Enterprise 2.0 discussion continues
Over the Easter weekend the discussion on Enterprise 2.0, or the use of tools like blogs and wiki’s behind the firewall, has been engaging more and more people in the blogosphere.
It all started with a rather upbeat post and article on the use of specific tools within companies by Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee. Then Nick Carr stepped into the arena with some words of caution because “workers are just too busy” to contribute to the internal blogosphere or to wiki’s.
From my own experience, I fully agree with Ross Mayfield claiming that we are dealing with adoption and transition issues here. The evaluation and actual acceptation of tools like blogs and wiki’s takes time. People need to see what’s in it for them or be shown what it could mean for a group or company, taking into account the individual sacrifices.
As a reaction to Carr’s caution, McAfee wrote another post on the subject, but this time with a much less positive outcome, at least if you believe in using blogs and wiki’s behind the firewall. Although still a firm “believer” in the usefulness of blog’s (he has a nice paragraph on that), he lists two more reasons (in addition to “too busy to contribute”), why social software behind the firewall could not become as widespread as we might tend to think:
- just too little current enthusiasts in companies today to reach the important critical mass for these new tools to prove their value (how do you get more people with the vision?)
- do managers and business leaders really want an open and collaborative culture? If employees do not get clear signals on that, the majority of them will not feel inclined to participate.
Mcafee then asks his readers to come up with a other impediments for Enterprise 2.0. Well, Shel Holtz has mentioned a few in a post on Why Intranets are stagnant.
And more recently Shel even started a whole string of posts (e.g. here) on the same topic, highlighting case studies with successful application of social software, but in which he also presents some wise words of caution, like:
Social computing is a cultural shift that will occur gradually within organisations that employ the tools in support of business objectives and employee needs.
To wrap up this already lengthy post: I strongly believe we need good case studies, not only of cases where the tools worked very good and solved real problems, but also of cases in which the application of the new tools just did not work out as expected and more importantly, a clear explanation why it did not work!
...and we need time and patience.
Technorati tags: Social software, Web2.0, Web 2.0
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posted Apr 17, 11:18 pm on Apr 17, 2006 |
category: Social software
/ Knowledge Management