the current intranet/extranet pages with productivity tools like file management, email, calendars, and some wiki capabilities, i feel satisfies the above needs to a large extent. it creates a delicate balance of structure and user friendliness, rather than a “chaos of freedom”

The best way I have found is to begin by identifying the business or customer problems an enterprise wants to address and then working through the value an organization will achieve by solving those problems. The cost of the social network or online community factors against the value and yields the ROI. The important thing is that how the social network or online community is used must be tied back to the enterprise or customer problem. Other unquantifiable or incidental benefits are just the cherries on top that might sway a borderline ROI but more often than not these days, they aren’t going to be the reason an enterprise proceeds with a social network.

The Patty Seybold Group have done interesting work to define customer problems and define how they can be mapped onto business value.

The other thing to remember about an ROI is that it is only relevant when a company has options. If the initiative is deemed strategic and the company has to complete it to remain viable, then sometimes a social network or online community is the only way to meet the need. In that case, defining an ROI is redundant.

That is sometimes difficult for enterprise execs to swallow but I’ve seen the reality. For example, connecting a global partner network to stimulate channel sales growth is impossible to do with just email and phone calls. It’s also the situation I expect to arise over the next couple of years as more and more enterprises implement these social networks and online communities. Being the company without a social network will be like being without a website in the 90s.

I do envision such a tool to become more popular as more of the key roles, within an organization, transfer to one of the other generational groups mentioned above. Also, when recruiting of the melinium group becomes more robust.

Can social web applications like blogs, wikis, and online communities make a company more productive?

I think the bigger challenge will be to get agreement on the “return” part of the equation. It is likely that advocates of “social productivity” will argue for different results that those that are either not supportive of it, or don’t yet understand it

Often these are passed off by the people who matter as ‘Gimmicky’,'Eye Candy’ etc etc. Think about the difficulty Apple has had in cracking the enterprise space and compare it with the success it has in the consumer space. Even if an enterprise was all Mac, I am not too sure a CTO would sanction an enterprise upgrade to Leopard citing the lack of any real features which matter i.e. ROI. Consumers on the other hand have lapped up Leopard !

I guess the enterprise 2.0 folks might have to use employee “happiness” like programmer “happiness” which has been the marketing mantra of Ruby On Rails … However RoR has not had great success in the enterprise either!