I’m  not going to talk about technology on this blog. Instead, I’m going to explore what it takes to gain adoption of new approaches, and how we can gain a deeper understanding of the organisations we are serving.

Let me start with “gaining adoption”. Enterprise 2.0 delivers great functionality, and holds tremendous promise within organisations. All of these new technologies are for naught, however, if users (staff) don’t actually make use of them.

Let’s explore this from two perspectives…

The Enterprise 1.0 way

The traditional way of delivering enterprise solutions is to purchase a large technology product, pilot this centrally (often within IT areas), and to then “roll it out” across the organisation.

In many cases, these enterprise applications face considerable resistance from operational areas, and adoption may never be gained. In fact, I would argue that staff should resist enterprise applications.

Most of these enterprise applications actually work very poorly for the staff that need to make use of them. The reality often is that if staff really did make use of these tools, then staff (and organisational) productivity would fall.

The failure of these systems comes from not building an understanding of the day-to-day needs and issues of staff. Without this, it becomes impossible to deliver solutions that work.

This is something that I’ve talked about before, when writing the 10 principles ofeffective information management, or on conducting intranet needs analysis.

The Enterprise 2.0 way

Bill Ives wrote an excellent post on tagging behind the firewall, where he outlined may ways in which collaborative writing and linking can be used within organisations. While I agree with all of this, the challenge still remains on how to get adoption of these new approaches.

The key thing to recognise is that people’s motivations within the enterprise are different from the outside world. While there are many that gain great satisfaction from posting to Wikipedia, does this mean that we can expect to see the same thing magically happen within organisations?

What is clear is that motivations are very different within the enterprise, and we must find new ways of engaging staff if we are to expect them to deliver bottom-up solutions. Most of the case studies so far have been from consulting firms (IBM and others), and while these generate great excitement, these organisations are hugely different from the typical corporation or government agency.

While there are no easy answers to this at present, but I do know that if we are to succeed than we should step away from the technology aspects of Enterprise 2.0, and focus instead on understanding staff needs, interactions and motivations.

Making it work

One approach that definitely does work, whether for Enterprise 1.0 or 2.0 applications is to one-business-unit-at-a-time approach outlined by Kathleen Gilroy. I’ve done this many times, and it works beautifully.

More on this to come…