by Bill Ives
June 27, 2007 at 9:06 am
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0
I recently told a Story on User Generated Content within the Firewall that covered knowledge management closely aligned with business process. Enterprise 2.0 is certainly much more than KM but enhancing knowledge sharing is more of its many opportunities. When I was involved in implementing knowledge management efforts, pre and post web, I always stressed the need for alignment with business processes and the need to have the efforts measured by metrics related to these processes (e.g. call centers, sales support, product development).
I never saw a knowledge management or collaboration effort succeed with the “let’s build it and see what happens” approach. I can remember conversations with several CIOs who said that they build a discussion forum but no one used it. When asked about the business purpose for the forum or what processes it was aligned with, it was like deer in the headlights. The proliferation of early intranets and the chaos that resulted was also a bad byproduct of just letting the users have free reign.
There have been many posts on this blog and elsewhere about how Enterprise 2.0 is different than Web 2.0. Getting people to participate within their work life will be a greater challenge than in their free time. One way to succeed is to follow the practice of successful knowledge management efforts and align the initiative with a core business process and demonstrate how it improves this process. But is this the only way?
Many of the successful Web 2.0 efforts like YouTube and MySpace have provided a platform for individual creativity and did not seem to be concerned with specific use cases, or at least not locked into them. A number of firms have launched wikis just to see how they will get used. IBM Research several years ago launched its Blog Central effort to give employees a blog for whatever reason they wanted as long as it did not violate business policies. There were some very interesting and useful initial results but I also read a bit later that the 3600 blogs average less than 10 entries but then many may have just started by then. I do not know the status now. A more recent conversation suggested that there are 12,000 active bloggers within IBM (less than 5% of the firm but still a significant number). Of course, Enterprise 2.0 is much more than individual employee blogs but that is a piece.
Since Enterprise 2.0 initiatives have many more potential applications than knowledge sharing, allowing for open-ended use might be an effective strategy. It did not work for intranets but we are way beyond that now. If a firm had the resources and commitment, a dual implementation strategy would make sense. Do some pilots structured around business processes and allow for some user exploration and creativity. What do you think? What has been your experience so far?
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Science models tell us it’s about energy. Discussion groups wane without energy (voices that keep a conversation going). Most of the discussion groups I’ve been on in the past have simply become (which isn’t a bad thing) just an open spiggot for announcements. Occassionally a conversation breaks out, but not often.
The conversations have moved to the industry blogs (perhaps only for a while?), but not necessarily personal ones (with exceptions for people who are ‘pulsepoints’), rather topical ones. Thus there is real indication for people gathering around any mechanism that 1) allows for conversation and 2) is focused on a common topic of interest (e.g. creates a sense of community).
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MikeJune 27th, 2007 at 10:34 am |
I think you’ve hit upon something here. I pay very close attention to what’s happening in Web 2.0 world expecting it to arrive very shortly in Enterprise 2.0 world. Less that a decade ago, the opposite was true; Look at the Enterprise to see what’s arriving for the Consumer.
Enterprise 2.0 will take time. It’s about changing the culture behind the firewall, where historically (and especially in my sector, Banking and Finance) regulations, processes and rules exist that make it harder to embraced…it seems.
A few years ago, our CIO and a select forward thinking individuals within the organisation decided to ‘build it and see what happens’. Break down the walled gardens was a popular statement for the strategy.
Sure enough, small pockets of the organisation embraced blogs, wikis, IM and began to move away from email (where the walled gardens exist). Knowledge sharing began to blossom. Soon the front office were not only communicating with the back office, but they were also involving the IT people who as you quite rightly put it, build technology to ease their own pain not those of the user base.
Over the course of 3 years, we were communicating synchronously and asynchronously on open information systems. More and more people embraced it. Exactly as it should be, the seed of Knowledge Management and Enterprise Social Networking was growing.
We (IT) understood the end-users (our clients), we focussed on usability and began to rebuild the infrastructure and applications to suit the way our users worked. The support organisation-wide was encouraging.
Then, in 2006/2007 a restructure, a change of senior management affected the organisational culture in an adverse way. Existing communication and collaboration tools were seen as confusing and negative. As a result, the blogging stopped, the wiki content reduced, email traffic increased, the walls were erected once more.
Large investments are now being made into business processes and service management tools as opposed to the self help culture that once blossomed. Where tacit knowledge was a trend due to the transparency that became a by-product of the open systems culture.
We crashed on take-off. My challenge now is how to help change the perception of Enterprise 2.0 in an organisation who were unaware they were leading the trend. Can we bring an Enterprise Facebook in as the new CRM system?
I would agree with the 90% people, 10% technology. Certainly the technology has lowered the barrier and made it a lot easier which is a big factor in adoption. However, we seem to be missing a couple of really important things right now:
1. Awareness of the opportunity/need to improve knowledge work and learning
2. Changing habits and skill building
There’s quite a bit out there around the skills for new media especially by people looking at it from skill development among students (often called information literacy). But I don’t hear nearly as much about this in the corporate world.
Certainly it seems that in order for Enterprise 2.0 (or Personal Work and Learning Environments - PWLE) to really take off we should be supporting it’s adoption.
Paula, Mike, and Tony - Thanks for your comments. I agree with Tony’s formular of preceived uesefulness * perceived ease of use (see his link) for adoption success. I think some of the energy that Paula talks about is built around the perceived usefulness and then it gets sustained or, at least not worn out, by the ease of use. Mike you gave a great example of what to do and what not to do. I have seen many times that implementation success requires the right thinking at the top. Even though Entperise 2.0 allows for more individual intiatives within the organizations, the top can still make or break it.
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ScottJune 28th, 2007 at 5:49 pm |
I don’t think we could (or should) separate “core business process” from “individual knowledge worker” in an enterprise. In fact, social computing provides an environment to marry them into one, which is the vision of Warren Bennis (i.e., “Great Groups”) and Peter & Trudy Johnson-Lenz (i.e., “Groupware”). For reference, see http://newnewweb.blogspot.com/2007/05/are-we-witnessing-death-of-personal.html.
If we failed to provide some structure, relying on every new wiki space to evolve on an emergent basis, we may as well take the “knowledge” out of “knowledge worker.” We may as well re-invent the wheel every time we need to move a heavy object. The key E2.0 take away is to provide “just-enough” structure to direct and norm collaborative behaviour (answering “what do we do in this space and what is the core organization of it”) while also allowing creative lattitude for structuring and organizing a space. I explain this in detail in a post about the . In that case study, I reference the success at where this was put into practice successfully.
One of the comments above mentions culture as a barrier. My experience at deployment after deployment is that the culture call is a sort of cop out “ahh, we couldnt make this 2.0 stuff work because our culture just isnt open enough.” I’ve seen the most conservative tech-backwards groups go from 0 to Wiki-Fast in 24 hours or less.
How? Simply agreeing as a group WHAT process will be done in the wiki and blog environment, and showing everyone HOW to do add/edit/manage the content to meet the process need. The process may be as simple as posting market intelligence announcements with one category each, or managing project requirements across milestones.
If the instructions are clear and everyone agrees to move together, groups typically don’t care about whether a process is handled in a less structured wiki or process oriented work flow system. Based on culture of privacy or *need* for privacy, there is, however, a need to keep some workspaces permission filtered to the “need to know” level.
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