by Matthew Hodgson
November 17, 2008 at 3:11 am
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0
What are the factors to be mindful of when evolving into an Enterprise 2.0 or even Government 2.0 organisation? Part of the difficulty is understanding the balance between the use of these tools by individuals in a personal and social context and by the organisation as part of its enterprise architectural planning and strategic.
There are case studies that suggest that the implementation of web 2.0 technology itself can be very successful and can be adopted immediately and readily into the organisation. Others suggest that you need a bottom-up approach, a ground-swell of individual opinion that uses these tools and that this, in turn, drives change for adoption at the enterprise level. Both indicate that the sorts of output activities seen in the research in the social computing sphere are the result - that is, joining, creating, critiquing, collecting, and so on.
Stuart French has been researching the data on adoption of social computing tools in small to medium enterprises and suggests that perhaps the both of these models of adoption are correct. After some twittering between the two of us, and two brains doing far too much ‘theorising’, I proposed to him the following meta model.
In some organisations the “build it and they will come” attitude works, with wikis and blogs being adopted with relative ease. Supportive leadership (or management) and clear ROI are likely to be the key factors for successful adoption here, with the influences of culture being either minor or supportive (covertly or overtly) of change. The model also suggests that the bottom-up, personal use, of social computing as an information management tool is also likely to be just as effective and adopted at the enterprise-level, given the same limitations of affect of culture. In time, as the benefits to individuals and to the enterprise are acknowledged and shared, the culture can change to a point where the Personal Domain can affect the Organisational Domain, and vice versa.
Of course, the model also suggests that should corporate culture run counter to the introduction strategy, whether from a top-down or bottom-up perspective, social computing initiatives are likely to be not as effective as to result in participation. These cultural factors are likely to be:
- low readiness for change
- high risk-aversion
- preference for hierarchy and processes to create knowledge over personal freedom to collaborate and share
- individual preference for position power and legitimate power over referent powerand expert power
When considering adoption strategies for moving to Enterprise 2.0 the message is clear — think strategically and take into consideration the effects of culture from a personal as well as an organisational perspective.
M
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[…] 2.0 adoption An interesting article by Matthew Hodgson over at the AppGap about adoption models for social media and collaborative computing in the […]
[…] 2.0 - a meta theory for adoption I recently posted an article on Enterprise 2.0 on The AppGap about an adoption model extending the work of Stuart French on adoption of wikis in small and […]
Though what that kind of (interesting and thoughtful) diagram doesn’t necessarily capture is the way that the personal interweaves with the organisational domain, increasingly so as Web 2.0 and its impact seep into an institution?
Models which continue to separate the personal from the organizational have an inherent flaw. People are the organization. Their aggregated conversations and actions create the culture. Adoption of social computing tools or any collaborative technologies generally runs smack up against the organizations overall culture. Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 puts pressure on the underlying assumptions of an organizations business strategy and the culture it has evolved to execute. The more participative will adopt faster.
Co-created business strategy constantly pulls in the grass roots as well as external stakeholders, creates a culture of participation and therefore seeks collaborative technologies to enable the business strategy to happen.
Failure to stay focused on the business strategy and how a new technology will make it happen has derailed countless adoptions. For more on an emergent, co-created strategy see http://snurl.com/61xa2 and article http://snurl.com/61xxi
Victoria G. Axelrod
Some more thinking on this adoption model:
Shiv Singh wrote @ November 20th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Interesting model Matt and it looks like a lot of great thinking has gone into it. I’m not sure if the Joiner, Critic, Creator, Collector and Spectator paradigm apply to the Enterprise space though. Also, this implies that CoP is the route to explicit and tacit knowledge. I feel there are other routes to them as well.
@shiv the activities are the interaction possibilities in social computing paradigms, including the enterprise, from Forrester’s research. The research shows that we do different activities in different circumstances.
The variety of activities is an important consideration particularly given the prepensity of KM to expect everyone to join and create and index etc. The research says the reality is otherwise.
M
@Victoria Axelrod: There are quite distinct theories, of individual motivation and group dynamics, that need to be taken account of in order to more fully explain the interactions going on with adoption of social computing tools within the enterprise. This is obviously further complicated by the fact that there is an obvious interaction between the two.
Both aspects, reductionist, which does not preclude emergence, and comprehensivism need to be considered in order to understand those factors that led to success for the introduction of social computing tools within an enterprise perspective in order to be able to replicate it. Unfortunately, there are no theories to date that adequately predict success.
M
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