Realizing Business Value from Web 2.0: An IBMer's Perspective on ROI, Metrics and Anti-Patterns

You probably should know this by now: Dumping the suit and tie and dressing like the Mac guy won’t make you cool

The powerful combination of buzz and herd behavior has led companies in traditional industries to invest in blogs, wikis, social networking and other Web 2.0 tools and services, to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing and to reach out to clients and business partners. However, for many of them results have been lukewarm at best. In his role as an Emerging Technologies evangelist at IBM, Aaron has been working with a wide variety of clients worldwide, providing consulting advice on Web 2.0 to enterprises large and small.

Best practices can be defined as “the most efficient and effective way of accomplishing a task, based on repeatable procedures that have proven themselves over time for large numbers of people” (Wikipedia). Conversely, an anti-pattern can be loosely defined as a damaging mistake which occurs with enough regularity that it can be abstracted and recognized as a pattern. Some educators claim that we learn more from errors than from successes, hence the value of identifying anti-patterns.

This session will explore some of the common anti-patterns he observed in global enterprises that may explain why some of the benefits of Web 2.0 are not materializing fast enough, and will provide recommendations on how your organization can avoid common pitfalls.

Hot topics such as the lack of an ROI model or measurement framework, a dominant command-and-control corporate culture, and the perceived security or legal risks around Web 2.0 will also be discussed in this session.