Preparing
for Conversations
with Jenny Ambrozek and Joe Cothrel
Online Communities
in Business 2004
Past Progress, Future Directions
Jenny Ambrozek
Founder
of SageNet, LLC
Hastings on the Hudson, New York, U.S.
Joseph Cothrel
Independent
Consultant
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Introduction
Founder of SageNet
LLC, a consulting practice helping businesses create value by
applying collaboration tools to connect with customers, partners
and employees. She has hands-on expertise in how to share knowledge
and streamline operations, an interest area extended through
the Advanced
Thinkers Summit.
Ambrozek knows the
business and the fundamentals of connecting people online from
eight years with the Prodigy Service, last serving as Director
Community Development. Her introduction to online was a pioneering
1985 Australian Videotex project. She is editor of The Edutel
Book: A Guide to Videotex in Education (1985) and co-founder
of The Sage Letter, a newsletter for parents about wise use of
the Web, operating as www.netfamilynews.org.
Articles and conference
presentations address the business of online community. Most recently,
in conjunction with Joe Cothrel, she conducted a survey about
the state of online communities in business, presenting the findings
at the 7th Annual Virtual Communities Conference
in The Hague. Ambrozek is co-author of the related report Online
Communities in Business: Past Progress, Future Directions.
Joe's knowledge
in communities and collaboration derives from his decade-long
involvement in community research and practice. His experience
includes three yea rs as vice president of research at Participate
Systems, a provider of online community strategy, management,
and software to Fortune 500 companies and other organizations,
including AT&T, Cisco Systems, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP. He
previously led collaborative research studies in his role as
director in the Next Generation Research Group, for companies
including Shell Oil, Anheuser-Busch, Motorola, and others. Prior
to that, Joe served as a senior researcher in the Global Best
Practices Group, now part of PriceWaterhouseCoopers. He's published
his findings in journals such as MIT Sloan Management Review,
IBM's Knowledge Directions, and Strategy & Leadership
and been cited in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,
Forbes, among other publications.
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Online
Communities in Business 2004:
Past Progress, Future Directions
Survey
Background
There are many communities
within a single company, and most people belong to more than
one of them.
It may seem obvious
today, but it wasn't when John Seely Brown and Estee Solomon
Gray pointed it out almost a decade ago. How technologies could
best be used to support these communities has been a prime concern
for knowledge management practitioners ever since.
Today KM has moved
beyond employees to begin to encompass customer knowledge as
well. If they were writing on the same subject today, Brown and
Gray might talk about communities outside organization as well
as within. There too, technologies have been applied to enable
community interactions, though more so in some industries (high
tech, media, online commerce) than in others.
Where do we stand
today in helping communities form and flourish online? Earlier
this year, we set out to answer that question. We invited 200
people with significant knowledge and experience with business-oriented
communities to answer a brief opinion survey. While most were
directly responsible for community efforts within their organization,
the group also included researchers, software vendors, and other
individuals with direct insight into what's happening with communities
today. The invitation was also extended to members of several
relevant communities of practitioners, including AOK and Knowledge
Board in Europe. A total of 135 people responded, representing
a wide range of organizations.
The survey, which
was conducted in conjunction with the 7th International Conference
on Virtual Communities, tested conventional wisdom against current
experience in areas like return on investment, participation,
and executive support; and explored present and planned use of
collaborative technologies over the next five years. Further,
in an attempt to better understand the network of influence that
underlies community efforts, we asked respondents to name three
organizations, communities or individuals whom they look to as
"inspiring examples or good sources of advice" in the
practice of developing online communities.
Our complete results
are available at http://www.sageway.com/ocib.html. In the
paragraphs below, we tell you about some findings we thought
especially interesting.
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Survey
Findings
- The Gap: Promise
and Reality
Our findings revealed
a stunning gap between the future of communities and today's
reality. When we asked respondent to share their visions for
the future in free-text responses, we were told:
We've learnt that
we cannot manage business without them, they grew organically
first and then companies had to work out how to manage them second
(they were disruptive)...and they may well morph and define a
different company structure in the future based on teams that
are really communities.
We are past the
early adoption phase and much of the reluctance of the majority
to participate is eroding. Virtual communities will be intrinsic
to our work and social lives moving forward.
You can't always
predict when, where, or on what topics a community will emerge;
Communities do have a relatively predictable lifecycle. What
we've learned from virtual communities must be applied in corporations
if they are to survive.
At the same time,
our quantitative results told a more sobering story about present-day
reality:
- Almost three-quarters
of our respondents told us that most organizations can't measure
return on investment
- About three-quarters
also told us that many people still don't understand what online
community is
- More than half
responded that the discipline of creating and managing communities
is poorly defined.
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- Technologies:
Proliferation and Consideration
On the technology
front, we focused on a set of 17 technologies that form the basis
of community and collaboration efforts today. We asked our respondents
about current and expected use of these technologies over the
next five years.
While we expected
significant variations between technology use for employee communities
and customer communities, we in fact found that they are moving
in opposite directions. Technologies for customer communities
continue to expand, as companies continue to experience with
platforms and functionality that users want and need. By contrast,
employee communities seem to be consolidating around a small
set of technologies, specifically teamrooms (also called electronic
workspaces) and expertise location.
Click
for larger image
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Influencers
and the "Edge"
Given the current
attention to social networks, we included social software among
our set of key technologies to find out how well these tools
were penetrating into established, ongoing community efforts.
But we also wanted to use social network analysis as a technique
to better understand "who's influencing who" in the
world of online community development. We asked the following
question in our survey:
Looking outside
your organization, who do you look to as an inspiring example
or a good source of advice regarding virtual communities?
The results of our
effort are truly provisional, and we look forward to carrying
this research on in the coming months. But we think our current
findings may be of interest, particularly for those who want
to see if their "inspiring examples' - or, in some cases,
if they themselves - show up on our list of 136 "influencers."
The complete list is included in the report. A "clickable"
list is also available in our project wiki. The web address is
below; please contact us with your email address if you would
like access.
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Conclusions:
Five Strategies
The result of our
study is a snapshot of what's happening with online communities
in business today, not a recipe for the future. However, a detailed
review of our quantitative and qualitative results showed that
respondents do concur on basic themes or strategies for the months
and years ahead. We saw five strategies stand out.
- Think local
and real
- Integration of online interactions with local geographies and
physical interactions is a universal goal.
- Get networking - Tools that support social
networking tools, including not only introduction tools but blogs
and other social software, will have a profound impact on communities
of all kinds.
- Empower the
people -
Increasingly the call to community is not "come and join
our community" but rather "come and create your own
community."
- Raise the bar
on data
- Harvesting and demonstrating the value of communities is still
top of mind.
- Advocate and
educate
- It's never been more important to imbue organizations with
community principles and best practices.
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Discussion
Items
We thank Jerry Ash
for this splendid opportunity and invite your thoughts on the
following:
1. Definitions
While we haven't
mentioned this, our study resulted in an interesting chorus of
opinion on what "community" means today, how teams
and networks fit in, whether "virtual" or "online"
mean anything today, etc. Thoughts?
2. Metrics and
Measurement
In your experience,
what are drivers to management support and funding? What data
do you gather and present to show the business that community
initiatives justify continued organizational and budget support?
3. Five Strategies
We debate whether
these strategies are profound or simply truisms. What do you
think?
4. Influencers
Who or what is influencing
your efforts? Any names you expected to see, but didn't?
Your contributions
to the dialogue are sincerely appreciated. We look forward to
our conversation.
Jenny
Ambrozek and Joe Cothrel
1. Presentation to the 7th International Conference
on Virtual Communities, The Hague, Netherlands, June 2004
2. Report
of our study: Online Communities in Business: Past Progress,
Future Directions.
3. Project Wiki that includes some related documents
to our survey findings. Requires registration. Please email jenny@sageway.com or cothrel@comcast.net to
gain access.
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