by Jevon MacDonald
January 24, 2007 at 11:38 pm
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0
You may be wondering, “who can help my company adopt some of these new ideas and technologies that we are hearing about“?
If you are involved in running any sort of moderately sized organization, you can be sure that in the next year you are going to be approached by some form of Enterprise 2.0 Consulting company or group within a large firm.
Do you need them? Do you have to wait for them to come to you, or can you start right now? There is no time to lose. I contend that you cannot wait for a hero to ride in, you must lead the way.
Some tips:
- Look inside: Chances are you have at least a few clued-in people. Take them to lunch and and give them some space to share their ideas. If they are really on to something, try to free up some of their workday so that they can experiment
- Listen carefully: There are two conversations going on right now, one about Technology, and one about a Business Ideology. If technology isn’t your thing, then start moving forward with new business ideas and the right technology will emerge, and if you are pegged as a technology person then start opening up the world of low cost options to your colleagues.
- Don’t rush: Major shifts in corporate structure and direction are painful and drawn out exercises. Instead of feeling the need to act, focus instead on assimilating relevant new ideas and contextualizing them around your own strategy.
- Act fast: Low cost and low friction opportunities are now available to everyone, learn to try small. If a transformation is going to take place successfully in your organization, it will be through thousands of small efforts, not one large push.
- Check your ego: Here is the painful part, and one of the secrets. The baseline requirement of Enterprise 2.0 is to learn to let go and to realize that you must learn to trust those around you before you yourself will earn their trust.
- Learn to imagine again: For the first time in almost 70 years business is truly changing, and the possibilities are endless. What does that mean for you?
- You are creating this too: This isn’t about converting to a new ideology, this isn’t even about accepting a new idea, we are early enough in the new world of the New Enterprise that each participant is a creator. There are no masters yet, no old guard or new revolutionaries, there is simply an idea out there that is really starting to take hold, and every disciple is must do double time as a prophet.
- Learn to be ready: Only when you fully realize the potential for your organization can you find the right help. The best and smartest people will not be coming to you, you will have to find them. There is a boom of sorts coming in Enterprise 2.0, so be wary of snake-oil salesmen and instead go out and learn from the gurus and masters who will continue to emerge in the next year and beyond.
- Keep reading: The amount of knowledge, understanding and ideas that are being shared is staggering. Never before in business have so many innovations and creations been available for free. So start reading every relevant blog, article and book you can find, and don’t stop: the ideas will not stop evolving.
Have I missed anything? Please post your own suggestions below in the comments.
Reading
- Recommended reading - Business - Recent
- Recommended Reading - Technology - Recent
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Al wrote @ January 25th, 2007 at 5:07 am
Excellent post Jevon, really good points to considering moving forwards with the Enterprise 2.0 idea. I would add another very important one at the top if your in any kind of large enterprisy business :
1) Check your skin, you are going to need a really thick one! You will meet considerable resitance and critisism, not least from the tech police (I.T. department) who will either try to crush the project or turn it into one of their normal cul-de-sac projects. You will have to rise above that and punch through, in fact you may even have to bypass them and do it by stealth in a small way without letting them realise. This can be acheived by using web based services initially (expense the monthly costs). Once it gets a hold the tech police will have a weaker arguments for burying it.
I know I am being humorous and a little cynical, but there is a very real point here, for years I have run into the tech police problemns working both inside and outside of organisations, do not underestimate their negative effects, resistance to change and control mentality.
Love this blog by the way, keep it coming.
regards
Al
Jason Yau wrote @ January 25th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
I would add to the list: Study your organization.
Some businesses are better suited to adopting new collaboration technologies than others, and that should inform any strategy to deploy a system.
Are your employees tech savvy? Proactive? Independent? Reliant on IT? Is collaboration between groups generally accepted policy? Is there political infighting or rivalries?
Addressing these types of issues are critical to ensuring a new application will be accepted by employees and used properly within the organization.
Jevon wrote @ January 25th, 2007 at 3:35 pm
Jason, Al: You both make good points, but I only have one contention: it is more important to start with SOMETHING as soon as you can, rather than spending time and energy trying to clear out roadblocks.
The challenge is finding a personal, and corporate, balance.
[…] Jevon MacDonald Enterprise 2.0: Where do I start? 2007: The year of Enterprise 2.0? Report: How can Enterprise 2.0 work right now? What does the new customer see? What I wish would happen in Enterprise 2.0 in 2007 Words and the distinctions they create Manifesto for an Emerging Consultant Counter Culture: Why Change? How do new organizations work? The Manifesto for and Emerging Consultant Counter Culture Blogging the Market 12 Elements of Great Managing, and useful software. […]
[…] Jevon MacDonald has written a great post on this blog titled Enterprise 2.0: Where do I start? In it, he argues that organisations should start by learning more about themselves and looking for internal opportunities, before rushing down the consultant or vendor route: Check your ego: Here is the painful part, and one of the secrets. The baseline requirement of Enterprise 2.0 is to learn to let go and to realize that you must learn to trust those around you before you yourself will earn their trust. […]
How about starting with the evidence? If Enterprise 2.0 is the answer, what was the question? For each company, for each initiative, this will be different.
Such initiatives will implicate a LOT of change. The goal is to focus on the changes that offer the greatest improvments (e.g. ‘close’ some gap) and to ‘open’ the initiative to everyone (this alone implies a collaborative infrastructure and culture).
Perhaps restating a few of Jevon’s perspectives:
Find Energy For Free (a complexity science concept). Unlike what some Marketing concepts might suggest it isn’t a matter of replacing ‘push’ with ‘pull’ (even internally), as both expend equal amounts of energy. It’s a matter of finding enegy in motion (kinetic energy), unlocking potential energy, or simply setting out a ‘pole’ and see what it draws. Use the ‘total’ of your human resource potential.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Responsibility. Think the antithesis of mashups. Identify key tasks and apply Amazon 1-click design methods to key corporate applications. Use ’snippet’ interfaces to launch to existing results. This alone will get everyone’s attention. Example, an existing Lotus Notes employee directory — three interface layers eliminated by a single field with a Yahoo! auto-complete design pattern, getting directly to existing employee profiles.
Be prepared to overhaul development teams…different focus, different methods, different people. IT floors are the most diverse culturally and the least diverse intellectually. The current allocation of technical to interaction design will flip, so that for any given implementation more time will be allocated to interaction design and research than to the technical design and implementation. [Isn’t SOA supposed to create all these reusable functions?]
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[…] Getting started on Enterprise 2.0 A list of how a manager can get started on moving forward with Enterprise 2.0 initiatives. […]
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