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?

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’

Maybe something like this:

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