The FASTForward Blog » Can an organization not be ‘ready’ for Enterprise 2.0?: Enterprise 2.0 Blog: News, Coverage, and Commentary

Can an organization not be ‘ready’ for Enterprise 2.0?

by Joe McKendrick

January 10, 2010 at 5:48 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Event Announcements, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0

My colleagues Jon Husband and Jevon MacDonald have been launching some great discussions on the organizational impacts of Enterprise 2.0 and social networking. Jevon talks about the organizational design questions that need to be asked in building a social business, and Jon provides insights into the importance of employee engagement within the enterprise.

Clearly, organizational culture plays a huge role in Enterprise 2.0 adoption and success. And in turn, Enterprise 2.0 helps to reshape that culture, introducing more information sharing. But does an organization need to have the right culture in the first place? Is it necessary, then, for an organization be ‘ready’ for social networking? Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd, writing over at the Harvard Business Review blog say yes, this is a factor. The good news is that there are many ways to build a social networking strategy.

Consider these scenarios, they say:

An executive blogs about a recent downsizing, with good intentions of boosting morale. However, laid-off employees are incensed that the blog appears insensitive.
” The company implements an internal-only social networking platform that allows rating, tagging, and comments on products and services. A new service, offered by HR, receives very low ratings and negative, but not mean-spirited, comments. The head of HR requests that all the comments and the ratings be taken down. Would your company approve this request?”

Meister and Willyerd, authors of an upcoming book titled The 2020 Workplace (forthcoming in spring), say events like these will make or break social networking efforts. Attempting to introduce open and frank communications and interaction into a fairly rigid command-and-control corporate environment may result in dashed expectations and a frustrating, counter-productive experience.

Key questions to ask include the following:

“Do we really want to have a two-way conversation with our employees, partners, and suppliers?”
“If you have already implemented social media to connect to your customers, how are your organization’s executives responding to the wealth of information they already have?”
Are executives open and responsive to social media information, no matter how bad the feedback, “or do they demand the feedback be filtered in order to create a sanitized, more palatable version?”

As a result of this self-examination, they say, is it possible an organization may see that it’s simply “not ready” for social networking strategies, to be open and transparent to employees, customers and partners? Meister and Willyerd say a shift in strategy is required, versus a head-first plunge into social networking. A good way to start is through pilot projects addressing specific business needs, such as employee communications and document sharing. They even recommend a one-day “Innovation Jam” involving the entire workforce.

The takeaway here is that many organizations may feel that the openness and transparency offered by social networking runs against the grain of their corporate culture. As a result, they may quash efforts at Enterprise 2.0 before they even start, with the excuse of “that’s not for us.” But Enterprise 2.0 can help deliver the transformative effects that open up the flow of of energy and information. As we recover from the recent recession, we are entering a stage when businesses need to be global, with a great deal of flexibility and innovation to maintain a competitive edge.

Share and Enjoy:

Permalink

63 Tweets 3 Other Comments

69 Comments »

Jeff WilfongJanuary 11th, 2010 at 11:58 am

Culture is the issue for nearly any size of company but a start-up. If you do not have buy-in, then tools go unused or underutilized. Sometimes, I think that simply employing technology will create some culture (sort of like bottom-up or grassroots organizing approaches). Other times, I see that middle-management is instrumental in winning over their supervisees and initiating changes. Rarely do I see any top-down approaches being successful.

Phil SimonJanuary 11th, 2010 at 6:20 pm

Good post, Joe. I’d argue that most organizations are not ready for just about any technology in lean times. I just saw this again recently as I implemented an “Enterprise 1.0″ technology at a hospital.

Cultures more tolerant of failure and change are going to have more success on social networking types of endeavors, as others have pointed out. There’s no silver bullet in E2.0 that overlooks good management, culture, and other factors endemic to IT success.

Joerg JeldenJanuary 12th, 2010 at 4:45 am

Dear Joe
Thank you for this great post. I have enjoyed reading it very much, but there is one thing I would like to remark. You start with raising the question “Can an organization be ready for Enterprise 2.0?” For me this question does not fit to an enterprise 2.0 culture. It follows a top-down way of thinking. Isn´t the right question to ask when an organization is ready? I would like to propose that it is a process of making an organization ready for Enterprise 2.0. That organizations choose an emergent way of deciding your proposed questions. That they gather first experiences on small cases and projects and build on these. If most organizations would start asking a question like „Do we really want to have a two-way conversation with our employees, partners and suppliers?“ right in the beginning, then 90 percent would simply answer with no. This is no good: neither for the organizations themselves, nor for the economy at all. I just finished „The 10 stages of Social Media Business Integration“ by Brian Solis and The Builder´s Manifesto by Umair Haque. Both are great pieces. These 10 stages are build on the idea of an emerging integration of social media into an organization and Haque´s analysis of 21st century leadership adds the right leadership model.
Thanks

uberVU – social commentsJanuary 10th, 2010 at 3:42 pm

Social comments and analytics for this post…

This post was mentioned on Twitter by dina: I just posted: India Inc – wake up! Social Networking’s here to stay. http://bit.ly/7jBRls…;

This comment was originally posted on Conversations with Dina

ffblogJanuary 10th, 2010 at 5:48 pm

New Post “Can an organization not be ‘ready’ for Enterprise 2.0?” http://bit.ly/6lvsB1