Overcoming Enterprise2.0 skeptics

I noted this from a blogger in NZ. julian

It is not uncommon for people who have spent much of their professional careers using traditional methods of taxonomy, records keeping and information management, to be cautious of, or resistant to approaches which are inherently messier and less ordered."

This is consistent with my view that “the only constant in the world is change….. the only other constant in the world is resistance to change”  change

Although his statement is somewhat true, in my experience, people who create business value often realize that their environment may indeed be messy and poorly ordered and they will choose to do something about it. Unguided, I’ve seen people trying to use new technologies to automate a messy situation, rather than seeking fundamental issues and changing them. These solutions can easily end up mimicking the existing poorly functioning processes and do not achieve much.

However, with a bit of time spent together as a group, with some guiding hand as necessary, structure can be applied to improve the situation. A bit of structure can, in cases of skeptics, go a long way towards setting up a platform for future innovation. In creating a solution, one needs to accept this skepticism as a design input and account for it in crafting an approach that works.

What I have seen in my work is a variety of people: leaders, close followers, skeptics and curmudgeons. True success is achieved when the curmudgeon haltingly praises the effort as “useful”.

The bloggers’ statement also seems to suggest that adopting Web 2.0 technologies to improve information management and control could be “messy and less ordered”. My view of Web2.0 is that the focus will be on adding experience and wisdom to what already exists as information management. This is also called tacit knowledge. As one explores current developments, it can be seen that there is still a lot to be learned about what the best way is to capture and organize tacit knowledge. Folksonomy is one suggested approach, but could there be others? Will research and user cases develop that suggest an alternative to rigorous, meta-data based approaches of the past? Will IT organizations seek to impose rigorous methods of the past, as they also will have skeptics who will resist change? Will the ultimate approach be self-organizing? It often comes down to doing what is best for your company after making a true assessment of the culture, the local politics, the leadership, etc..

So, acquire all the requirements that define your situation and create an execution plan the works for you, ---before you simply copy someone else’s ideas.