The ramification of Andrew Mcafee's article and subsequent post by Nicholas Carr has been far and wide. The other day i got asked by one of my clients who work for a global telecom company on this topic. His question was "Hey, what is this enterprise 2.0 ? I have heard about this wonderful tools that will allow me to publish content, but why should i waste my time writing stuff for others to read....i have more pressing things to do." This i think is a typical question which wil get asked by more people working in enterprises, when we ask them to use a wiki, blog, RSS feeds, tags etc
Then I found Rich Ziade interesting post which resonated with the questions that i was asked, which got me to think that is there something which we must have learnt from our previous efforts of implementing knowledge management systems that can be applied here.
So, this is my effort to identify some user scenarios that hopefully will resonate with every professional across a range of enterprises as to the barrier to adoption;
- Usage of emails come naturally to professionals, and majority of instant knowledge sharing happens vial emails. If we have to transition them to use IM, the killer feature is "presence management i,e i know who's online and can communicate, while the real time nature of IM does the trick.
- Usage of KM systems or other collaboration systems are cumbersome, requires time & effort. So the end result has been enterprises employing people whose job is to structure content and upload them to these systems. The reality is everytime you want to reuse content which has been developed by others, u end up emailing the original owner asking for the original structure, and then spend time and effort to align the content to suit ur needs. So, the idea is if you use wikis or blogs, u can publish ur requirements, correspond with people who respond to it and effectively execute your requirement with less time and effort.
- News about the industry or product or company gets published on the intranet and the feed comes from specific sites which the enterprise subscribes to. What this means is every enterprise user has a content overload, the trick will be the usage of RSS feeds in a way that the individual can tailor it so that you get the information that you require with less effort that before.
- Training people on new content management systems is an absolute no no....after going through several ERP, CRM package training over the past decade, professionals are suffering from a "training fatigue". Personal experience says, if compulsory training is offered as a part of deployment, there is a negative perception created even before u can sell the product to new users. The ideal mix will be a mixture of online or classroom training to hand hold some people, but let the majority to use systems and create an online forum to share issues with other users.
- Trying to sell it as a productivity tool might be tricky as corporate IT departments and their internal customers have heard this story so many time before that it might seem like "scratching a broken record".
But there are two powerful forces driving professionals across a range of industries to explore new ways to work;
- Globalisation
- Creating and Maintaining competitive advantage across new products, business models, business processes.
I would be keen to know from of other user scenarios that are potential adoption hurdles to the "mass adoption" of web 2.0 tools.
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