Archive for January, 2007
by George Dearing
January 31, 2007 at 2:59 pm · Filed under
Barriers, Enterprise 2.0
I wanted to chip in on the adoption dialogue started a few days ago.
I’d classify my post as a volley based on raw experience and very free form, so bear with me.
The thing I’ve learned the most from my own adoption is that your e2.0 road is paved (or under construction) with all sorts of good intentions. You just have to dive in. Have you tried to explain how you learned to use social bookmarking? Or how you use RSS?
There’s an undeniable simplicity to a lot of this enterprise 2.0 stuff. A lot of it boils down to exposure and a commitment to learn.
Think about why you became an expert on information management or blogging. Was it your quest for knowledge? Was it because your a tinkerer? Or was it your personal goal to make a comeback after failing at so many futile KM projects? Point is, our motivations for recognizing the importance and need for enterprise 2.0 are many and diverse. So taking a crack at what drives e2.0 is a shotgun blast at best.
Most of what I’ve seen and heard throughout the discussions deals with the traditional enterprise battles we fight everyday. Business case, ROI, technology alignment with business strategy..all relevant but very tired and beaten down. As the beat down continues, I think you’ll see larger forces start to supplant the more traditional triggers that drive corporate adoption.
Larger force #1 – The New Media Breakdown
What I’m seeing is what I’d call a “new media nervous breakdown”. Clients are being pressured by their customers, their next door neighbor, or Joe in marketing to come into the fold. That fold is the internet. And like it or not, putting the web to work for business involves a lot of what we’re classifying as enterprise and web 2.0. It’s no coincidence we recommend so many Web 2.0 approaches to leveraging the web — often they’re the easiest way to take that first plunge.
Larger force #2 – Big software companies
Like it or not the Googles and Microsofts will drive a lot of the enterprise adoption. We’ve already seen the Google effect on everything from search to web-based email and collaboration. You can only ignore the “Docs & Spreadsheets” link in your GMail for so long. Show me someone that’s used Google Docs a few times and I’ll show you someone ready to carry the e2.0 torch. RSS adoption soon will also take a huge leap when users see it baked into every nook and cranny in Vista.
An as far as tips go, mine are:
- Be an educator. People want to learn. As they learn about what’s changing on the web, they’ll naturally seek out a comfortable starting point.
- Paint a picture and tell a story. Most folks have used Microsoft Word. Show them how publishing to a blog is akin to creating Word docs.
- Start small and build value incrementally. We’re all obsessed with speed, but doing it right the first time holds more water. There’s no stopwatch on you.
- Be painfully clear about the reason you’ve decided to adopt a certain approach.
HINT: “Better collaboration” isn’t enough. If you can’t describe it in simple business terms, you’re wasting your time.
- Let go and break stuff. Assuming we’ve done our job, users shouldn’t be able to mess things up under usual circumstances. Once people figure out they can back out of something and its integrity can easily be restored, adoption increases.
- Show how enterprise 1.0 and 2.0 coexist. We could talk about this one for days.
If you show users how their workflow can peacefully live right beside the new gadget on the block, anxiety diminishes and the exploration begins.
- Don’t discuss or describe capabilities in vendor terms. If you’re telling users the value of what they’re doing lies in “private labeling a b2b MySpace that leverages user-generated content to build community” they’ll probably label you a dotcommer and spew bubble 2.0 connotations.
by Dana Gardner
January 31, 2007 at 11:38 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
While we’re building out lists of five tips for gaining adoption of Enterprise 2.0, I’m reminded of the difficulty of motivating people, and even harder — getting them to change their behavior. If you’ve raised a family, or managed people at work (not that different), you know that making them think any change in action was their idea pays great dividends. A sense of ownership is an awesome thing, and too often missing in corporate cultures.
And I firmly believe that any shift like Enterprise 2.0 is fundamentally not about technology and productivity and management principles. It’s mostly about people and process — and those are affected deeply by ontology and behavior, both individually and in groups. Indeed, Enterprise 2.0’s most beneficial offering may be that it allows individual and group behaviors to mingle and reinforce — or repel — at scale. Enterprise 2.0 helps collaboration and ownership of knowledge scale up, as well as down.
So, given that touchy-feely preamble, the top five things to keep in mind to grease the skids of Enterprise 2.0 adoption are:
1) Encourage people to have fun. Learning is intrinsically fun, and most comedy is based on the sudden realization that you know something. Even better when it’s a group-know. We can all laugh at our collective insights. Teaching is best done with a sense of humor. So to get the sharing going, to get the creation of content — and learning-teaching activity — into adoption mode, then get the fun meter up. Find a way to make meetings fun; really.
2) Take a page from Google. Their corporate credo allows their workers a period of time to work on projects of their own making, or that specifically pique their interest while not part of their regular jobs. This identifies what they want to learn about, and what they will want to teach too. Their pet projects will emerge from the context of their skills, which instills ownership and pride. They will naturally want to communicate about it, even publish. They will have fun (see number 1 above). So give your people time to be creative on their own terms. Then harvest the knowledge and good will.
3) Encourage and allow a sense of ownership broadly. This also plays off of the first two tips. Pride and benevolence are huge motivators, and when harnessed will buttress any moves to exact change in enterprise cultures. When an individual or group expresses pride and a sense of “we did this” and then wants to share that willingly, the organization benefits. Enterprise 2.0 offers the tools to fuel this. By allowing fast, ad hoc delivery of content, knowledge and productive adaptation, these tools can be turbo-charge with the pride of creation and of sharing.
4) Allow more people in the organization to directly interact with customers and prospects. Gasp! I know what you’re thinking. But a major practice, of rigidly channeling who gets to talk to the customer, won’t hold up in the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 world. If the boundaries are down, and transparency is up, then let the knowledge and exchange extend between your workers and your customers and/or prospects. Let everyone sell themselves and the value of the organization. Give the “conversation” an opportunity to encourage more business by making your business and their business closer, more friendly, and ultimately develop a series of feedback loops that are not hobbled by too thin a funnel of control. If we all can sell, the sales people can find more people for us to talk to, instead of trying to explain what we mean (with another slide deck).
5) Reward the prodigious publishers. When you’ve unleashed more of the creativity and expression from your knowledge-based community, recognize that good communicating on an on-going basis is hard and requires vast self-starting energy. So institutionalize the ability to determine the master communicators, encourage them, and reward them. “Publishing” now comes in many forms, and is more swift, inexpensive and potentially global in its reach that ever before. Exploit this. Companies that produce high-quality information and freely make it searchable and available will be the ones most heard — and understood. Support those who do this best with prestige, financial incentives, and time.
by Hylton Jolliffe
January 31, 2007 at 8:51 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Wanted to alert you to the release of a case study by Andrew McAfee and Karim Lakhani on Wikipedia. Says McAfee, on his blog:
It’s focal point is the articles for deletion process on Wikipedia’s “Enterprise 2.0″ article, but I’ll use this focal point and the other information in the case for a much broader classroom discussion. Using this case, I’ll talk with students about:
* Why Nupedia (Wikipedia’s more formal predecessor) failed to gather momentum, and why Wikipedia has gathered so much.
* Whether Wikipedia’s highly egalitarian and freeform editing processes and policies yield good results and, if so, how this happens.
* How decision rights are allocated in Wikipedia.
* The merits of the Inclusionist and Deletionist perspectives.
* Whether Wikipedia really has become a “post-revolutionary Bolshevik Soviet, with an inscrutable central power structure wielding control over a legion of workers.”
* Whether the Wikipedia community practices the ‘right’ level of deference to the opinions and judgments of subject matter ‘experts.’
* If Wikipedia’s policies are being correctly followed, what the fate of the “Enterprise 2.0″ article should be.
See his blog post for more and for the link to the case study itself – it’s available for free and available under the GNU FDL.
by Jim McGee
January 31, 2007 at 12:06 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
We’ve been challenged to offer tips for gaining adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies by James Dellow and James Robertson. Of the responses so far, I confess that I am most aligned with Euan Semple’s, who suggests that perhaps the call for adoption advice is premature. Here are some thoughts on adopting these technologies beyond the general strategies that apply to any collision between new technology and an organization.
- Start with your own learning. You are the target user base. Moreover, these are technologies whose value is not easily understood from casual use or from reading someone else’s account. Set up a blog and start keeping a daily journal with it narrating your work.
- Use Enterprise 2.0 tools to do your research on Enterprise 2.0 Get an RSS Reader and start subscribing to blogs talking about these technologies. Use your private blog to post items from your reader with your thoughts and reactions. Set up an account at del.icio.us and start using it to track your web surfing. Use a wiki to start organizing your research into a business case and plan for your organization.
- Find and enlist co-conspirators. Ignore the issue of resistance to organizational change. Route around it. Find a handful of other individuals you work with to join you in your efforts. If possible, include collaborators outside your organization as well. Examine and reflect on your struggles and mistakes as you learn.
- Ignore the IT organization or co-opt it. These technologies are inherently subversive to the established order of things in most organizations. Don’t fight it, exploit it. Start with services outside the firewall, unless you can find a sympathetic friend inside the IT organization who will help set up a sandbox server to play with. Don’t get caught up in trying to fit in with the existing technology architecture or standards. You’re initial objective is to understand how this class of applications interact with the business processes in your unique organization. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking the problem is about technology.
- Fix a broken process. Once you’ve developed some grounded experience with these technologies, you’ll be able to identify the process in your organization that can visibly benefit and that you have the power and authority to fix.
Absent a specific organizational situation and a specific problem, I fear that most tips will, of necessity, be very generic.
by Bill Ives
January 30, 2007 at 12:33 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
This is a response to James Robertson’s post, Tips for gaining adoption (1) and Euan Semple’s contribution. Now I am not trying to be a smart ass and go for twelve instead of five. The number came from a series I did a couple of years ago on successful factors in implementing knowledge management. I looked at six case studies and the lessons learned. The series is summarized here, Post Script: Summary of KM Stories.
Certainly, Enterprise 2.0 is more complex than knowledge management but it raises many of the same issues, only more so, and we can learn from its mistakes. The list is below. Now these are were not new suggestions when they were made but it is surprising how many times they are not done. I modified items, 2, 3,4,and 11 to reflect Enterprise 2.0 without changing the concept. However, there will not likely be a central Enterprise 2.0 function as in most KM so I added the pural(s).
I completely agree with what James and Euan wrote. Perhaps, as suggested by James Dellow, the writers of this blog can collaborate make a composite list. Of course, a wiki would be a better platform for that activity. BTW here are some good wiki tips from the American Library Association. They are at a more detailed level than these lists but they apply to most Enterprise 2.0 implementations (e.g., 1. A wiki must have a specific purpose and 2. You can’t just offer a wiki to the public as a blank slate and expect participation.)
1. Gain and Enlist Top Down Support to Overcome Turf Issues
2. Provide Strong Leadership for the Enterprise 2.0 Function(s)
3. Align Enterprise 2.0 Strategy to Business Strategy
4. Align Enterprise 2.0 Applications to Key Business Goals and Process
5. Develop a Clear Business Case
6. Design Measures Aligned to Business Processes
7. Listen to the Users, Involve Them in the Design
8. Simplify the Access of Knowledge
9. Develop a Clear Communication Plan to Promote the Effort
10. Involve all the Key Stakeholders
11. Integrate all forms of Communication and Documentation)
12. Develop a Clear Motivation Plan that Aligns with Current Motivation Plans
James tips (and the factors above they most align with):
Create a prototype or pilot (7,8,10).
Use stories to articulate (and capture) needs. (9)
Build on existing platforms.
Use case studies from similar organisations. (yes, but do not simply copy them)
Be passionate about the right things (3,4)
Euan’s cautions:
“Avoid turning Enterprise 2.0 into a “thing” and a thing that can be done correctly or incorrectly with a whole load of people telling you what correct is.” As Euan notes, this was the downfall of KM that it has struggled to recover from and was part of the motivation for doing the six KM cases. If you do all of the above it should not be a thing.
Euan also said, “don’t do what people tell you to do. Do what makes sense, do what works and do what you have the energy to sustain in the face of the considerable challenges that will be thrown before you. By all means have conversations with people who have been around and seen and done related things and who are happy to have interesting conversations with you but that is it. No formulas and no experts.”
I feel that this most important tip is in the spirit of the twelve points above that are mostly process steps and not design specifics. The same applies to James’ tips. Enterprise 2.0 is a business approach and a suite of capabilities that have to fit the specifics of your organization. This is why I do not like how the wikipedia assigned it to a technology. There is no single best way or approach. Any list we collaborate on should be done in this spirit.
I have now looked at the excellent adoption tips from Jerry Bowles and Kathleen Gilroy after writing this post. They each bring some new items to the conversation but all appear to not violate Euan’s caution about making Enterprise 2.0 a “thing.” There are none that I disagree with.
I also just read Mike Gotta’s, 5 Tips for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption. They start with “Define what Enterprise 2.0 means for you.” The other four fall into this mode and are consistent with a process approach and build on what has been said so far. They avoid the “thing” trap than Euan cautions us on. After everyone contributes we should pull the suggestions together. I see no inconsistencies so far which I guess is good.
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