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.

Still others believe that there is a limit to what can be accomplished by the technology as well as the organizational changes and it is a combination of both of these that are necessary.

And, yet others are arrayed at different points in between all of these other positions.

What is fascinating to me is how a wide spectrum of very bright people with high levels of expertise can end up at such divergent places.

The thought does occur to me that maybe the divergence is not as wide as first appears. Maybe we are talking about different things. Maybe we are each engaged in looking at different aspects of the same elephant.

I think there may be a way of partly clarifying this by virtue of looking at the development-deployment-adoption-use process in terms of upstream technology development and downstream organizational adjustment. Depending on where one is in the process, the focus and balance can change from a heavy emphasis on embedding elements in the technology to facilitating the existence of elements in the organization.

The technologist or architect dealing with the early stages of this process sees much that can be accomplished by virtue of what they do with the technology. I assume that they are correspondingly elated with success when it is due to the technology and unhappy when it appears that the technology has failed to accomplish what was intended.

The organizational consultant dealing with the later stages of this process sees that there is a high potential of accomplishing desired use goals based on initiatives that can be taken regarding the behaviors, skills, processes, configurations and culture of the organization. They, too, are elated when their efforts yield success and unhappy when the organizational interventions fail to produce the desired results.

I make the assumption that those in between have their own particular points of focus which impact their views on the efficacy of given actions.

I ask myself what is necessary for those at the downstream points to appreciate what can be done with the technology at the upstream points and for those at the upstream points to recognize what can be done at the downstream points.

I also ask myself what is necessary for each of us at different points in this spectrum to recognize both the virtues and limitations of our respective roles.

I appreciate that what makes these questions more challenging is the nature of the technology, itself and the expectations that we have about this technology. Enterprise 2.0 tools are highly laden with expectations around collaboration based on what is happening regarding usage in the general population and early usage in a business context.

We all appear to be drawing conclusions and establishing our assumptions and beliefs at a very early point in this new era of Enterprise 2.0 tools. We are still at an early point of collective reflection. Other factors may yet gain prominence. For example, do we yet have the artistic distance to consider the general place and impact of where people in the world are at. [See Ken Wilbur, "A Theory Of Everything"] Maybe we are all barking up the wrong tree. (An American expression for looking at the wrong factors.)

I have no easy answers. I am using this post to comment on what is already an ongoing conversation and hoping to contribute to it.

What do you think?

Comments

[Dave Feineman]

I think you may have mixed together two different problems. I agree that someone involved in technology development sees the technology as maleable and is potentially capable of engineering useability into the design of products - whereas the people working on adoption of that same product recognize that in a pragmatic sense the technology is temporarily fixed, and that is is people and processes that are the only real levers that can be adjusted in the short haul to get to adoption and value. Their contexts/worldviews/realities are different - so the remedies are different. Not different aspects of the same elephant as you sugggest - but really different animals.

But that doesn't get to the heart of the Enterprise 2.0 question that you started with. There, I think you would need a model that looks at at least 5 factors:
Does the appplication give me a personal benefit?
Is this application aligned with my own peer group's norms?
What is the cost of promiscuity (abandoning the application entirely or switching to another)?
Is the application fit for purpose and have high useability?

I think this might begin to let you answer questions like why do so many people start blogs and then abandon them? Or, will you ever convince many 60+ year olds that there is a real benefit for them to use Twitter? Or, does having a mashup capability matter? Etc.

This might also be a segway into thinking about a root cause issue - what are the differences in the social network ecology in a corporate environment compared to that in the open internet?