Why would employees want web 2.0 tools?
Adopting the Microsoft ‘eat your own dogfood’ motto, I presented to our Frame partners on Web 2.0 yesterday. The focus of the presentation was whether business really needs to take notice of Web 2.0 – or Enterprise 2.0 – tools. Does the hype and activity on the internet translate to corporate environments?
One of the key questions that came after the session was ‘is this just one more thing we need to do?’
I’ve been in line management roles, working long hours and wondering how I’m going to get it all done. So pronouncements from 60,000 feet about a new way of working never excited me. And if they lacked real detail, more often than not they were simply irritating.
Understanding this quite common perspective was fundamental to delivering a knowledge management solution to a client. We communicated an important guiding principle: knowledge management activities had to be part of the way we worked. Not additional. Not an afterthought. Embedded. Replacing some other way of working, to real advantage for the individual.
Of course this means that your customer base is highly segmented. No one size fits all solution. And that’s where many of the web 2.0 tools assist – they are hugely flexible in how they can be used.
So a customer service team might agree to move most of their updates, previously emailed out to team members – onto a blog.
A team leader might blog answers to any questions they are asked. There are several benefits to this: they are stopping the email trail (which would probably only grow and pull in more people), they are capturing valuable knowledge about an issue – their response – and putting it somewhere searchable, they are providing the answer to a wider audience than just the person who asked the question.
Our answer to our audience then was no, adopting web 2.0 tools was not one more thing they needed to do. The tools open up new ways of working, but care and effort needs to be expended on designing those new ways.