An Enterprise 2.0 Governance Framework – looking for input!

From a couple of months before the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum held last week, I had been hoping to create some kind of governance framework or implementation framework for Enterprise 2.0 that would be useful at the event.

Last year I created our Web 2.0 Framework, which has now been downloaded around 40,000 times and I gather been used by quite a few organizations in their planning and strategy. This time I wanted to create something that would be useful to help organizations understand and address both the risks and business value of Enterprise 2.0 approaches.

What I have seen in most large organizations is that senior executives’ amorphous understanding of the risks in Enterprise 2.0 has overwhelmed their equally fuzzy grasp of their potential to create business value. A governance perspective articulates and responds to the risks to the business, and also ensures that value is not left on the table – a very important aspect of executive accountability.

In the end I didn’t have time to do the task justice, but quickly pulled together a rough framework to use in my kick-off presentation for the Forum, as below.

First comment is that this is an early effort, and certainly needs considerably more work. I have labelled this “Beta 0.7” to indicate that more development needs to go into this to be useable, though probably the basics are in place.

On the value side, these items are clearly context-specific, and these or other benefits need to be assessed within a particular business. However I think in most cases it would be a major mistake to attempt to quantify the business value, largely because there are no meaningful ways of doing so, except possibly for efficiencies and reduced IT costs.

The risks can in some cases be fairly assessed relative to existing risks. For example, almost every technology security expert says that network penetration risks (malicious access to the organization’s IT systems) are no different using Web 2.0 technologies if appropriate measures are already in place. Other risks are more amorphous. I find it interesting that productivity impact (i.e. goofing off on Facebook and Digg) is probably the most-cited risk by executives. Let’s discuss that in more detail elsewhere. Culture risk is another interesting one – the way I would put it is that it is possible that more open discussion will have a negative impact if you already have a toxic culture. However if the overall trends in culture and attitude in an organization are positive, then openness is likely to facilitate greater employee engagement.

The actions listed are high-level, and these need to be made more specific in the next versions of the framework. For this to be a rigorous governance framework, the actions should match up with the risks and value, though most of them contribute to a number of these.

I’ll endeavor to refine this framework a little further. Please provide input, or feel free to use this as inspiration to do something you think is more useful. I absolutely believe that creating an effective governance framework will greatly facilitate the uptake of these approaches in organizations, by clarifying what are perceived to be highly amorphous risks and business value, and specifics actions to take.