Image by George Dearing via Flickr

Last year I was working with a large brand and it was painfully apparent their internal collaboration pilot was doomed from the start. The eBusiness exec kept saying “we’re just not getting the adoption.”

When pressed on metrics and the objectives his company had outlined that could perhaps affect the work being done in various groups, the result was radio silence. A quick reality check showed the brand group had seeded a few blog and forum posts, created some user accounts, and proceeded to push out an email or two. Oh, and we were given 90 days to see if things worked.
I never could figure out how they expected anything to come out of the effort by dropping in some technology and encouraging people to collaborate.

The thing that brought that back to mind was a Forrester post from Nigel Fenwick on enterprise 2.0 pilots, essentially extending the commentary that centered around an Andrew McAfee post.

Fenwick shared three insights reflecting some of his research on “Successful Enterprise Collaboration Communities.”

• Ownership by the CEO and the senior executive team — being willing to drive by example and holding business unit owners accountable for adoption within their own lines of business.
• Hiring a manager whose sole role was to drive adoption and publicize wins. This person found people/teams who could benefit with tangible business results and got them involved. He then encouraged them to share their success stories.
• Getting the right technology in place to remove technology obstacles to adoption. (i.e., make it easy).

As McAfee and others have touted, you better have some buy-in and you damn well better be committed to doing things a little differently. Once the practitioners and evangelists leave the building, all the fancy tech and strategy can go out the door in seconds unless you dedicate the time and resources to help your employees understand how their jobs will improve. That doesn’t happen in 90 days..so keep your pilot-fighting game faces on.

Image of Dell Outlet

• The Blog Council | How to find new ideas for blog posts

  Good list of of things to get the blog juices flowing.
  (tags: blogging blogcouncil idea+generation web2.0)

• 10 Corporate Twitter Accounts Worth Following // PC Magazine
  Good to see Telligent client Dell get a nod with@delloutlet.
                          
• Implementing Enterprise 2.0
  Don’t fully agree with how the author delineates Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, but it’s thorough on dissecting the 2.0 essentials.

(tags: web2.0 enterprise2.0 blog ibm social+computing social+networking wiki software)

Related articles by Zemanta