I started the CMM series here: Part 1, and Part 2.

Not sure if I will continue it, since I am beginning to think a blog is not the right place for such a detailed drill down into IT and biz strategy. We’ll see.

Venkat

whats about your announced social media capability maturity model (CMM)? I’m very interesting in it. I also thought about a more holistic intranet maturity model.

I would like to stay in contact with you.

Kind regards,

Christoph

Adam: I’ve dabbled enough in amateur scriptwriting and comicbook making to know that this would make an absolutely terrible script for either a podcast or animation :)

Adding characterizations, a dramatic arc, and more human dialog (as opposed to alternating soliloquies) would be necessary to make this a compelling podcast-drama or animation. From my own experience, that takes about 10x more thought and work than this type of post does.

So… are you volunteering to help? Heh heh.

Venkat

I really agree with this point:

“And one going to a prepared customer partly won-over through participation in design and testing, and more forgiving of remaining issues due to his sense of co-ownership and direct relationships with people deep inside the company.”

If your people are not communicating that creates a disconnect in the initial parts of the product cycle, when reaching early adopters is critical. I wouldn’t call this speculative at all. Perhaps the benefits of internal communication are a bit speculative, and it would certainly vary depending on your companies structure.

I can’t wait to see your model that is coming out January.
Bookmarked this in SU, I can think of a lot of people who need to read this.

Excellent point about potential circularity. I prefer to view it as a positive-feedback/critical mass effect though. At some point all network technologies rely on the ‘fax machine’ effect– it is only worth owning one when enough of the people you interact with use one.

That said, I do believe in my leap of faith here that it will be successful in most contexts, and that all setbacks will be temporary. This is simple Darwinian logic: if SOMEBODY in your industry gets it right and you don’t, they’ll gain at your expense and eventually marginalize you or cause you to go extinct.

So yes, individual failures may scuttle particular approaches and delay adoption at a company/function/workflow, but once somebody/anybody gets it right, the death-watch clock starts ticking for those who don’t.

I also find it curious that we somehow seem to have different expectations of social media. ALL sufficiently systemic/network-based technologies face the same barrier, go through a hype cycle, disruption pattern, what have you. Copiers, typewriters, PCs. In all cases, if the underlying value is genuine (which you never know except with hindsight), initial lost battles do not change the outcome of the war.

Venkat

I (too) am a technilogy evangelist, but the biggest barriers to a positive ROI from implementing 2.0 technologies are (ironically) social barriers. Even if a technology meets specific needs and has the POTENTIAL to have a positive ROI, a couple of well-placed cynics can render it ineffective. Heck, they dion’t have to be cynics, they could just be people who are overworked, and don’t have time to experiment with new technologies.

As a fellow Social Software Evangelist, I run across this same discussion often. Thank you for sharing your conversational tactics here. I will be looking forward to your article in January. Additionally, if you would like to have another set of eyes on your model, I would be glad to give it a once over.