Trepidation 2.0 – Common questions based on old fears

By Eugene Lee | August 8, 2008, 4:17 pm | 0 Comments

There are some fascinating common questions that we get from customers who are excited by the potential of Enterprise 2.0 but who express some trepidation about what the path ahead looks like and means for their organizations. I say fascinating because while on the one hand many people are hip to what is fundamentally different now – lightweight tools that don’t get in people’s way, a groundswell familiarity with Web 2.0 tools that have created a prevalent degree of comfort and facility with sharing (through user-contributed content tools such as Flickr), social networking (LinkedIn and Facebook), and “doing things in public” (activity feeds in social networking sites, blogging, and wikis) – many of the questions customers ask reveal the influence of what I think of as a “1.0 amygdala”. Old patterns that trigger fear lie deep despite agile learning in the higher levels of the brain.

Here are some of the more common questions I’ve heard:

How do I make sure people don’t misbehave in public?

Both Ross Mayfield and Michael Idinopulos have written great posts commenting on the New York Times article about the U. S. State Department’s Diplopedia wiki. While I agree with everything they’ve said, I think there are also some more fundamental things to think about. What keeps people from misbehaving in general? Is it explicit rules with explicit penalities? In broader civic society yes – but what about in the corporate environment? Aren’t general social norms and specific corporate culture stronger guidelines for behavior – and isn’t the “enforcement” of that behavior much stronger culturally? I’ve always been intrigued by walking into different corporate environments and seeing how quickly you can get a sense of the culture by just watching how people dress, how they speak in meetings, and how they talk to one another. These are almost never prescribed through “dress codes” or “communications policies” – they’re much more environmental, learned through watching, transmitted through story telling, and “enforced” through typical social norms.

I would submit that Enterprise social software enables and strengthens this sort of cultural transmission and reinforcement, rather than dissipate it. In our products we’ve worked hard to make sure that the identity of every activity is associated with that activity – which dampens the temptation to “misbehave”. And just as the group can edit typos and grammatical mistakes in a wiki, so can they collectively enforce social norms in the broader collaborative spaces.

How do I make sure it’s not “Shelfware 2.0″?

With traditional collaboration software, adoption has always been tough. Why? Because 1. Unless the software provides value to the individual before or while it is creating value for the group at large, the return on investment at the individual task level is too low to motivate enough individuals to do anything, and 2. Unless the use cases for the collaborative environment are directly relevant to helping people get their jobs done, it will always be a special corner case that people feel they are doing “after hours” or as a “special project” or because “my boss told me I had to”.

That’s why we have singularly focused on identifying true business problems which can be solved through Enterprise social software solutions with specific use cases that are “in the flow” of people’s daily work as opposed to “above the flow” of getting work done. (See Michael’s excellent post on this: http://michaeli.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/12/in-the-flow-and.html) When collaborative use cases are truly in the flow of daily work, the ROI for each individual is higher, which drives participation, which fills the value balloon for the group as a result.

How do I stay safe and keep our IP secure?

This is a big deal, which is why we have extra security and privacy capabilities implemented in our hosted ASP service, and why we also have a unique SaaS appliance that gets deployed on premise with our larger customers but which provides the same continual software upgrade features that our hosted customers enjoy.

How much infrastructure do we have to build and customize before we can get started? Do I have to do a big enterprise-wide “big bang” to truly get results?

We have a strong philosophical belief at Socialtext (validated through years of helping customers achieve success with enterprise social software) that there is a delicate balance between small, focused initial deployments and building “collaboration as infrastructure” and turning the whole company loose on it. Our most successful customers have done a little bit of both – a highly focused set of initial projects with clearly defined business objectives and identified teams – with a parallel set of more lightweight projects that are deployed and relevant to a much larger population. We often start with a template workspace to solve, say, a sales and marketing content problem (RFPs, collateral creation and review, competitive intelligence) while at the same time spinning up a “Wikipedia inside” to help with cross-departmental knowledge sharing, M&A integration, or preparing for a retiring workforce.

What’s different about all of this is that the 2.0 generation of technology is so much more social than collaborative, by which I mean software that can provide value to the organization without the first prerequisites of explicit group creation and mandated cultural change, combined with the fact that people in general are much more comfortable sharing and “doing work in public”.

So I encourage people to suppress the instinctive fear that is driven from past experience and reframe your questions in the context of a new generation of software and people’s comfort with the software- while at the same time recognizing that culture, social norms, and how individuals fit in are still the same.