This is the third post of a multi-post series covering the discussion between SOCIALtality founder and 20-year Fidelity-enterprise veteran, Wendy Troupe and myself. The topics of our discussions were around Social Media, the emerging Enterprise 2.0 movement and the issues facing companies contemplating adoption. Yesterday we addressed why enterprise 2.0 market predictions vary so greatly. Today we are going to address how the shift towards Enterprise 2.0 in either a paradigm shift or an incremental change.
Question 3: Must a company experience a wholesale paradigm shift in order to derive value from Enterprise 2.0 or can an incremental integration approach succeed?
My response:
You have to start with an incremental approach. It’s very rare that a rapid shift ever occurs within large companies, especially if we’re talking about something changing across the enterprise. If you throw an internal collaboration tool at your employees, adoption will not be instantaneous; actually it’s going to be anything but instantaneous. Adoption is going to take time and could be 6 months to well over a year before you see widespread adoption, use, and actual business impact.
Driving adoption among employees is going to be a key issue for companies. Technology is also important but is a much smaller piece of the equation. You can have the perfect technology in place but if you don’t have adoption, then you fail. That’s a fundamental issue across the entire Social Media and Enterprise 2.0 space. It’s much easier to buy a tool and implement it. It’s hard to get people to start using the platform and developing an understanding of it’s real value. In his book Enterprise 2.0 Andrew McAfee sited John Gourville who did some research which suggests that:
“the average email user will underweight the relative benefits of a replacement technology (such as an internal collaboration platform) by a factor of three, while Enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts will overweight these same benefits by the same factor. This is the 9x effect deployers of new collaboration technologies will have to overcome.”
Part of the adoption challenge is getting people to slowly start to want to change the way they do things. In the book, Enterprise 2.0 there was an example of a project manager who informed his colleagues that he’d no longer accept email about a particular project, instead they’d have to discuss it on the collaboration platform. You have to slowly start replacing the old with the new and migrating people. It takes time. One of the reasons I’m so interested in Enterprise 2.0 is because the answers aren’t there yet, it’s a human puzzle that needs to be solved.
Wendy Troupe:
I think the size of an organization and the influence of the leadership factor heavily in adoption. I think it’s easier for a smaller organization to rally around something new. In a small organization, the collaborative barriers are thinner and more easily overcome. In a larger organization, adoption of new methods is often stunted by ownership silos. I think larger organizations have to overcome internal competition to foster true collaboration.
I think organizational leadership has to share a common strategic vision to create wholesale change. Often the vision is passed down from the central leadership. They see the potential and work to create an environment where a new concept can proliferate.
I think incremental change is often the result of grassroots support efforts rising within an organization and bubbling up to the top.
External factors can often effect the route change takes. If there are competitive threats, losses of marketshare, etc. leadership will often force organizational change out of necessity.
Organizational change often starts with the adoption of tool. A tool has a clearly defined cost, a focused set of expected outcomes and can be applied to a specific set of issues. Incremental change, a slow and methodical replacement of the old with the new, can be the best route to adoption. It’s up to organizational leadership to create an environment where the adoption of new methods are encouraged and new ideas can proliferate.
To read the other posts in this series please see below:
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