The excerpt below comes from an email conversation with a friend who is doing a lot of Enterprise 2.0 work inside an organization.

We talked about things like Jakob Nielsen’s latest writing, and how to extend the conversation in to IT, or as I should say, away from IT.

It’s also important to look at who is in the conversation.

Nielson is a techie first. His approach to people is that they are little Turin machines that you put inputs in to and get an output from. In the case of Jakob, he sees the interface as something that
elicits a response.

IT guys also often see technology in the same way. They define desired responses, output and constraints, and then design systems which guarantee those outputs. The user just becomes another input they factor in and optimize for, the same way they treat XML, Databases and
APIs.

This is why it is so hard to have these conversations with IT at all. Their job is well defined and it does not compliment Enterprise Social Computing, except on the service delivery side — and that is why so many of us are working so hard to dance around IT and build adoption of SaaS.

With Social Computing in the enterprise, we aren’t talking about defined process, or specific task-outputs, the conversation is at a much higher level, we have to look at business outcomes and business thinking.

You’ll probably say “well, I need IT to implement this stuff”. It’s true, you probably do. What you have to do is build up a spec and a more thorough argument of WHY e2.0 is needed, not HOW it is going to be needed. The truth is that the interface and gloss of Web 2.0 is not all that relevant to the enterprise. The relevant conversation is about how all those lessons we have learned about communities, user generated content, pattern recognition, etc. all matter to business.

Stop talking to IT about the problem. Talk to them about how new technologies are going to get implemented, Web 2.0 or not. Dig deep and find out how they audit software, how they roll it out, what their policies are that you need to know about. Even if you already know this stuff, try to get in there to experience it.

Do you hate me now, or do you love me?