Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

Forums are excellent for online discussions to support communities with common interests and I often find great enthusiasm for introducing forums when talking with companies and membership organisations. The problem though is that often they are just thinking of IT solutions rather than taking a business led approach.

The main issue is - what is the business value of the forum?

The business value comes from users perceiving the forum to be a useful part of services provided by the organisation so that there is engagement with the forum. My view is that this means that:

• there have to be a good number of interesting discussions
• questions asked normally get replies
• the forum links with the rest of the online services

Getting critical mass is at the heart of the problem and as Steve Dale pointed out at our recent seminar, this means that facilitation of the forum is critical. And that often means employing someone with a suitable level of expertise in the subject area, which could well cost £40k or more per year, at least until the forum gets established.

Another issue is that discussion forums are not so good for reaching conclusions - discussions generally don’t have a clear outcome; topics just tend to fade away and become abandoned. This is another area where the facilitator can have a role, summarising discussions so that conclusions are captured to make sure that the maximum value can be extracted from discussions.