, that your boss is going to look at and beat you up about is pretty pointless management activity. Please GET IT GANG, E2.0 is not for the bosses it's for you! These ratings are not for your boss to give you a raise! It's for you to find the right person to give you information on a certain topic! The comparison is for your personal feedback too. Do people think I'm a jerk? I.e. one of the spokes on the radar graph would be "Is good to talk to". We are trying to get technology to server our greater good, that's what E2.0 is about IMO. I am currently using some technology that is making my job easier to do, it's great. We are really at the Model-T days of computing, let alone E2.0 computing. We want to hire a smart grad, plug him into an E2.0 company, and let him make the company millions, and serve the world simultaneously right!

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

Soenke Dohrn — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 05:35:20 -0000

I fully concur with Kevin GambleÂ’s comment. You can only manage, what you can measure. But what do we want to measure in the first place? Measuring self-organising processes has to be different from measuring linear processes. By selecting items usage frequencies, like authoring, you incentivise its use - whether it supports the quality of self-organisation respective organisational goal or not. Is that really helpful?

After all, you do not know what the best outcome would be, or else you could design and formalise the process. But then, why introducing self-organising collaboration tools in the first place?

You also have to consider that the tools, like authoring, serve different purposes in a knowledge discovery and innovation process. Authoring aides creativity teams to form, managers to transparently discuss and communicate decisions, departments to get an understanding for concerns present in the organisation as well as channelling customersÂ’ feedback.

So what we should measure instead is not the frequency people made use of E2.0 tools, but the frequency they have been applied to processes or decisions in the different areas of organisation. Since the core question is, which processes have benefited the most, which have emerged, which have ceased existence?

I think your radar chart has good categories, though you will find that tagging is more likely to sky-rocket since it is the most efficient and a highly effective tool to connect person to people to content (three-tier). My hypothesis is, that using that chart to analyse fuzzy-front-end of innovation processes, you probably find that more authoring, editing, and interacting categories dominate. At later stages once the ideas have become more focused positive feedback becomes stronger as the transparency of decision-making process increases..

Finally, interesting would be to measure, where those collaborative tools help reaching a decision. I.e. when managers have to make a decision on, for example, going ahead or stop the idea project, there should be qualitative measures such as top three most influencing discussions (discussion name + link + summary 150). This decision should be an aggregated info dossier, tagged accordingly and made available to the OrganisationÂ’s network.

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

Jed Sundwall — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:14:50 -0000

I agree with Joel that "these stats will be of little interest to current organizational leaders unless you are able to draw a direct line between these stats and their impact against the problems the tools are designed to solve."

We developed an algorithm for a client to rate Facebook Pages by looking at a handful of FB Page activity metrics. The results helped us identify some techniques to develop an active FB Page.

Then we realized that we don't care about having an active FB Page unless it's helping accomplish some other strategic objective. Focusing on the metrics we'd identified (which are similar to yours here) would make our clients more popular, but, as Scott's second point addresses, the value of that popularity is hardly fungible.

The activities you're looking at in this example could certainly lead to the creation of some good content, but looking at them per se, even in aggregate, doesn't seem that useful at the end of the day.

Re: Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings?

Mark Bean — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:26:17 -0000

I think you could get a lot of metrics from the following items:

1. Attention. The amount of traffic to your "content" for a given period of time.
2. Participation. The extent to which users engage with your content in a channel. Think blog comments, surveys, wall posts, ratings, or widget interactions.
3. Authority. (like Technorati), the inbound links to your content - like trackbacks and inbound links to a blog post or people linking to a YouTube video.
4. Influence. The size of the user base subscribed to your content. For blogs, feed or email subscribers; followers on Twitter or Friendfeed; or fans of your Facebook page.