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?]

The challenge is finding a personal, and corporate, balance.

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.

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