For the past few months, a few colleagues and I have been trying to figure out how to make Enterprise 2.0 solutions work much better. We've got a few ideas, and a working prototype (to be discussed in a future post), and plans for more. Our key insights are:
- More infrastructure is needed than the software typically provides (and much of what's needed is not hard to add), and
- The social process of joining and being in the Enterprise "community" (we put quotes on deliberately -- it's a vague word) must be orchestrated and managed. Some people do this -- they just may need to do it more, better and longer.
Enterprise 2.0's challenge is often called "adoption," but to us the issue is usefulness. To be picked up and used, the tools and processes must be useful to people, valuable to them (which includes their value in doing a particular task but also includes other ancillary benefits they may get) and be easy to use.
Most Enterprise 2.0 implementations focus on picking software and managing the introduction of the software to the target audiences. The hope is that a critical mass will be built and then that the people using the system will generate value for each other. We'd suggest that more is needed.
The first addition is workflow. As indicated in a previous post, it helps to have workflow structured enough so that people can easily do what you want them to do in the collaborative setting (which means that you need to think about what you want them to do). At the same time, you need flexibility for people can invent their own ways of doing things; you can't know ahead of time what will happen, and much that you don't know will be good!! That's one of the reasons you are installing Enterprise 2.0 tools.
The second addition is social processes that facilitate the creation of bilateral relationships within a collaboration. In most collaborations, the focus is on the joint task. But good, caring relationships among even a small number of pairs of participants will make any collaboration (online or offline) work much better. In the offline world, these can sometimes be generated by a beer after work; in the online world they need to be planted, nurtured, and watered systematically (which is a good idea offline too).
The social processes can consist of, at least:
- Carefully constructed profile pages. Profile questions can be asked in ways that provide many hooks into who a person is. This lets people understand each other in ways that are outside of the immediate work context, but which can provide "glue" between them.
- Aggressive management of initial participation. Community managers (yes, you need one for your internal community) can contact joiners early on, and help them find their way around. Or the community manager can facilitate contact by someone else in the community. Encouraging -- or requiring -- some offline conversation among site participants can be very powerful; if two people talk for 10 minutes on the phone, they have a much stronger tie than online alone usually creates.
- Ongoing management of social interaction. Enterprise 2.0 communities have the same challenges and life-cycle events as other online communities -- they need the same kinds of moderation and support that interest-based communities and customer communities need. Otherwise people will come, participate a little if you are lucky, and then wander off.
What have you done? What do you think?
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