Is Enterprise 2.0 just too risky?
I met with the members of the Knowledge Management Roundtable in NSW yesterday to discuss Enterprise 2.0 and the opportunities for business it provides within the firewall.
Marie O’Brien is the very capable and entertaining facilitator, and the sessions I attended were all strongly practical.
A couple of the questions asked reflected the very real issues that organisations are wrestling with, either in just opening up social sites to employees at work, or in working out how to leverage social networking in an organisation. I thought they were worthy of noting:
If you provide access to social sites, will people spend their time surfing?
This issue isn’t going to go away anytime soon. Will you see productivity plunge if you allow employees access? I first heard this concern over 10 years ago, when as part of a global intranet roll-out we provided internet access to all our employees. And the talented director I reported to, when asked by me for an official response, commented ‘that is entirely an issue for management’. The mechanisms for time-wasting have always been available, some just more or less visible than others.
Blanket bans may well be counter-productive. The benefit ‘back then’ was that we wanted web savvy employees, people who understood the internet and how it might assist business. I would like to suggest that is still applicable. How can you come to grips with social networking, either within your organisation or for partners and customers, if you don’t understand it yourselves?
The interesting thing about internet access all those years ago was that we saw a spike on the first day we rolled it out to each group of employees. By about day 3 access levels were back down to acceptable levels.
If you provide blogs within an organisation, how do you select the topics and the contributors?
This made me stop and think. On my last project we certainly seeded our first blogs. By that I don’t mean we chucked the technology at a likely suspect and hoped for the best. We worked out a cross-section of influencers, from the leaders to the workers, talked to them about why a conversation might be a good idea, and got the ball rolling. But within a very short time the requests started flowing. And the interesting thing was that everyone who contacted me wanted to start talking. They had people they wanted to connect with, and stories or business information they wanted to share. The technology came second. Sure the technology was a bit interesting and fun, and a whole lot more flexible than an email newsletter, and it might have even inspired a few people to ramp up the communication again, but people wanted to share.
So a mix of understanding the conversations, understanding the corporate dynamic so we knew which conversations carried what impact, some marketing 101, and then visibility and word of mouth, meant that we didn’t have to drag people to the altar!