Bridges To Knowledge: A Blog by Barry Camson

Open Government IS Cultural Change

I recently delivered a training program for the U.S. Intelligence Community on how to effectively transfer knowledge. This program was delivered during the period of time when the Intelligence Community was migrating from the Cold War mentality of "need to know" to the 21st century mentality of "need to share." 

Government as a whole is about to embark upon a similar change to that which the Intelligence Community encountered. This is as a result of the President's Memorandum on Open Government. The President's Memorandum calls for openness, participation and collaboration in government organizations. The culture of government organizations will have to change. This cultural change includes the behaviors, attitudes, assumptions, values and norms of these organizations. The President's Memorandum on Open government makes tangible what will be required for government to succeed in the future.

Seven Enduring Principles of Change Management Applicable to Enterprise 2.0

There have been a variety of valuable presentations, posts and conversations lately as a number of us have been considering what are sound approaches to help create wider Enterprise 2.0 use in organizations. These are conversations about what is generally called "change management." In these conversations, many of us are speaking about the Enterprise 2.0 tools as well as the ways of working and structuring work that support optimum use of these tools. These ways of working and structuring include increased participation and collaboration and flatter organizations to name just a few.

I have been involved in large-scale change projects for many years. In most of these efforts, there has been a focus on implementing state-of-the art technological tools as well as on how to create a high performing, more collaborative organization. These two goals have been seen as mutually supportive. This is pretty much in line with the goals we are speaking of for Enterprise 2.0.

I would like to set out what I believe are some enduring principles of change management that were value-adding in the past and which remain so today. Discussing these cannot be accomplished in a single post, so I will cover them over several posts. In this post, I will set out the overall principles.

These principle are:

1. Respect the existing people and system.
2. Utilize an encompassing approach.
3. Have a clear path forward.
4. Increase participation by enabling many people to contribute to the change effort.
5. Provide active, visible and sincere leadership support.
6. Seek deeper personal engagement.
7. Factor in contemporary models of change.

Some People Believe.......A Story of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption and Use

Some people believe that all that is necessary for successful Enterprise 2.0 adoption and use is for everything to be built into the technology, itself. Their view is that all of the issues of deployment and adoption can be addressed by how the technology is designed. They hold that an organization can be moved to be a more "Need To Share"-type organization by virtue of what is embedded in the technology.

Other people believe that technology is only the nuts and bolts and is limited in what it can accomplish by itself. These people hold that what most influences deployment, adoption and successful use are organizational changes to the processes, behaviors, configurations and the resulting culture.

Six Important Conversations To Have To Bridge The Enterprise 2.0 Cultural Gap

There appears to be a growing recognition that successfully dealing with cultural issues is a critical success factor in the deployment and adoption of Enterprise 2.0 tools and the changes in ways of working related to these tools. Many of the presenters at the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston spoke of the importance of culture in Enterprise 2.0 deployment in organizations. A common comment was, "it's not about the tools, it's about the culture."

The change management challenge is to move the organization deploying Enterprise 2.0 tools from what may be a traditional, hierarchical, command and control culture to one that is less hierarchical, and more collaborative, agile, open and transparent - characteristics which are more congruent with Enterprise 2.0 tools.

Here are six conversations that I recommend occur in your organization that will help your organization bridge the cultural gap between the status quo and the organization as an effective user of Enterprise 2.0 tools. This builds on a previous post where I stated that "to optimize the technology and achieve improvements in organizational effectiveness...a focus on the overall organization is important."