Many Ways to get Enterprise 2.0 Going
by Bill Ives
First, I want to offer thanks to The Shed 2.0 and the Enterprise 2.0 Evangelist blogs for referencing my post on Enterprise Wiki Increases Collaboration and Connections at Janssen-Cilag. They are both worth checking out if you have been to them. I also want to pick on something that the Shed 2.0 writer added. After an initial positive start, he was stalled in growing the readership for his internal blog until a “someone in semi-senior management” got involved. Then readership jumped another 100, including people who knew about it but had not yet picked up on it. He concludes, “So I guess E2 will still suffer some of E1’s problems. Most people will probably still want to be led rather than lead. The learnings from this though…get someone senior on board with you ASAP. Approach things from various different angles, bottom up, top down, side to side and round and round.”
The need for senior support goes way back beyond E1 and is not a bad thing in my view. For example, I have never seen a knowledge management effort succeed that did not have a supporter at the senior level. It was best if this supporter was on the business side rather than IT. Whenever we started an effort we looked for our senior management champion. Now in those days this was also important because more funding was involved. However, the benefit went way beyond securing funding. It was a critical factor in securing participation. Leaders help and if they are participating in discussion forums (a type of old style “blogs”) the quality and level of participation will increase. Moving to the enterprise 2.0 world, I will imagine that the quality and level of participation will also increase if people know that senior management is involved and looking at what is going on, and participating
