What was so valuable “Best Buy” completely changed its corporate culture to get?

A Corporate Blogging Case Study

A 35% increase in productivity!!!

According to CNN Money (via Kodus), Best Buy currently lets 60% of its HQ employees come and go whenever they please as long as they achieve their goals. This is a huge cultural change, but it seems that Best Buy is happy with this change since they plan to expand it to their entire HQ staff and their stores.

But how does it relate to corporate blogging, you ask?

How to “Sell” Corporate Blogging

The Best Buy case shows that a company can change its culture if the benefits are big enough. A company doesn’t need to completely change its corporate culture to gain the benefits of blogging. It only needs to find some way to acknowledge and reward behind-the-firewall bloggers for their efforts. We (Enterprise 2.0 experts/evangelists/advocates) can use the benefits that blogging and other Enterprise 2.0 technologies bring to “Sell” the required cultural change to the company.

The benefits of Enterprise 2.0 and Corporate Blogging

This is where we (so called experts/evangelists/advocates) fail miserably. Once we are faced with the simple and mandatory question that comes before every project - What are the clear benefits this project will bring? we start to babble.

The truth is - we don’t have good answer. We can show wonderful things blogging has done for individuals on the Internet. Some companies have even successfully used blogs to create a relationship with their customers. But there is no solid collection of benefits for corporate (behind-the-firewall) blogging.

If you know of such an example, where an internal blog provided real benefits, I’d love to hear about it. And though the Enterprise 2.0/Corporate Blogging gurus probably won’t admit to it, they’ll probably be very happy to hear about it as well.

Posted on March 20, 2007 by Yoav Ezer 
Filed Under Blogging, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Methodology, Office 2.0

Comments

11 Responses to “What was so valuable “Best Buy” completely changed its corporate culture to get?”

  1. Susan Scrupski on March 20th, 2007 7:32 pm

    I, for one, will gladly admit it! The e2.0 cognoscenti has actually been actively soliciting proof cases for about a year now with not a lot of success. I totally agree with you– if we can’t prove blogging, wikis, all social networking has tangible value… we have a weak argument for radical corporate change in the enterprise. Further, it doesn’t matter if your audience is bottom-up (emergent user-driven) or top-down (management and IT).

    Thank you for reminding me of this. We get so caught up in the echo chamber, we lose sight of the forest.

  2. Yoav Ezer on March 20th, 2007 7:44 pm

    Hi Suzan,

    I am glad you found this interesting. I am seriously contemplating a mini crusade to uncover the benefits of behind-the-firewall blogging.

  3. Seeking: Beef « ITSinsider on March 20th, 2007 8:37 pm

    [...] Posted by Susan Scrupski on March 20th, 2007 Where’s the beef on enterprise 2.0? I came across this post by Yoav Ezer, CTO of Cogniview. Ezer is making the point that if we can’t clearly articulate the benefits of adopting web 2.0 alternatives in the enterprise (in measurable terms), it’s going to be hard to recruit insurgents for the revolution. Okay, I’m paraphrasing. [...]

  4. Itamar Shamshins on March 24th, 2007 2:17 am

    Hi Yoav,

    If you’re looking for numeric evidence in terms of ROI - that’s a tough one, although it seems data is starting to come in.

    But there ARE examples of organizations implementing E2.0. The BBC has a fully deployed enterprise collaboration suit, including wiki’s and blogs. Here is a post you might like:

    http://90db.blogs.com/technobabble/2007/01/getting_the_bes.html

  5. Yoav Ezer on March 24th, 2007 9:04 pm

    Hi Itamar,

    I am looking for tangible benefits. Not so much for numbers since those change from one company to the other.

    By tangible benefits I mean, real information that by being written on a blog/wiki can help others within the organization.

    For example (I am guessing here):

    A wiki about pre-sales facts -

    1. Product benefits and their affect on customer willingness to purchase
    2. Customer possible questions and best responses

  6. Itamar Shamshins on April 3rd, 2007 12:04 pm

    Hi Yoav,

    Maybe something like this:

    http://econtent.typepad.com/econtent/2007/03/tagging_inside_.html

  7. Yoav Ezer on April 3rd, 2007 4:52 pm

    Hi Itamar,

    Interesting and certainly encouraging, but without tangible benefits. I can’t take this story to a CIO in another company and say…Hey Joe, Honeywell adopted social tagging and it helped them to make more profit on {subject}, waste less time on {subject}, etc’

  8. Brad K. on May 12th, 2007 8:31 am

    Yoav, I think most of the companies I have worked for considered information in terms of product lifetime. Just as a car company wants all dealers to use only the words in the current sales campaign, they want assurance that previous campaigns do go away. Product developments often want assurance that information is *not* available outside certain time frames. Managers and supervisors have often cleary specified what project information will be reported, and by whom, to internal or external customers or even upper management.

    When any company has a manager that will look at a module chart, and count the names of those that did initial design and use those numbers for promotion lists (ignoring volume of completed work, cost to complete module, quality of module, etc), worrying about how to get more data into more hands is missing the point.

    You have to measure what you want to improve. If you can’t, or don’t measure, there will be no improvement. Want attendance to pick up? Post daily tardies and absences in the coffee room. Want quality to improve? Let your boss ask about integration test results more often than ‘How’s the weather’ or ‘How ’bout them Yankees’? Want more product out the door? Post daily shipping, order, and backlog counts.

    So, what Web 2.0 metrics can you report to your manager?

  9. Bill on May 31st, 2007 3:55 pm

    MSN I NIIPET
    MSN

  10. best buy corporate contact info on April 17th, 2008 3:10 am

    [...] [...]

  11. Gary Koelling on August 2nd, 2008 6:54 pm

    we also have a thriving employee social network. info (and a some results here) http://tinyurl.com/62t8qj

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