I have decided to take another approach at Enterprise 2.0 - we can keep on shouting that you do not have to look for ROI in an E2.0 program, it just does not work. Most executives still go for left-brain thinking and want to see numbers... positive numbers. The thing is, how long do you get to pay off the initial investment and when does it really start to... well pay off? This means that you have to work with Net Present Value, Opportunity cost, cost avoidance and productivity increase and impact on profitability. When I was doing research on the cost of information work recently, I found some staggering figures when it comes to the productivity of the "Information Worker": we, information workers spend roughly 30% on processing email... and creating even more email. On the other side, the average knowledge workers spends roughly 25% of his time searching for information - the fact that emails are difficult to organize certainly adds to the equation.
Anyway, bottom-line of the paper was that corporate performance can be improved by installing a culture of openness - in this particular case enabled by Enterprise 2.0 technologies and behavior. If you want to have a sneak preview - just download the paper below and let me know your thoughts... any social medium will do.
Enterprise 2.0: reducing information asymmetry in 21st century organizations.
