Fearful of web 2.0? Take control!

by Matthew Hodgson

May 20, 2008 at 8:13 pm · Filed under Web 2.0

At Web Directions Government 08, Jason Ryan, Communications Manager at State Services Commission New Zealand, suggested that rather than be afraid of loosing control that we should step up and take control of interaction in our social computing projects.

While, at first glance, this may seem rather contrary to the open, trusting, and free nature of interaction we’re used to with wikis and blogs, Jason was actually pointing to the need for those who are fearful of entering the domain of social computing to do the following:

Plan for how you will engage your stakeholders using social computing tools: Whether its your boss, the CEO or the head of your government agency, one day they’ll come up to you and ask how you’re going to deal with the fact that someone said something on YouTube or Wikipedia.I know that in Australia some government departments have been ‘changing history’ by making their own edits to Wikipedia to represent a more sanitised version of the truth at tax payers expense. What resulted was just a blanket ban of the sites so people could no longer access them from work. Obviously, this knee-jerk reaction is not a great solution.
Social computing tools are becoming the primary way people interact and communicate online. Jason suggested that we need to start developing plans (even if just at a high-level) for how these channels will also become a part of your organisation’s communications strategies, rather than fighting covertly against them.
Create terms and conditions of use: Setting expectations is one of the most important aspects of official interaction, and doing so on your blog or wiki will help people understand what you will and won’t put up with on your site. E.g. bad language or extreme political and social views. After all, it is your site and you have your reputation to manage.
Remember that its not technology, it’s their environment: As little as 50 years ago, radio was a piece of social technology, bringing family and friends together at night to listen to radio plays and feel a part of a growing national and global community. Today, social computing tools are integrating themselves into the very fabric of people’s lives. For these individuals, it’s not just another piece of technology but it’s as much a part of their lives as radio was for our grandparents. In starting a dialogue with these people, choosing the right channel and the right message will mean the difference between reaching out and connecting with them and having your important message miss the mark, or worse, just ignored as irrelevant.

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This is a hot topic in large companies today and it’s not just about what people are saying about you on public websites. It’s also about what your employees are doing. IT departments today face a challenge as employees adopt blogs, wikis, and tools like QuickBase (I work on the QuickBase product). This can cause a major disruption to the status quo as employees go way beyond the IT sanctioned tools for getting their jobs done.

As with any disruption there is also opportunity. IT managers with strong leadership skills can take advantage of what’s happening to help improve employee productivity while maintaining good security over the company’s intellectual property. Here is a story we hear repeated over and over again regarding QuickBase.

An employee brings in QuickBase to solve a problem. Let’s say it’s managing and coordinating a supply chain of 20 different vendors. There was no IT solution for this problem and IT was not staffed to implement something. The employee didn’t bother to tell IT what they were doing. Fast forward three months and now QuickBase has expanded and is used for Project Management, meeting agendas and action items, and candidate tracking. It’s up to 50 users. Now IT notices. Here’s the IT conversation:

IT is concerned about storing confidential company info on Intuit’s QuickBase website but then they realize that prior to this employees were emailing spreadsheets to partners with a lot more company info and completely unencrypted. Second, the IT person realizes that they use TurboTax and that they are storing their tax data with Intuit. Lastly, they realize that with QuickBase they can watch all the traffic and usage that was a black box before.

The big insights that come out of this for IT are:
- Transparency breeds accountability. When employees are collaborating online they will self-police and do the right thing. If they don’t, they are accountable to all the other people who are online with them.
- By embracing QuickBase IT can push many of the business requests for systems back to the business and play more of a coach and enabler role, thus allowing them to focus on strategic projects for the company.
- Web 2.0 is here and they can either let it happen to them or take control and lead the charge.

The pace of innovation in Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 technologies is incredibly exciting and offers huge opportunity for the people that can see how to take advantage of it. Unfortunately, it also can cause fear for those who are committed to the existing way of doing things… leading to the knee-jerk reaction Matthew mentioned.

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