The idea of six degrees of separation dates back to early 1900s. Those were the days when most people did not have access to tele-communication. Lets keep phone and mobiles aside, today, Internet has played a very important role in connecting people worldwide and social networks have helped enormously. So it possible that six degrees of separation has come to down to five or maybe even four. We should analyze popular social networks like Facebook (add the “Six Degrees of Separation” application on facebook) or orkut to figure out what the right degree is today. I would probably like to call this new degree – Six Degrees of Separation 2.0.

Now, the idea of this post is not to coin a new term, but to elaborate its importance in today’s product development organization. Yes, I am talking about the application of Six Degrees of Separation to large organizations. Let me elaborate with an example. Consider a small organization, of say, about 20 people. The average degree of separation would be 1 or at the maximum 2. As the size of the organization increases, the degrees of separation increase up to a maximum of 6. More often than not, information in a large organization is spread over people and not the corporate internet. When one needs help, they end up calling the friends they know. This is called phone-a-friend model as pointed out by David Haimes in this post (which actually motivated me to write this post). This is a very interesting model used in every other product development organization. Its important for product development organization to use Web 2.0 to create internet portals or something that will encapsulate the information that people have into a non people dependent form – say for example blogs, forms and mailing lists. This is called Product Development 2.0. Read David’s post for more information on this.

In any product development organization, phone-a-friend model of working is very important and attributes to a great deal of productivity. Employee productivity is higher when there is a good network within the organization. Yes, you can also argue that employee productivity decreases when they know too many people. But Six Degrees of Separation is not about knowing too many people, its about the length of the chain. The lower the length the easier is the information to access and thereby increasing productivity. Its important to measure the average degrees of separation within your organization. A very low degree and a very high degree are both equally bad. I don’t have to explain why a very high degree of separation is not good. However, what I need to explain is why a low degree is bad or rather not advisable. The main reason is that, for a large organizations, a low degree of separation like 1 or 2 is practically impossible to achieve. And even if you try to achieve that, you will end ensuring that your employees spend a good amount on time on communication, thereby reducing their productivity. I would say a degree of 3 is very optimum and a degree of 4 is easily achievable to have an efficient organization. So, what do you do to ensure that you have an optimum degree of separation in your organization? Social networks, collaboration tools, blogs, instant messengers, etc. An internal social network not only helps in reducing the degree, but also can be used to measure and improve. Degrees of Separation is on of the key components of Product Development 2.0.

Till date, degrees of separation wasn’t really something that has been consciously tried out in the organizations. But if you think about it, that is something we have been trying to achieve implicitly. What I tried to portray is one point of view, of how the idea of degrees of separation can be used to improve productivity. Imagine what you can achieve when you reduce the combined degrees of separation of your employees and customers together. Imagine the possibilities with Product Development 2.0.

The success of Self Support 2.0 depends on how much information is available and how well accessible they are. Self Support quotient can be used to measure how well Self Support is for a particular product. Note, just placing documents/readmes/etc on the internet will not increase your Self Support quotient. That is where blogging, internet, web 2.0, etc comes into play. Blogging is one of the key factors for the success of Self Support 2.0. I can explain why maybe in another post, later. Self Support 2.0 is critical for any product development organization. Say, for example, an ERP company wants to sell their product. One of the key factors (often discussed widely) is how much cost goes into support and for hiring engineers to implement the product. Now here is where my theory comes into play, the cost of engineering or support is inversely proportional to the amount of Self Support 2.0 quotient the product has. So if a product has lot of information available widely on the internet and is accessible via Self Support 2.0, then the cost of engineering/support is low. Well, I can’t prove this, but if you think about it, it happens to be true. Take for example, Java professional are cheaper than Oracle Applications professionals. People might argue that this depends on demand supply. Yes, no doubt, but if there is something which is easy to learn then the learning curve is low. You can train your existing resources in no time to learn new products.

Self Support 2.0 will not replace the traditional Support, but will supplement it. 1 to 1 Support is definitely need for any enterprise class production environment. No doubt on that. But the value of Self Support 2.0 should not be underestimated. If I can get the information I need in 10 minutes by Google search, I won’t spend 1 hour just to log a service request. Which means I can learn quicker, and when I can learn quicker it means lower training costs, and in long term a win win situation for everybody – product development company, clients, developers, etc. More often than not, developers don’t have access to Support or cannot afford it (unless of course the company they work for has access to support). What do they do then? They either ditch the product or use something that is easy to learn. One of the reasons Eclipse is widely successfully is because Self Support 2.0 quotient for Eclipse is high. Try this exercise out – starting trying out JDeveloper and Eclipse. Both are more or less same in terms of basic features. You will soon decide to use Eclipse because you find information about it easily available – Self Support quotient is high. One may argue that Eclipse has plenty of plugins which makes tasks easy. True, but since people found Eclipse easy to use or information about it easily available, they build lot of plugins for it. Evangelism comes out of high Self Support 2.0 quotient. In the long term, Self Support 2.0 reduces engineering costs which is a key in the IT/ITeS industry as major costs are associated to engineering.

Many will disagree with me, but in the years to come, Self Support 2.0 will be more valuable than the traditional Support. Self Support 2.0 fosters Evangelism which is important for wide acceptance of a product. Again, I am not saying traditional support will be eliminated, but Self Support will be important for a product’s overall success in the future.

To summarize, the success of product depends on Self Support 2.0. In order to have an edge over others, product development companies should ensure that Self Support 2.0 quotient of their product is high.