Enterprise 2.0 Conference Reality Check Wisdom

Professor Andrew McAfee from Harvard Business School moderated a great panel at the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston titled Enterprise 2.0 Reality Check. Panel participants included Pete Fields (SVP, eCommerce Division, Wachovia), Ned Lerner (Director of Tools & Technology, Sony Entertainment), Simon Revell (Manager of Enterprise 2.0 Technology Development, Pfizer Ltd), Don Burke (Intellipedia Doyen, CIA) and Sean Dennehy (Intellipedia Evangelist, CIA). The session covered the various deployment experiences and lessons learned by the panelists in rolling out Enterprise 2.0 enabled user applications. Words of Wisdom included:

Encouraging use:

• How someone answers the question "Does you vote make a difference?" is the strongest indicator of whether they will vote in an election. Similarly users must feel contributing to collaborative environments will "make a difference".
• Need strong facilitation for collaborative tools to be successful
• Utilize Enterprise 2.0 consultants and manage user expectations
  
• Users need to understand that all perspectives are heard, considered and respected
• Key is to get someone to "figure it out" and they will bring others
• Social me first...get small success stories
• Find the right project
• Give up control and employees will do the right thing
• Just do it!
• See from the users perspective (is their value in the application to them)
• Study your in-box to target opportunities for collaboration tool applications with real value
  
• Change work practices to incorporate collaborative tools
• Allow switch of tasks from traditional way to new way using collaborative tools
• Note that many "early adopter" users are technology-centric (perhaps target them first)
  

Communicating value:

• Top executives bring in consulting firms such as McKinsey or Accenture and pay millions of dollars to get the truth from employees that can be accessed via collaborative technologies
  
• Vibrancy of the application is a good metric
• Elevator pitch is "Using technology to connect people for business value."
• Expectation management is key; successful adoptions may involve less than 10% of potential users and of users only 1% may be active, 10% occasional users, and the rest observers
• Use anecdotes to "sell" value
• Remember that the "crowd" provides input they do not become the decision makers

Barriers to adoption:

• Middle management is not comfortable with these tools (four generations in the workforce now)
• Change in general is accelerating however fundamentals of management have not changed
• User issues, not management, is the major impediment to adoption
• Change management is key - easy to under-estimate inertia
• Smaller organizations will likely not see as great a network effect (although still useful)
• How much does management want an honest dialog?