Measuring the Contribution of Collaboration Technologies III - The Outside World

[Ray Macsweeney]

"Thank you for not discussing the outside world" (The Simpsons - sign outside the Springfield Retirement Community)

No decision making framework would be complete without considering the outside world. There are four groups to consider - suppliers, collaborators, competitors and customers - and three main dimensions - complexity, industrial readiness and competitive behaviour.

Complexity

Tailored
In a tailored interaction (typically between 1 and 10 parties), there are multiple points of interaction between the organisations and multiple different modes of interaction. New tools can be experimented with, and easy consensus reached on how they are used, and what they mean. The range of tools that can be deployed can be quite wide, and experimentation is cheap.

Off-The-Peg
At the other end of the scale is collaboration with large number (e.g. the mass market). Each individual interaction can be relatively cheap, however it is likely to need to be confined to specific toolsets with specific goals in mind and high degrees of organisational control, though not necessarily bureaucracy.

Smoke and Mirrors
In between is harder. There are a sufficient number of parties involved that the organisation can't know everyone or have personal relationships with everyone, however the a deep level of interaction is being sought after. Interaction can support a mid-range of tools, but can't manage high levels of experimentation. This is the most expensive and potentially hardest place to try and deploy Web 2.0 tools in a corporate setting.

Industrial Readiness

One useful mechanism for helping determine a strategy on deploying Web 2.0 technologies is how "evolved" the technology is in a particular industry space.

Initial Adoption
At this point, the deployment of the new technology will be experimental and undefined in terms of what is going to achieve. The major challenge is for the organisation to continue with the investment in spite of constantly changing technological uses and changes in the "value" delivered from the project - the business case benefits are a constantly shifting goal.

Mass Adoption
When your consultants come to you and tell you that wikis are the new way for collaborating on the industrial design of your widget, you know you're in Mass Adoption. The challenge here is to understand what you are purchasing (probably tending towards standardised) and how that adds value to the conventional drivers or strategy in your business (core capabilities).

Followers
The important thing about "followers" is not when they arrive, but they scale of them when they get there. If the 3,000 llb gorillas of your industry consistently arrive at the end of the technological party, but dominate it when they get there, it might be worth technological partnership with them from an early stage to ensure any investments on a given platform or standard are not utterly negated when these followers arrive.

Competitive Behaviour

Notes the above diagram is based on a GE/McKinsey matrix, so all the usual rules apply for use (e.g. using relative market shares etc). One key difference is that the axes used are based on shares and growth within the collaboration channel and not across the broader industrial environment

Platform Users
This quadrant defines the start point for the technology and also where the majority of users will end up when the technology reaches "follower" stage.

Platform Victims
In this quadrant are organisations that are caught in a potential "value trap" from their collaboration technology - they have high relative market share in a technology that is not growing or only growing slowly. This limits the strategic options available.

Platform Contenders
This is the set of companies that are defining the (potentially competing) technology standards.

Platform Owners
These are the companies who dominate the standard, and are therefore most capable of driving the standard towards their own strategic goals.

Summary
These are some models to I use to determine the external drivers of strategy for implementing a Web 2.0 solution. The challenge, as always, is moving from picking a strategy to the complexities of implementation - climbing over the "boulders" that are put in the way.

Thanks to Yewenyi on Flickr for the "Portal" image above

Also republished on my blog http://raymacsweeney.blogspot.com