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.

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.

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?

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).