The Challenges of Enterprise Social Computing (aka Enterprise 2.0)
by Jon Husband
Euan Semple is one of acknowledged experts with respect to the use of social computing inside the firewall of an organization, based on his work when employed by the BBC to facilitate the use of wikis and blogs as part of the organization’s intranet. He is also a contributing editor emeritus of this blog.
His recent blog post titled "Most companies who try to do Enterprise 2.0 will fail" resonated with me, notwithstanding Andrew McAfee’s point (made at several presentations I have attended) that he is not aware of any social computing pilot projects / initiatives that have gone catastrophically off the rails.
Amongst those who follow the domain known, for want of a better name, as Enterprise 2.0 will also recognize that it is becoming conventional wisdom that the main challenges to effective implementation and use appear to be cultural and related to widespread assumptions-in-use about effective management … a notion that Gary Hamel takes to task in his recent book "The Future of Management" (earlier post on this issue here).
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Most companies who try to do Enterprise 2.0 will fail
And it will be for these reasons in no particular order:
1. They think it is about technology.
2. They aren’t prepared to deal with the friction that allowing their staff to connect generates.
3. They will assimilate it into business as usual.
4. They will try to do it in a way that "maximizes business effectiveness" without realizing that it calls for a radical shift in what is seen as effective.
5. They will grind down their early adopters until they give up.
6. They will get fleeced by the IT industry for over engineered, under delivering solutions, think that Enterprise 2.0 failed to live up to its promise and move on to the next fad.
7. Lack of patience
8. It is not companies who do Enterprise 2.0 it is individuals.
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