From “Feel Good” to “Good Feel”

I was reading Bruce Rogow’s nicely done summary of his series of CIO “Odyssey” interviews at Cognizanti (subscription required). Bruce, my former Gartner colleague, is one of the more strategic IT thinkers in the industry

One section specific to collaboration jumped out at me:

“The emphasis has shifted from “feel good” efforts such as the chairman’s blog or an employee Web portal, to an array of collaboration efforts that deliver bottom-line benefit, such as accelerated product development, splashier products, better customer support or more tools for more timely
and accurate decision making.”

I look at the agenda at the Enterprise 2.0 conference coming up next month. The agenda has steadily improved over the years with an increasing number of client success stories. But too many of the sessions  are still titled “social”, “community” - touchy feely stuff. And as I written before the moniker itself – Enterprise 2.0 is a feel good, frankly pompous term

I keep hearing excuses about why business cases are so hard to develop around Enterprise 2.o. Cisco is doing fine with its collaboration play – telepresence – because it has solid travel expense reduction as business case, even with its premium product pricing. Zoho is doing fine selling SaaS tools which allow for collaboration, but as a recent discussion I had highlighted : would they be better off changing their tag line from“Work. Online” to “Work at a fraction of cost of today’s Microsoft tools”?

Which is what Bruce is saying.  Take the top 4-5 burning platforms most CEOs are focused on – customers, products, expenses. Take the KPIs for projects around each and show how social tools can help  on each.

Focus on tangible successes. Then you can call it Social Computing or Enterprise 2.0 or Web 3.0 or whatever.