Scott K Wilder at Community 2.0 Conference with Karim R. Lakhani (Harvard professor and researcher)March 12, 2007
Case study: Should Intuit integrate communities inside core products?
Beforehand:
Karim and I met in the lobby of the Red Rock Hotel in Las Vegas and reviewed the material I had planned on presenting. His plan was to eventually turn the lunch session into a case study and use it as part of a new curriculum for a Community related class at Harvard. The other companies he looked at included Google, Wikipedia and Threadless.com. I pointed out to him that Intuit was his first non-internet company – it shipped CDs — and that it was a market leader that had a formula that already worked. So, the question was how much we could disrupt our internal development processes and how much real estate we could use in the product. For me, it was really exciting to present Intuit in a different format. In a more academic oriented case study format. It appealed to my desire to teach.
Lunch time: 150 of us gathered in the Pavillion Room at the Red Rock Hotel in Las Vegas (10 miles from everyone else : )
Intro from Francois: This format is an experiment, where we will engage the power of the assembled group to tackle a case study. What does it mean to have communities? This is a social innovation, with knowledge existing OUTSIDE of the corporation, displacing the long-held belief that companies own and control the knowledge as a source of competitive advantage.
Lakhani: Social innovations take a long time to permeate society. It took Pasteur almost 30 years to convince doctors to wash their hands to prevent infections from spreading; unwashed hands remain the largest source of infections in hospitals today. Format: we’ll have a quick overview of the problem, then we’ll discuss this at each table, and then we’ll collectively share out thoughts and ideas.
Intuit is not a typical Web 2.0 company, with everything online. It is your typically successful software company, shipping CDs and enabling downloads of the same applications. The challenge is how they can leverage online communities to build a better product.
Wilder: We’re really glad you are here, and we need your help. Scott presented his slide deck.
Background on the Community
The Opportunity
The Challenge
The Risks
The Questions
ü How do we convince management to place user created content in a well-established product?
ü What type of user created content do we actually integrate into the product?
ü What is our criteria for success?
Lakhani: These risks and challenges were reflected in John Hagel’s presentation this morning. How do you deliver on ROA / ROI / ROS as defined this morning? What are the boundaries? If we are going to encourage small businesses to discuss what they need / what they are trying to do, are we willing to entertain new business models?
Wilder: Bring it on!
Audience: What type of user-contributed content is being created today?
Wilder: Primarily users are providing answers to questions posted by other users. The TaxAlmanac.org project collects information that is shared between users, and we don’t monetize that site or that content in any way.
During lunch, the audience of 150 people broke into small groups to answer the questions above
After lunch:
1. How do we convince management to support this effort?
2. What type of user created content should we integrate?
3. What are our criteria for success?
4. How do we get started?
From the crowd: If Intuit already has 88% market share, why would they do this? The risk of NOT doing it is that they can create an opportunity for their competition to create templates for every company. Another company could ride in and repurpose user-contributed content to compete with Intuit.
From the crowd: Why in the world would you take live, vibrant content from the online communities and make it dead, static, and shipped in a shrink-wrapped package? Is there any good reason to take living information and make it dead? Is there any benefit? Very open to LINKING to that information that still lives online (…speaker was from Microsoft).
From the crowd: What percentage of your user base is involved in the online community? [Scott: most companies are about 1%; we’re north of that, closer to 4-5%]
From the crowd: Isn’t it fairly dangerous to include user’s contributions inside QuickBooks, which is supposed to be completely reliable and completely accurate. The online groups are one thing (clearly written by users outside of QuickBooks); including that content in-product would give it a certain imprimatur.
From the crowd: BillJ (ex-Autodesk) says that their past efforts to include user-contributions didn’t work out that well; people solving the problems in-product were not in the mode of creating content that would be accessible to other users. Separately, if you are providing this content online aren’t you already “half-pregnant”?
From the crowd: Users don’t care about features; they care about how to get their tasks done. This type of information can often be provided by users more easily than by your technical help writers.
From the crowd: Aren’t you just exploiting the online community then?
From the crowd: No. No offense to Microsoft, but I get much better answers / suggestions from non-Microsoft sites by searching on “Microsoft & topic” than I do from reading Microsoft in-product help files.
From the crowd, someone asked to impersonate CEO: Asked to provide the types of questions a CEO would ask.
- What’s in it for us?
- What’s in it for the customer?
- Focus on ROI (= return on investment) from this effort.
- Is this in any way going to endanger our renewals? If we include this type of information, are we going to make it easier for people to stay on older products? What is the risk to our current business model, and to our renewal revenue?
From the crowd: We just went through this exercise re: ROI at our company. It required a major education effort, engaging senior managers in online discussion boards and pod casts. Lowers the fear factor, helps executives get comfortable with the technology and the types of application that can generate ROI. Typical measurements (market share, etc.) are not typically tied back to online community. What numbers ARE useful, and can be tied back.
Karim: Most executives are comfortable with numbers and metrics. Until we educate them on the types of metrics proposed by John Hagel, we need to provide them with the types of information that they are used to.
From the crowd: Intuit is incredibly good at slipping updates out to customers (I’m a happy customer), why can’t you try this business model and see what the results are? It’s very clear that your business model has to evolve, and that you won’t be doing the same thing five years from now that you are doing today. Why not try this out, and see what happens?
From the crowd: Why do you think you need help from the CEO? Get the support inside the company, and resources will follow. Take the valuable information that is available to you, and build the great stories that will justify investment.
Karim: Once we have the support of the executive team, what do you do to satisfy this hard-charging executive, with a focus on process excellence? How do you measure “are you creating value for the customers”? How do you quantify the results?
From the crowd: I have heard from others that internal development teams at Intuit have created hundreds of wikis. Why don’t you re-purpose the information created internally for this external outlet? Microsoft and open-source communities have done this successfully. What Intuit doesn’t get is that they are creating all these different sources of information, and only leverage the content created by the documentation teams.
From the crowd: Establish some RSS feeds that pull data directly from the online communities, and establish a manager to select / publish community content directly into the product. You could also use this to publish information like that suggested by the last speaker (internally generated information).
Karim: Once we have all this working, how do you know you have succeeded?
From the crowd: You need to look at revenue streams differently, and try to associate your online community efforts with revenue. For example, someone suggested that you will need to accept new business models. Can you tie revenue from these new models to your investment in online community?
From the crowd: You can use usability tests (what he called ‘rhetoric’s’) to see if people are more successful at task completion when this streamed online community content is available in-product. As you begin to target new and smaller countries / opportunities, you may find that you have to enable local production of content to ensure that local peccadilloes are answered / addressed by local resources who know their own rules and laws.
From the crowd: We advertise the number of features that have been built into the product because of users’ suggestions, and that helps to justify the investment and to encourage users to contribute.
Karim: Online community clearly represents an opportunity, but it is not trivial to deliver on it.
Scott: Inside Intuit, we often ask “what are you trying to solve?” And that helps us determine what we need to communicate (to get support) and to measure (to justify investment).
So what would you do to get user created content into a desktop or online product?
