A number of my fellow FAST Forward bloggers have written on the promise of Enterprise 2.0 and I certainly agree with its transformational potential, some of which has been realized already. I quote them and tell web 2.0 success stories at workshops. But I always hedge the claim with the huge change management effort to fully realize this vision across large organizations. As Indus Khaitan nicely wrote, “It (Enterprise 2.0) is the place where employees collaborate, exchange thoughts, create plans, capture meeting notes, track projects, create documents. The Writable Intranet means that enterprise knowledge is “free” and searchable by anybody. The “freedom” implies that knowledge is neither in e-mails and nor in documents but in easily accessible and searchable repositories.”  Sounds good and I am convinced that we will get there, or at least I hope so.   But it will not be easy because of human, not technical. issues.

Here is a brief sample success story on the possibilities. When Al Essa was the CIO at MIT’s Sloan School, he faced the challenges typical of any CIO. It required considerable time to monitor the efforts of his multiple project teams. Projects tended to operate in silos and many complained that they did not know what the others were doing. Al turned to blogs to address this issue. Al said, “We have created a blog forum for each project. Project managers provide updates and everyone in the department can access all project blogs. The project blogs act as true dashboards. The project lead maintains their project’s blog and other team members can contribute.”

Al could now review each project’s status online and drill down for more detail as needed. These status reports, and the ability to comment or ask questions, were also available to everyone in his department, so cross-project communication was a simple matter, a by-product of the project teams’ new blog reporting platform. Al could point teams to others facing the same issues. Individuals could access these reports in several ways. They could browse the department intranet for them and they could subscribe to them through RSS. The instant, secure, and constant accessibility, in searchable format, that blogs brought was a huge productivity improvement over swapping project reports and commentary through multiple emails. It brought his teams closer and everyone became believers in the new approach.

One significant benefit of this approach was the creation of a knowledge management system as a byproduct of simply doing the work. As time goes on the project records and deliverables can be easily accessed, creating a useful knowledge repository. This could eliminate or greatly reduced the difficult task of getting contributions to a KM system. It also realized the vision of Indus I quoted above. At first, some people resisted the idea but Al simply said that this was the new policy and give it a try it. Fortunately, most, if not all of his staff became believers.  But this was a relatively small department with a common focus and IT sophistication. Al Essa’s effort fit the profile that Jim McGee just wrote about on this blog in his post, Implementing social technologies inside organizations,  “individuals who have enough power and influence to persuade a work group to “run the experiment,” and whose work group is responsible for a consequential enough deliverable that the results of the experiment can carry some weight in the organizational hierarchy.”

What about taking this to a large enterprise with multiple departments and agendas? I greatly admire the work of Rod Boothby and his enterprise blog architect that takes what MIT did and goes way beyond. Having been part of large consulting company I can see the enormous productivity benefit that would occur with such a system that allowed everyone to be aware of the work of others and benefit from their efforts. But when I mention this to people in some large consulting companies or other types of firms the response is often skeptical. They feel that many people do not want everyone to know what they are doing and many client contracts prohibit this type of knowledge sharing. The latter is easier to deal with as you can have restricted access to certain sets of content. It is the attitude that will be harder and the attitude issues will take some carefully thought out change management work.

A few years ago Lotus Quickplace was an early precursor to some of the functions that the MIT blog system and other web 2.0 efforts now offer. I had a chance to develop knowledge management systems with some of the initial versions and was a big believer in its value.  It still has a large user base. Quickplace provided access control to a site. This ability to limit participants was seen as a big benefit. Later when IT people and senior executives wanted to be able to see inside these Quickplaces, initial users were not happy. This is an interesting contrast to the openness of web 2.0 tools like blogs and wikis but this request was seen as going back on one of the original benefits. People then felt they were going to be spied on. They failed to see any benefit for themselves from the transparency and none were likely presented.

We are now living in an increasingly transparent world. Perhaps the required openness to transparency within the enterprise will be, in part, a generational issue.