Enterprise 2.0 Candy Store – It’s good for you
Great blog post by Laurie Buczek on the dangers of post-Enterprise 2.0 launch “let’s try this, let’s try that” craziness. Laurie has some great recommendations on tactics to deploy to diffuse the “kid in a candy store” mentality.
Most integrated E2.0 offerings have so many different kinds of candy (micromessaging, blogs, wikis, widgets, tags, tables, collaborative spreadsheets, etc.) to try within their own walls, that it would take months just to try them out in different business use cases. And other candy stores (vendors) have more or less the same kinds of candy. My company just adopted Socialtext, which has a very robust set of integrated functionality. Our challenge is to get executives to try the candy for an extended period of time to really get the sugar in their system.
And finally, the biggest challenge is to convince everyone that the candy is actually good for them.
Steve,
If the execs aren’t getting hooked on to the candy the first time they try it, there is something wrong with the candy. Our problem has usually been getting folks to try the candy for the first time. But once they try it, they get hooked.
Saqib
Saqib Ali
January 27, 2010 at 11:23 pm
I don’t think so. Executives are so hooked on e-mail candy, and shared files candy, that they just aren’t sure they need wikis, blogs, tags, microblogs, etc. The key is to keep introducing business driven use cases. The more you can encourage adoption around “in-the-flow” processes the easier adoption is.
stevebrewer
January 29, 2010 at 8:48 am
I agree. Integration into the workflow is very important. For wider adoption of enterprise wide micro-blogging it has to be integrated in a business process / workflow. For e.g. if I update an enterprise wiki page, it should automatically send a ping to yammer with an update.
Micro-blogging is a social enabler in an organization but it has to tied with something that the users user everyday. Cubetree , IBM LotusConnections and now Novell Pulse are innovating in this area by tying micro-blogging to normal business activities / workflow.
Saqib Ali
January 29, 2010 at 7:15 pm
The socialtext platform that we use can also have other application’s (CRM, ERP, workflow) update notifications published within socialtext’s signals micro-blogging application thru socialtext’s REST API. We haven’t activated that yet, but are looking into where that would bring strong business value. If Microsoft Outlook ever becomes a micro-blogging platform, watchout! Outlook has such a stranglehold on corporate desktops, it would be the perfect platform to implement micro-blogging on. I’ve been testing out Office 2010, but see no signs of this yet.
stevebrewer
February 2, 2010 at 9:28 am