CIO Magazine just published an article “How a Marketing Firm Implemented an Enterprise Wiki” based on an interview with Neil Callahan, President of CoActive Digital. It’s a well-written article with some great sound bites from Neil, and I thought I would point out my favorite bits. These are some great patterns of success that we try to model with most of our customers.

The business leader led

What excites me the most about this Socialtext customer story is that this whole initiative was driven with business problems and issues in mind, and that the business leader (Neil) has been able to keep that perspective front and center throughout the selection, decision, first deployment, and ongoing rollout process. I can definitely assert that this makes all the difference in social software success stories; too many times I’ve seen intiative stall where it was a technology team-driven initiative who then shops around looking for business sponsors.

The business leader found the right business-driven use case and team to start with

“Callahan says that moving workflows and processes from e-mail to wikis would only work if there was a good internal use case. So he turned to his business development group.”

This is spot on. Matching the team (including the personality of that team’s leader, the existing internpersonal dynamics of the group, the work culture, and the business priorities of the team) with the initiative really helps in the early days. It’s exciting to see these projects take on a life of their own – the team starts with the right initiative, there’s some pre-built content and structure to help them get going, and then their “in the flow” collaboration really starts to build out the value of their workspace – and then other groups quickly take notice and follow their example.

The business leader got buy-in from the group and didn’t meddle

This is a hard temptation or instinct to avoid. I often have to advise the “Executive Sponsor” at our customers to “sponsor yes, inspect no”. In other words it’s great to be a passionate and visible champion for the social software initiative at a very senior level of your organization, but be thoughtful and selective about the degree to which you insert yourself into the flow of conversation and dialog that emerges – especially early on. (Of course there is a wide spectrum of cultural starting points; there are many places where I think executive involvement “in the flow” wouldn’t be disruptive.) Too much senior executive involvement can sometimes intimidate the rank and file from getting their feet wet and “learning in public” – which is a good thing to watch out for.

I can personally relate to this. When I first joined Socialtext I was raring to go and get involved in everything. I was commenting on almost every new page, asking questions, adding comments, etc., all with the intent of stimulating and encouraging open dialog, discussion, and debate. Then someone pointed out to me that until people got to know me better some employees might be a little reluctant to engage in a public dialog with the new CEO. I wouldn’t say I “backed off” as much as “clarified my intent” more, which created a better sense of trust and productive transparency.

Come to think of it, isn’t that just classic leadership learning?