Stewart Mader offers insight and adoption advice for enterprise 2.0 projects. I appreciate his take on the subject, especially about allowing emergence:
[…] If you begin using a wiki in your organization and users start doing something differently, don’t stop them, and don’t just let them – encourage them! What they’re doing is probably better then the previous way, and by encouraging them, you’re building loyalty to the new tool that increases its chances of success. […]
Yes, and it’s a good idea to keep it simple, until seeing the patterns that evolve, and then supporting these. This calls for management to let go of its acquired (and hard-earned they are!) competencies and mindset. Yet, modifying deeply ingrained traits is hard.
So, in the light of social software in the enterprise it’s not primary the people, but the architects of organizational collaboration that need to change. This expands the common understanding of change management, and makes clear that enterprise 2.0 implementation efforts must not only address the primary users of the tools.
You make a great point – too much planning and structure is likely to make a wiki unsuccessful. It’s important to make a wiki available, then give it some time to see how people use it, and grow it accordingly. Yes, the information architects need to follow the lead of the people using it – that’s at the heart of how social software works!
Stewart
Thanks for stopping by and commenting …
Well, I suppose we both agree that discussions about Enterprise 2.0 must not focus on technology alone, because fitting these tools into organizational realities (and/or building and tweaking organizational structures) is more important after all – but this is a hard sell …