Thursday, April 3, 2008

Enteprise 2.0, an adhoc or a strategic approach

What do you do? Choose a adhoc approach to enterprise 2.0 and just let it happen in your company or choose a more strategic approach and build an enterprise wide platform? The AIIM report is very clear, an enteprise wide approach will get the best results. Because everybody uses the same platform it is far more easier to find your stuff and collaborate with everyone. Think about the problems you get using three project collaboration platforms inside your company. Due to the three platforms your projects will be set in silo's and projectteams will be formed by the platform and not the capabilities of each teammember.

But do you have to roll out to every part of your organization. When you truely believe in the wisdom of the crowds you have to give everybody access to the enterprise 2.0 platform. But enterprise 2.0 will only be used by knowledge and collaboration intensive parts of your comapny. Not everybody will use it so why give them access? These other parts just need other platforms and applications to do their jobs.

Another thought on this is that the adhoc approach is the ultimate user control. Everybody in the enteprise can just start an enterprise 2.0 application and look what happens. The need for integration will come eventually and then it will get done.

In rolling out culture is a very important factor. Digital work and enteprise 2.0 is more culture then technology. Almost everybody uses office applications and stores documents on a network drive, but is this digital working and are you ready to really use an enterprise 2.0 platform?

I think a strategic approach to the right parts of your organization will yield the most benefits. Culture must be ready to even start with this enterprise wide!

What do you think? Let me know and lets discuss this!

2 comments:

Thesingh said...

I am working at the moment on an introduciton of an internal wiki. It's pretty hard, because a lot of stuff is conceptually still too far away for a lot of enterprises. Enterprise 2.0 will come. But the cultural change that it brings will the most important challenge.

For example the implementation of the wiki was not even that hard. But now getting people to really participate! People are still used to the idea of a static database. Generating something themesleves is actually quite hard.

Robbert said...

Hi brendan,

I understand what you mean, you can try to look at the social network inside your company and decide where to start. E2.0 being social software will behave according to the network effect I talked about ealier. If yout get 1 to 5% to create stuff on your wiki that would be great!

Would love to hear more of your findings!