The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0?

DO NOTHING

And then your bright, thoughtful and energetic staff will do it for you. Trouble is they will do it outside your firewall on bulletin boards, instant message exchanges personal blogs and probably on islands in Second Life and you will have lost the ability to understand it, influence it, and integrate it into how you do business.

The second easiest way is to find ways of allowing this to happen inside the firewall which can be as simple as sticking in some low cost or free tools and then making sure your existing organisation can:

GET OUT OF THE WAY

The third easiest way is to do the second easiest way and then engage those who would have done the easiest way and get them to help you:

KEEP THE ENERGY LEVELS UP

And the hardest way .......

.... you don't need me to tell you that!

Technorati Tags: enterprise 2.0

Comments

[John Ounpuu]

Great post. Blunt, simple, direct and so true. And I love the blog name, too!

[Jon Husband]

THE social-computing-in-enterprises 2007 Manifesto ?

[Tim O'Reilly]

This is just lovely, and so right on.

[Scott Smith]

Has the power and the look of poetry. Lovely.

[alan herrell - the head lemur]

How to Use Enterprise 2.0
http://theheadlemur.typepad.com/ravinglunacy/2007/01/the_only_intern.html

[Simon Carswell]

Euan, on my networking 'travels', during which I've been talking to a few people struggling with 'KM' in organisations, I'm picking up the message that because the younger generation are using these tools on the Web there will be two points to consider as far as E2 adoption is concerned: 1. They'll expect it to be available 2. They'll find it natural to use it.

So getting E2 adopted with the younger set should be like pushing at an open door. I think this fits in with what you're saying.

Simon

[Ludvig A. Norin]

To the point, funny and clear like russian vodka, but I don't buy it. In fact, I think it's a load of ***.

Any good business have employees, any employee have tasks. The reality of most businesses is that people needs to be managed. So to "get out of the way" is really not a very productive advice.
Since when is it good for a company not to be managed? E2 won't make it so, for sure.

In the most internally networking businesses, things still needs to be coordinated. E2, communities and social software can, and will, be a great tool for this - not eliminate it.

[Euan Semple]

If you read the post carefully it should be clear that I did not say that options one or two were the best options in terms of outcomes for the organisation.

The third option, while not necessarily easiest, is the one which is most likely to prove successful in terms of moving the organisation forward. It requires a lot of effort and energy and is far from doing nothing.

The reality is not that most people need to be managed - they need to be influenced.

If you want to say shit why don't you just say shit?

[Euan Semple]

If people want to leave comments I'd be grateful if they they own up to their opinions and use real e-mail addresses.

To the person whose comment I just deleted why should information amassed using web 2.0 tools be uncoherent (I believe you meant incoherent) and not backed up? The apparent coherence of current information systems masks the fact that good stuff is invariably really hard to find whereas in rich networks of conversations the good stuff has a far greater chance of being discovered and pointed to.

All of our systems had become increasingly important to the business at the BBC and to considerable numbers of people (18,500 using the forum and 4,800 wiki users) so backing them up was a no brainer.

You are not the first to describe my previous employer as "fairy land" but I suspect your reasons differ from the normal ones.

[Mat]

Maybe the adoption of E2.0 is a generational thing? Maybe it's a cultural thing? Or, maybe there just isn't a mass market for "loose" collaboration tools.

Maybe the only way to get adoption (and revenue) is to focus on automating business processes that have a higher perceived value to the organisation.

For the record, I love collaboration tools and have used Central Desktop, Basecamp and others in projects over the last 24 months - with varying degrees of success. The biggest wins is when those tools have been adapted to support a specific business process e.g. sign off of time-critical artwork.

[Tracy Allison Altman]

Euan, Great post. I agree with your comment that "most people need to be managed - they need to be influenced." At the Office 2.0 Conf (SanFran, Oct 2006), Esther Dyson described the "loose" collaboration tools as good for the type of person who's willing to come into a room and rearrange the chairs so it's better for everybody there -- but that most people don't fit that description.

I also agree with Mat, who said "Maybe the only way to get adoption (and revenue) is to focus on automating business processes that have a higher perceived value to the organisation." I'm finding that's the case for Enterprise 2.0, and expect it will hold true for Enterprise 3.0, 4.0, ...

[Jon Husband]

The Net Generation hates Your Intranet

excerpted quote from ThoghtFarmer blog"

Born between 1977 and 1996, the Net Generation grew up immersed in a digital world. The internet dominates their personal and social lives, from instant messaging to peer-to-peer filesharing to virtual communities. They publish and participate in online social networks and swap ideas as easily as they swap songs and videos.

So what happens when one of these fresh college graduates joins a firm and finds a staid, traditional intranet with a tightly controlled publishing model?

They hate it.

This is a very real problem for companies trying to attract and retain new talent. These twentysomethings operate on principles of openness, participation and interactivity

This is tomorrow's workforce, folks. Manage it tightly if you will, and have fun hanging on to them.

[MLO]

The issue I run into is the lack of understanding that no matter the age group, there has always been a certain number of mavericks who "did what was necessary" and this has included rogue newsletters, unofficial manuals, and informal networks between professionals. All of this existed well-before the Internet. It is just easier to find now.

Now, information does not always need to flow freely to everyone, but if you don't provide a way for it to flow freely between the groups that need it to exist, well, they will install it under their desk or on an something external to the firewall. They will work realy hard at circumventing your controlling behavior and you will lose productivity.

I am seeing a disturbing trend of more control from upper management who are very threatened by allowing knowledge - mostly day-to-day knowledge - to be freely available. In many cases it has only served to magnify their own shortcomings in business knowledge. These individuals are usually the very definition of Dilbert's Pointy Haired Boss - which is not that much of a caricature.

Those managers who know what they know and know what they don't know are not threatened. They have always relied appropriately on their experts. The "in the know" types were always the managers who gave their people direction and then got out of the way. These managers know that a good portion of their job is to keep upper management at bay so they don't interfere with actually getting the company's business done.

The higher up in the chain, the less you know about day-to-day operations. It is only natural because your responsibilities have changed. No one can know everything.

There are times when "openness, participation and interactivity" outside of a select group is completely inappropriate. Things like creating HR policy, or new designs that need to be protected from competitors.

If you don't provide easy-to-use tools and hinder free flow of information between the users of the information you are going to find them creating other types of solutions. And I can guarantee you these solutions will not be secure. Your business will be in danger of either a lawsuit or losing valuable competitive intelligence.

Pax,

MLO

[Helen J Nicol]

I think this is right to some extent, but to effectively use these technologies the individual barriers to sharing have to be broken down. In cultivating an online community I've come up against a hell of a lot of confidence issues. The biggest issue seems to be that people don't want to brag and don't want to be seem as incompetent. This leaves only the middle ground info that everyone agrees on. The culture of the organisation I feel is key. Maybe we need to help people acknowledge that we're constantly learning, that it's ok not to know, before business based use of social software really comes into its own.

[Euan]

I didn't say that the easiest option was the best. It took us a lot of effort and hard thinking to get as many people as we did embracing this new way of working for just the reasons you describe.

[Lesley Dewar]

"So what happens when one of these fresh college graduates joins a firm and finds a staid, traditional intranet with a tightly controlled publishing model? They hate it!"

Thanks for this. As an Australian financial planner, regularly audited by one of the multitude of lawyers employed by my Licencee (and she is tough!), we have a very rigid set of procedures to follow - in a business where every job is different from the last one. But you have to tick all the same boxes!

I have great trouble in retaining GenX employees; I am an internet nut myself; I have very strict business policies on internet access within the office.

Now, I can see that I have to find someone who can write some acceptable procedures that will allow younger employees to have some degree of freedom to operate in their own way - while not risking my electronically based data base to corruption, theft or physical loss.

Tall order! Especially when I am one of those mavericks!

[Artem]

Short and understandable, thank you. I tried to find anything about it, but I didn't. Soon, I will right it on my blog.

[Michael Faber]

Appealing post but IMHO you underestimate the complexity of Enterprise 2.0 - frankly I think you realize it's much more complex and there are many issues and conflicts of interest to be resolved but you decided to oversiplyfy in order to keep the hype up

not everyone wants to contribute to corporate memory and there's much more trouble along the path to E2.0 and you know it

I'm also a fan of this concept:
http://www.smart-up.eu/2007/09/07/enterprise-20-best-practices/
...but it's not that simple as you picture it

[Euan Semple]

I had no intention of "keeping the hype up" and having been directly involved in making this work happen in a large complex organisation I have no illusions as to what is involved.

If you read the post carefully I at no time say any of it is actually easy. Option one may involve no effort but it doesn't work and options two and three are bloody hard.

In fact the post was written when Enterprise 2.0 nonsense was at its height and was intended to deflate some of the puff.

[serkan]

Okay, I placed a link to you in my Blog. Let's see what happens. Also, who is
Meme? Is she cute? :)
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sohbet
ozel sohbet

[yarisma]

thanks for article

[Derya Baykal]

Thanks.