What is the reason for it?
Who is responsible for making it successful?
How is it going to work?
There is a common belief among enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts (like myself) that an enterprise social media application will organically sprout collaboration in the work place. This belief is rooted in the fact that all of us are using social media sites in our private life - why can’t we do the same in our professional life? Of course we can. But then why do half of the enterprise 2.0 initiatives fail? Because in many cases management attention is concentrated on the technology rather than the organizational change.
My experience implementing several enterprise applications taught me that introducing any new technology requires paying attention to three questions: What is the reason for the change? Who is responsible for making it successful? And how is it going to work?
What is the reason for the change? For people to change behavior, we need to know why we should. How will new ways of doing things add value to our organization? We use Facebook because we like to share with friends and family, and we like to keep in touch. To use a similar tool in the workplace we need to have a compelling reason.
- How will it make us more competitive?
- How will it increase efficiency?
- How is it going to make my job easier?
Who is responsible for making the project successful? Everyone needs to get involved, from senior management to the customer support representative. Too many times these projects are being treated as an IT pet project. It’s the job of IT to make sure the technology works. But it’s not IT’s job to generate business value from the system. This is everyone’s job. The key is to get people involved and give them responsibilities. For example you might say to the project manager, “Our goal is to reduce the average timeline by 20%. How do you think you can use the new system to achieve this goal? What needs to be improved/changed?”
How is it going to work? Planning is one of those things that’s easy to talk about, but very hard to do right. Let’s take Knowledge Management, for example. The ability to collect and disseminate knowledge has potential for high ROI, especially for companies where employee know-how is the source of competitive advantage.
But how do you build KM? That is the million dollar question. One important thing to remember is that knowledge management systems don’t grow organically, they need to be engineered. Think about Wikipedia -- when it started, it didn’t start from nothing. It had previous encyclopedias to use for example and structure. Those encyclopedias were engineered -- someone decided what entries to add, who will write them and how they will grow over time. Similarly, when designing a KM someone needs to be responsible to decide on subject lists, creating a manageable scope, deciding who will contribute their knowledge, and installing a peer review process to ensure quality. This process requires resources and commitment over time - excellent KMs are not built in a quarter and they don’t build themselves.
The same can be said for implementing an enterprise 2.0 system.
When implementing an enterprise 2.0 system, remember: make sure there is a good reason to do so, make sure key people in the organization are committed to its success, and carefully design and follow the implementation plan.
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