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.

I’m going to go one step beyond this to say: organisations don’t need enterprise 2.0. Implementing a new technology (or set of technologies) won’t drive organisational change or improvements, no matter how sexy or new they are.

So my answer to the question “where do I start?” would focus on two things:

• People: spend time in the organisation understanding what the needs and issues of staff are. Don’t talk about enterprise 2.0 (they don’t care or understand), but take the time to listen to what people’s “pain points” are.
• Business needs: work with senior and middle management to identify strategic needs and directions. At the end of the day, the right points to start are those that will have the biggest impact on the organisation.

Of course, we  go out into the organisation with an understanding of how enterprise 2.0 can help, and where it may fit in. This will help us to take a new perspective on how technology can support day-to-day business needs. (We also need to recognise that we will find as many situations where enterprise 2.0 isn’t relevent, but the needs are just as great.)

Time and time again, I’ve seen organisations get tangled up when it comes to defining an information management strategy for the whole business. The cause? Starting with technology.

It’s easy to get caught up in questions such as: do I start with content management or document management? Should we be doing enterprise 2.0? Should we be creating an ECM platform?

These questions are a trap, because technology was never the real issue. The real issues are staff and organisational needs. So we should start there, prioritise according to business strategy, and then slot in the appropriate technology when required.

Enterprise 2.0 is about taking a new perspective on the organisation, not on a set of technologies. That’s what’s so exciting, if we can make it all work.