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Three considerations for enterprise 2.0

Written by James Robertson, published November 11, 2008

Categorised under: Enterprise 2.0

Continuing my discussions about practical approaches to enterprise 2.0, I’ve been observing and thinking about a range of adoption patterns. Like any new technology, there are many successes, and at least as many failures.

For organisations looking to benefit from enterprise 2.0, we obviously want successes. From where I stand, there are three main considerations when conducting strategic planning:

  1. Purpose. What is the reason for pursuing a particular solution or approach? How will it benefit the organisation? It’s nice to help people to chat, and this may help to build a sense of community, but this is not enough. There are many business needs and issues, and our job is to find way of solving them.
  2. Culture. As many have highlighted, solutions need to match the culture of the organisation (and perhaps move it forward by half a step). And this is the current culture, not the culture we may have when a new generation enters the workforce.
  3. Motivation. Why will staff use of new solutions? This is the classic “what’s in it for me” factor, and it’s even more important for solutions that require bottom-up involvement from a wide number of staff.

The aim here is to distil the thinking down to three items that can be used as a simple “test” when thinking and planning about enterprise 2.0. If you don’t have a clear answer for all three aspects, the strategy is likely to fail.

Of the three, motivation is the most important, and strangely, the least talked about.

We would all like “internal Facebook” or “internal Wikipedia” solutions. The motivation of people to participate in these platforms on the web is not the same as motivations for staff within organisations. I believe there are motivations that can be tapped into, but we know precious little about them at present.

This is where we should be devoting more of our effort. If we want most staff in an organisation to become active participants, we had better understand what will motivate them to do so!

So I’ll bring it back to three factors: purpose, culture and motivation. Find these three, and success will come.

As ever, your thoughts?

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3 Comments:

  1. Andrew Mitchell commented on November 11th, 2008

    Agree that motivation is the most important of the three points. If (and its a big IF) you can unlock and sustain motivation then useful purposes will be met and culture will be developed. (Maybe just not in exactly the directions specified in points one and two.

  2. Craig Thomler commented on November 15th, 2008

    Hi James,

    Good post as always.

    I’ve found that Motivation is sometimes a driver of Purpose but frequently in these cases competes against Culture.

    I watch people coming into the organisation asking where our ‘X’ tool is (collaboration platform, instant messaging system, dashboard reporting system, interactive organisational chart, etc).

    Culturally the organisation struggles to address the need of these users for these tools, not understand the Purpose or the value that could be derived from it.

    Ultimately the Motivated users either normalise into the Culture, take a new job elsewhere, or manage to change the Culture (though this last is rare).

    So while I agree Motivation is most important, sometimes it pre-exists while the Culture needs the most work to change.

  3. James Robertson commented on November 16th, 2008

    Hi Craig,

    There’s definitely growing pressure on organisations from individuals who are using a rich set of tools in their personal lives, or who have used some of these tools in previous organisations.

    This is still a very small proportion of staff numbers, however, and I’m much more interested in how we motivate the *majority* to use enterprise 2.0 tools.

    Taking the expertise directory or “internal Facebook” solutions as an example: if we don’t get 80% of staff filling in their details, then we have pretty much nothing.

    So even if early-adopters are allowed to make use of these tools, they will only be 5-10% of staff, and our projects will fail to get critical mass.

    Thus the vital importance of motivation if we are to integrate enterprise 2.0 into “the way we do things”.