spot on - the value is how E2.0 enables some underlying business process or activity to be improved... it's not the technology but what you do with it. This is a key part of our implementation methodology at blueKiwi.

If there is not a business problem to be solved, then it's just an experiment for the sake of it.

But there is a ROI to be found. It's not because enterprise 2.0 is mainly about intangible assets that it may have an intangible ROI.

Intangible assets are to support formal business process which ROI we can calculate. I think it's obvious when having a look at things like strategy maps for example.

Bertrand has an excellent point relating to balanced scorecards. Too often, people focus on the "Financial Persepctive" of a strategy map when looking for ROI, and not enough on the "People/Growth and Learning Perspective" or even on the "Customer Perspective", when they all actually link together and ultimately affect the Financial Perspective. A few years ago, I did quite a lot of work in the Balanced Scorecard space, and most customers had fairly weak ways of measuring things like employee satisfaction. They do something like an annual survey, which tends to be biased towards how people feel during a particular period. In a web 2.0 world, we can have instant access to people's opinions, which is surely better than a once-a-year survey. It just needs to then be tied back to an objective for the business, in a measurable way.

Example: So let's say we measure innovation by the number of new marketable products - perhaps a leading indicator to this would be "number of ideas per community". Not all ideas result in products, but sometimes even bad ideas will trigger someone else's good idea. With innovation it is acceptable for there be a high degree of failure, as long as ideas are plentiful and people feel free to share them.

So if a particular org created an innovation index, measured by number of ideas and number of active people per community, that is something that can be measured and analysed, and linked to number of new marketable products, linked to revenue objectives. This can then result in action. Perhaps more ideas does not mean more marketable products. Perhaps ver active communities result in fewer ideas, but more are transformed into marketable products... and so on and so forth...

Just one example... and strategy maps/balanced scorecard are full of those opportunities....

In our implementations of cubeless (www.cubeless.com) we are finding that wide adoption and frequency of use by the community are critical to any kind of ROI measure. In addition, we are seeing that at many companies the prospect of using "Web 2.0 tools" (rss, bookmarklets, wikis, etc) strike fear into rank-and-file company employees who aren't tech savvy, limiting adoption and benefit to the company. In order to acheive the level of adoption and frequency of use that can begin to show the ROI a company expects, the focus should be on the creation and maintenance of a healthy and active community, rather than on the tools themselves.

Great question, Jon. Cubeless is the community-building platform from Sabre Holdings. The system was initially built and launched as an internal tool for Sabre to connect its dispersed employee base from home offices and remote offices around the world to the company and to each other (called SabreTown). We were so amazed by the use and benefits we were seeing from the platform that we are now marketing a version externally. The experience we've found from our internal Sabre implementation and others we have done more recently is that the return to the organization comes from aggregating thousands of success stories touching on every function and region in the company; all that wouldn't have been possible without the platform. We can roll these stories up into broad categories (money savings, improved employee loyalty, improved communications, business challenged solved by the community, etc), but it is the stories themselves that provide the rich text of the return the company sees. Without broad adoption and usage (the healthy community), these success stories don't materialize.

If a company is looking for a single hard dollar ROI number to justify adoption, I'm not sure how to provide this. In my mind it's not unlike the company's e-mail system. There may be some out there somewhere, and I am sure there are plenty of swags based on saved mailings and phone calls, but I've never seen an example of a single, agreed-upon hard ROI figure for an e-mail system within a company. Yet, everyone seems to have one.

On cubeless, we measue the health of community in two ways:

Karma: In the community, each user has a Karma score, which is visible on profiles, which is earned through doing good things for the community (like maintaining a complete profile, providing helpful answers to questions from the community, posting to the blogs, referring questions to other users who can answer them, etc). The community itself helps admnister the Karma for other users by rating answers and other content from users. Karma helps the community measure its own health as users watch the rise of Karma scores of other users.

Reporting: We have reporting built into the community that shows the levels of activity and use of the platform, which we use to determine the health of the community. Some of the metrics we include in the standard reporting are (and some benchmarks we are seeing):

Percentage of employees with an active profile (In SabreTown 65% of employees had an active profile within 3 months of launch)

Percentage of profiles that include an answer to each question asked

Number of questions asked of the community

Time elapsed until questions receive first answer (In SabreTown, 60% of questions are answered in one hour, 90% are answered in 24 hours)

Average number of responses each question received (in SabreTown, questions receive and average of 9 answers each)

Number of employees at each Karma level

Number of groups active (SabreTown has 306 total groups)

Most active bloggers

Most active groups

This is just a sample of the standard reports we provide each community. We also maintain averages for each reporting item across communities so that communities can compare their health metrics to other companies.

I think that measuring the health community is really interesting, very useful for end users and managers, we do the same reporting and percentage with blueKiwi.

About karma, don't you think the name of Karma is too web oriented and not enough corporate? I understand the concept and really appreciate it but do you imagine employees sharing karma together?