Gartner says Web 2.0 offers many opportunities for growth, but few enterprises will immediately adopt all aspects necessary for significant business impact.
“While Web 2.0 offers many new opportunities for companies to grow their business, few enterprises realize how to implement the full range of capabilities to succeed. By 2008, the majority of Global 1000 companies will quickly adopt several technology-related aspects of Web 2.0, but will be slow to adopt the aspects of Web 2.0 that have a social dimension, and the result will be a slow impact on business, according to Gartner, Inc. The challenge is that Web 2.0 is not just a set of technologies, but also has attributes that have a social dimension…”
What are the challenges?
Recently Socialtext, an enterprise wiki provider published a well documented case study of wiki deployment within Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, the international investment banking arm of Dresdner Bank. Wiki had been heavily used by IT since 1997 but DrKW wanted to bring business people on board to enhance collaboration and communication between IT and the business. The wiki deployment was a success and is now being used by approximately 2,500 DrKW employees.
As user numbers were growing, social software consultant Suw Charman was brought in to manage and support and adoption. Charman subsequently wrote an adoption strategy which provides valuable insight into the challenges and process of deploying social software. The adoption strategy is written in the context of wiki deployment but I believe it is appropriate for other social software technologies too.
Briefly, the adoption strategy focuses on four main challenges:
Fostering grassroots adoption. This challenge centres around identifying users who would clearly benefit from the new software, helping them to understand how it could help, and progressing their usage so that they can realise those benefits.
Management support. As well as supporting bottom-up adoption, it is beneficial for there to be top-down support, but that support has to be based on openness and transparency.
Understanding time-scales. Having a clear adoption strategy, and ensuring that the correct key players are identified and 'converted', helps to speed up the process, but it remains a fact of human nature that it takes time for people to become comfortable with new technology, new ways of doing things and, most importantly, new cultures.
Remember what your goals really are. Adoption isn't a goal in and of itself. Lots of people use email an awful lot, but that doesn't mean that it's being used well. Think about what your ultimate aims are; make them discrete, measurable and attainable.
Social software is a very powerful tool within enterprise, but like any other business project, it takes thought and planning to ensure successful adoption.
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