First off – in my present company we do not offer anything to do with reputation ranking so I have no commercial ‘angle’. The observations below are based on seeing how some of the solutions in the market both pitch themselves and anecdotal evidence from customers, colleagues, etc who have either used this approach or alternatives. It’s also based on years of consulting experience (Ernst & Young and IBM) and Enterprise 2.0 deployments supporting business transformation, innovation and organizational change management.
For those not familiar with Reputation Ranking it’s basically an element of a software platform that enables participants to develop their ‘reputation’ through their on-line activities and feedback from peers. Consumer examples include ebay (‘Top-rated seller’, 100% positive feedback, etc.). Business-to-business examples include 99Designs (’26 projects won’).
I believe Reputation Ranking has an important place in the Web2.0 world, creating a commercial environment where people can trade safely with others they have NO personal relationship with, e.g. e-bay, 99Designs.
However, the Enterprise environment is different. It is not about people competing against each other to win, it is more about people working together to deliver more value. So, the issue comes down to:
– does offering a capability to ‘create’ and ‘manage’ your reputation cause more people to get engaged with Enterprise 2.0, contributing and driving initiatives forward, or
– does it fuel a more competitive, game playing environment – how do I look good, how can I get my numbers up, etc. in order to impress my boss?
So, overall, do the benefits outweigh the downsides? Reputation Ranking sits within a broader initiative such as innovation, crowd sourcing, employee participation in Enterprise 2.0, so it’s important to layout some objectives so an assessment can be made.
The business objectives (and these can clearly be argued) are typically:
• Engage a greater proportion of the target audience in the proposed discussion/crowd source etc (Participation %)
• Get more ‘meaningful’ contributions (Business value per contribution)
• Get more contributions per individual (Contribution %)
So let’s look at the impact of Reputation Ranking on these measures – both the intention and anecdotal evidence.
Reputation Ranking – the Intent:
The intention is to get more people more closely engaged and give the contributions from those with the highest ranking more weight. This has the underlying assumption that people want to be engaged and know what they are supposed to engage in. It also assumes that staff, partners, suppliers etc want to build their reputation.
My sense is that this will work better in some sectors than others (e.g. Banking rather than Public Sector), and it will have a generational bias (which may be a good thing!). From the evidence available (which isn’t much) it attracts the people who want to build their reputation (Doh…). Obviously the prevailing culture of an organization will have a big impact on whether people ‘play the game’. In political environments it is difficult to imagine it not simply becoming another powerful ‘game-playing’ tool!
Some good research from Pfizer (http://bit.ly/95fD0e) shows that people who engage often, based on idea/contribution, have no more insight than occasional participants.
Also, those that do engage, form only a small percentage of the overall population. The launch of a Reputation Ranking based approach does cause a lot of real excitement and can therefore stimulate participation in the short term, particularly amongst those who are ‘outgoing’ in the virtual sense.
My big concern is the potentially negative impact it may have in four contexts:
• When a programme is launched people just don’t get it or see it as trivialising something more serious
• If the programme has been running for a while then it’s very hard to catch up, or at least be perceived to have caught up, so people don’t bother
• Just because someone has built a great reputation on historical and current issues that have been shared and debated (say on a marketing or product development issue), it doesn’t mean they have any particular insight into new issues arising (such as cost reduction)
• Reputation Ranking will drive more political contributions than real added-value, so reinforcing, rather than breaking down, highly political, dysfunctional, behaviours.
Should a Reputation Ranking based approach disenfranchise the ‘long tail’ of the organization then the benefits of engaging a few more people, more often, could be SIGNIFICANTLY less than the disadvantages.
To drive participation there are other better levers to pull, such as:
– great communications to staff and participants about what’s going on
– insightful recognition programs (as opposed to reward based approaches)
– well communicated challenges people can step into and deliver on, and
– respecting people’s ideas and contributions through meaningful feedback and engagement.
The Pfizer research (http://bit.ly/95fD0e) shows the value of the long tail. While 1% of participants make 20% of contributions this means that the long tail contributes the lion’s share of 80%. Even more interestingly, the research goes on to show that the distribution of ‘good stuff’ is spread equally across all participants.
In summary it feels like it’s a really interesting concept looking for a problem to solve. It also appears to be a highly attractive, but blunt, point solution to a profound and subtle business need. It seems to me we all know it will take more than providing a bigger, shinier vehicle for self-publicists to raise their profile to meet these needs!!
If there is some good quantified data out there it would be fascinating to hear about it. It may be that I am wrong – that’s fine. Reputation Ranking has been around long enough to generate good data – it would be great if it could be published.