Predicting Enterprise 2.0 Adoption

The National Computing Centre in the U.K. has posted an interesting article by Martin White on Achieving effective Enterprise 2.0 adoption. The center of the article is a list, developed by INSEAD’s Morton Hansen, of 10 statements to diagnose an organization’s readiness to adopt Enterprise 2.0. It includes things like:
-Employees feel that they have a duty and a freedom to help others even if there is no immediate benefit, and indeed even a short-term impact on their own work performance.
-Employees willingly work together with colleagues from other units to solve specific problems.
-The organisation has clearly stated principles related to the value of teamwork and cooperation.
-Examples of good practice and success in knowledge exchange are given wide publicity and recognition.

White is right to warn IT managers off the build-it-and-they-will-come approach. And I really like the idea of a simple diagnostic to assess an organization’s readiness to embrace Enterprise 2.0, but I think White has the wrong list.

White’s list runs together many different types of collaboration: working across organizational silos on specific tasks, working within an organizational silo on specific tasks, codifying personal knowledge for general consumption, picking up the phone to call someone you know, picking up the phone to call someone you don’t know, etc. The cultural conditions vary significantly by the type of collaboration, so you can’t lump them all together this way.

The common denominator across the list is collaboration. But being “collaborative” is a pretty low bar these days. People in almost all knowledge-intensive roles have to collaborate on project teams, in meetings, around deliverables, etc. There are very few jobs left where you can be effective working all by yourself.

And people already have a collaboration tool: Email. Even the most “uncollaborative” people send dozens of emails a day.

So the meaningful question here is not “Is your organization collaborative?”, but rather “How will your organization collaborate?” Will your employees collaborate through email, or will they use Enterprise 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis, social networking, RSS feeds, etc.?

As I see it, the difference between email and Enterprise 2.0 boils down to a few fundamental contrasts:

• Enterprise 2.0 posits the group as the primary unit of activity; email posits the individual
• Enterprise 2.0 requires high-speed network access; email can accessed offline, via BlackBerry, etc.
• Enterprise 2.0 is the challenger; email is the incumbent

In that spirit, let me offer up a much simpler version of the White/Hansen checklist:

1. Do employees work in groups or teams? (Extra credit if individuals typically work with multiple groups in parallel or group membership changes frequently)
2. Do employees have constant network access, or are they frequently offline due to travel, field visits, etc.?
3. Do employees use multiple online tools to complete their daily work?

If the answer to all 3 questions is yes, you’ve got a pretty good shot at Enterprise 2.0 adoption.

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