Lessons Learned from Social Software Implementations

Mike Stopforth collects some neat advice for social software implementation projects, but basically it is aimed at fellow social software consultants. His arguments are well put forth, nothing to argue here. I understand his critique of overly-IT-focussed consultant selling well – fortunately my boutique consultancy frogpond is in no way a IT consultancy, thus I feel no guilt.

1. Social Software is not for Everyone

Despite what us Web 2.0 enthusiasts may want to believe, not every society, community and individual can find value in 2.0-ness. Some companies do fine without it and forcing a social media inplementation on a community can only get ugly. Be as objective as you can when you draw up a strategic plan or functional specification for a project. If you’re not convinced that social software can add value, walk away from it.

2. Social Software is About People

And therefore is about culture. Certain corporate cultures find it easy to integrate social software, others kick up against it. This often has to do with change management, but sometimes i’ts impossible to force (or even encourage) change. Competitive internal environments where intellectual property is regarded a personal competitive differentiator can often be difficult to penetrate in this regard. It also depends heavily on the size of the community, […]

It’s the people that are missing …

… in many discussions around the tools and methods of Enterprise 2.0, Social Software in the Enterprise or whatever you name it.

Especially intranet discussions are too often charaterized by a portal focus – or may I say obsession. When technology is our starting point, it’s no wonder that we care more for corporate memory, information management and systems, than actual users.

The people factor deserves more consideration, unless Enterprise 2.0 (or … you get the point) will fail again, much like technology focused KM efforts of old have.

Shifting mindsets from technology to people is hard, yet it’s essential, because it’s the creativity and motivation of people that drive innovation and knowledge usage – and they deserve to be supported.

Enterprise social software supports and builds upon connectivity and adaptivity (and lays out the groundwork for emergence), and thus leverages the complex systems nature of organizations to their advantage.

Interview Tim O’Reilly

Via Netbib-Weblog, dieses Interview (mp4) das David Weinberger mit Tim O’Reilly geführt hat. Netbib verweist dazu auf diese Zusammenfassung von Lorcan Dempsey (OCLC). Aber das Interview lohnt die 15 Minuten Investition durchaus, u.a. weil Tim O’Reilly auch Phänomene und Trends diskutiert, die für den Kontext von Enterprise 2.0 wichtig sind, bspw. ob und wie sich Unternehmen gegenüber ihren Kunden und Partnern öffnen sollen.

Relevant sind diese Fragen u.a. bei der Gestaltung von Open Innovation oder auch bei der Gestaltung von Geschäftsmodellinnovationen, die die Kreativität und Mitarbeit der Kunden einsetzen wollen, d.h. Crowdsourcing oder Mass Innovation.

Tim O’Reilly, creator of the Web 2.0 meme, says that organizations have been slow to understand how “network effects” can benefit their business if applied internally as well as externally. As customers add to what the company knows, should that added-value information be made accessible outside of the company? (David Weinberger)

Ein Beispiel ist die Beobachtung, dass Unternehmen über große Datenbanken verfügen, diese Inhalte aber nur selten effizient nutzen. Wenn Unternehmen Kunden zur Mitarbeit motivieren und ihnen Plattformen (und eben insbesondere Social Software Plattformen wie Wikis etc.) anbieten, können sich selbstverstärkende Netzwerkeffekte ergeben. Amazon ist hier ein gutes Beispiel, zu dem ich in meinem BMID-Blog auch einige Gedanken notiert habe: Amazon 2.0 _ Tags, Ajax, Plogs & Wikis:

Die Versuche Web 2.0-Technologien und -Konzepte wie Tagging, Wikis, Autorenblogs etc. als Beta zu testen kann man ebenfalls so verstehen und systematisieren: Amazon will das eigene Angebot erweitern – und dabei auch Daten in die Waagschale werfen, die bisher eher unentdeckt in den Tiefen der Datenbanken steckten. So integriert das neue Beta-amapedia-Wiki Daten aus den bereits früher eingeführten Product-Wikis und macht diese mit strukturierten Tags zugänglicher

Enterprise 2.0 – Through the backdoor

Michael Schuster of System One offers another spin on adaption and implementation issues, the role that social networks play, the uptaking of social software and more:

How long are enterprises going to withstand the pressure from their employees that illegally install tools, use external services and setup things like wikis without caring about corporate security policies or the like? I hear from so many people who are not happy with the applications that they have, that it is very likely that those who are eager to work with efficient, slim tools are going to find a workaround and (even worse from a company viewpoint) introduce that to their colleagues and to other teams.

This sounds reminiscent of the maverick, bottom-up uses that bypass conventional IT structures (and governance alike), e.g. when employees actually use external tools like webmailers, as described in this article by the NYT. Well, people want to forward their work email to Webmail (so that they can access it from home, when doing extra work) anyway. Consequently we need policies that don’t interfere with the actual ways people work – and Enterprise 2.0 implementations must be well aware of both IT governance policies and workers needs.

Knowledge Management 2.0 (Again)

Eclectic Bill on the difference between Web 2.0 and Knowledge Management 2.0, triggered by this comment by David Weinberger in KMWorld:

[…] Web 2.0 is not a disruptive set of technologies but just the “continuous and incremental changes” as the Web has evolved in popularity and usage. The web has always been collaborative from the beginning and the new technologies just make it easier to collaborate.

[…] KM 1.0 was all about “managing and controlling information environments” while KM 2.0 is “bottom-up, participatory, rapid innovation, more mixing up and and mashing of information.” […] KM today is a decentralized group of methods and technologies that is very different from the IT-focused centralized group of applications.

He goes on expressing his concerns that

[…] KM 2.0 will suffer from being too-closely associated with the latest technology. Even though IT applications help enable KM, it is more than the software. You can practice much of KM without technology because it is people that create knowledge – not computers. This collaboration between people is what makes KM work. But with the focus on Web 2.0 and its collaborative technologies, KM 2.0 will be confused with the Web 2.0 tools. And as these tools become outdated or fail to live up to the hype, KM 2.0 will suffer much KM 1.0 suffered during the early 1990s. There is more to KM than the tools and the KM community needs to stress that point.

Yes, it’s about people, not about technologies … see my posts here and here for further evidence.