Jakob Nielsen’s recently posted an extensive piece on Social Networking on Intranets that addressed adoption issues for enterprise 2.0. It is a summary of the key findings from a study of 14 companies in a much larger 168 page report. It begins with the subtitle, Ready or Not, Here Comes Enterprise 2.0, which sort of captures his approach. Jakob portrays enterprise 2.0 as something that younger workers are pushing on enterprises. If you go to0 slow you will lose good younger workers and if you go too fast you will run risks to overall corporate culture.

While I think there are many more reasons to implementing enterprise 2.0 than appeasing younger workers, Jakob provides some very useful findings and suggestions. For starters, he says that companies must cede power to the people. Actually that was my paraphrase of what he said but he did say that command and control no longer works for corporate messaging. He added that, “enterprise 2.0’s power is not about tools, it’s about the communication shift that those tools enable.” I would agree.

Jakob also found that frontline workers are driving the vision in the companies he studied. While I think a bottom up approach is quite good and aligns with the power to the people philosophy, companies should be more proactive to combine bottom up with some strategic top down direction. A thousand points of light might be going in diverse directions. To back this up, Jakob said, “a uniform finding across all of our case studies is that organizations are successful with social media and collaboration technologies only when the tools are designed to solve an identified business need.” Some top down strategic direction might provide a focus on the critical business needs. Having said that, I would not suppress the bottom up guidance, just blend the two.

I really liked this suggestion, “While some users will eagerly adopt community features for their own sake, others will be skeptical and need guidance. One successful approach is to avoid advertising the new tools as new tools. Instead, simply integrate them into the existing intranet, so that users encounter them naturally.” This exactly what we did in 2004 when we swapped Word docs attached to emails for a blog to support an executive task force at a large hospital. The docs were not told it was a blog, but rather simply a new tool to support their sessions. This stealth approach was especially important in 2004 when blogs were seen as the domain of teenagers and geeks. The docs were won over by the increased functionality the blog offered (see Collaborate for Success: Great Resource for Physician-Hospital Collaboration).

Another useful suggestion is to “avoid burdening users with double work. Don’t, for example, force users to update their profile or photo in both the traditional employee directory and a Facebook-like social connection tool.” This should not be hard to do with most tools but it can be overlooked. He also said it is “important to budget something for community management — not to control the conversation, but rather to guide it. Designated community managers should serve as facilitators and moderators.” This is an old knowledge management best practice that is even more important today (see KM Stories: Part Four – Gaining Support at All Levels).

Jakob concludes with the caution, “when you consider that successful adaptation of Enterprise 2.0 tools requires the organization to change its ways, it becomes clear why these projects don’t happen overnight.” He adds that it seems to take three to five years for “social intranet projects” to take hold. There is much more in the summary. I am sure the 168 page version offers even more insight. Thanks to J.B.Holston at Newsgator for pointing out this post to me.