Lots of recent observations, conversations, case visits, and anecdotes about the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 tools are starting to yield some conclusions. It seems that when companies make these technologies widely available behind the firewall, the only two groups that quickly start using them are techies and newbies.
‘Newbies’ here means new entrants to the workforce; as I wrote earlier, recent graduates find it natural to socialize, collaborate, and find what they’re looking for via technology platforms (think of MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia, LastFM, del.icio.us, etc.). In addition to point, click, drag, and drop, their baseline computer skills include search, link, tag, and post.
‘Techies’ are IT staffers, and also those people scattered throughout the rest of the company who are the natural early adopters and advanced users of whatever technologies are available. My first job after my MBA was as an operations management consultant. I quickly learned to look around at each new client and find the folk who programmed Excel macros or used Filemaker Pro or Crystal Reports (yes, this was a while ago). They always had the data we needed, or could find it for us. They were the techies, and there were never enough of them.
If these observations are accurate, then a graph with technophobia on one axis and years since graduation on the other reveals who’s more and less likely to use Enterprise 2.0 tools if they’re made available:
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The ‘empty quarter‘ of non-adopters is the upper right-hand section of this graph. These are the folk who are relatively unlikely to pick up new tools and run with them.
But so what? It’s unrealistic to expect 100% adoption of any new technology that’s not mandatory, so there’s always going to be an empty quarter (I have it on good authority, for example, that there are still faculty at Harvard who have their emails printed out and brought to them.). Given this, why should a business leader care about Enterprise 2.0′s empty quarter? After all, it’s only going to shrink over time as newbies continue to enter the workforce. In addition, some of the people in the empty quarter will probably benefit from the new technologies, even if they don’t use them. They might read another employees blog and learn something, for example, even if they don’t blog themselves. So why not just leave the inhabitants of the empty quarter be?
The main reason not to is the fact a huge amount of a company’s accumulated knowledge and expertise resides nowhere else except in the heads of the empty quarter’s inhabitants. And as I and others have argued previously, Enterprise 2.0 technologies are great tools for making this knowledge and expertise more accessible throughout the organization. They do so in two ways. First, they serve as persistent and universally visible (behind the firewall, anyway) repositories of whatever information people have taken the time to enter. Tagging and linking make this information provide structure to this information, making it easier to search and helping the cream rise to the top.
If the inhabitants of the empty quarter just continue to collaborate via email, the information they exchange is not globally persistent or visible, can’t be accessed or referred to by others, and doesn’t stand the chance of becoming part of something bigger and better. It essentially vanishes without a trace. Of course, there are times when this is exactly the goal; we all want the option of communicating through private channels, so we’ll all continue to need email. But when we want to share information it makes great sense to put it up on a blog, wiki, or other Enterprise 2.0 platform rather than emailing to a long list of recipients.
The second way that Enterprise 2.0 tools help propagate knowledge and expertise within a company is simply by letting people find each other. Imagine a company where a lot of people have internal blogs, and where a lot of collaborative work happens via wikis, group spreadsheets, etc. And imagine Google-level search capability on the company’s Intranet. How hard would it be for an employee, even one who had just walked in the door, to quickly find just the right person to bounce an idea off, help with a problem, tell whether a prospective vendor is reliable, or recall what happened the last time a similar project was launched?
The great majority of companies today are far from this scenario because their empty quarters are so large. Are there effective ways to evangelize within it and convert people to Enterprise 2.0 tool use? One strategy is to keep working on the tools themselves, making them more obvious and easy to use. This is certainly a good idea, but I don’t have a lot of confidence that it’ll bear a lot of fruit in the empty quarter. Old habits die hard, and the 9X problem of email is particularly acute among non-techies.
A more promising strategy, I believe, lies at the intersection of coaching, leading by example, and policy-setting. Of these, policy setting is the least obvious and most risky — what would a pro-blogging policy look like, and what would keep it from backfiring? I’ve heard a couple clever examples. A Google employee at a conference I attended, for example, said that employees there sent a short (five line) email to a specific address each week, telling what they’d done. These became part of a searchable archive.
I haven’t yet been able to verify that this is a widespread practice there, but if it is one of its smartest features is how lightweight it is. A five-line email is perceived as freeform and fast to compose, so it’s not a burdensome requirement.
Other lightweight Enterprise 2.0 policies might include:
- Maintain a blog for your group / department. Identify who’s in charge of it, and update it at least once a week.
- Maintain a blog for each project your lab is working on. Post whatever non-confidential information you’d like your colleagues to know about each one.
- Keep your personal page up to date. Make sure it lists your areas and industries of expertise.
- Use the wiki to make sure your portion of the org chart is up to date.
I suspect that these policies will work exactly to the extent that managers follow up on them and see if they’re being followed. This is where coaching comes in – the right way to foster adherence to Enterprise 2.0 policies is not by yelling at those who fall behind, but by nudging them a bit and reminding them why it’s important to comply. And leading by example, of course, is an unparalleled way to build credibility.
What else works? If you’ve succeeded at evangelizing within the empty quarter in your company, how did you do it? Leave a comment and let us know.
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I believe that the methodology by which you can effective “evangelize” in the empty quarter depends on profile of the users in your particular quarter. You name 2 groups… “newbies” and “techies.” These are the groups that are simple to define in this problem. But the “empty quarter” remains faceless. I believe, there can be many different groups, or aggregates of groups, in this sector, and it’s important to understand them and target evangelizing efforts appropriately.
I fall into the “newbie” category, as a kid who through poor planning on my part ended up entering the workforce prior to many of my peers and landed in a peusdo management role. Because IÂ’ve always enjoy working across disciplines with the “techies”, and because I seemed to them to have a touch for encouraging adoption, in my past experience, the “techies” would come asking, “Amy, weÂ’re finally putting up a wiki, and we need an evangelist. YouÂ’re into this stuff, here, let me show youÂ….”
I think the only reason I personally was ever able to achieve widespread adoption at all was by attacking it as a marketing problem, which was natural for my background and position.
For example, I wanted organization wide adoption of instant messenger in a contact center environment. Achieving this required a much different process from department to department. In the customer service department, where the demographic was young, messing around daily with their ring tones and MySpace profiles, I merely suggested the benefits of instant messenger use, and they were willing to try immediately. “Cool,” was honestly the basic reaction. However, this was of limited practical use to them unless other departments began using IM too. In the sales department, with a complete profile of the average user, I was able to get them thinking about the benefits of instant messenger usage in a different way. Telling them was not effective because they didn’t intuitively understand and certainly didn’t care. However, pushing their “call-back” leads generated by the CRM system out to them via instant messenger got them first at least paying attention to IM’s existence, and finally, playing around with it. Basically, a tiny bit of conditioning: “Instant message from Amy = Lead. Lead = Important. IM from Amy = Important… Maybe IM could = Important?” got them over the hump and on to user driven adoption. I didn’t continue forcing people to pay attention to IM, it took off from there. Users created their own methods of using the tool. Utilization statistics (time spent actually on the phone compared with time logged into the system) improved across the contact center. The customer service department felt more productive and happier, resulting in unquantifiable benefits to customers. And selfishly, I was able to create an environment for myself where I could become a perceived go to girl by sitting on a conference call with not only the company intranet and wikipedia up on my screen, but a chat window allowing me to get real-time answers across the organization or the country. In this example, management had little involvement, beyond my initial push. The users took over completely. However, someone (in this case, me) had to think about how the tool could be presented to different users in the empty quarter. (Ironically, although I had the support of IT, the “techies” were one of the last group to actually use IM.) Although they now had to manage personal IM use, line managers were pleased to spend less time herding strays wandering around the building asking questions, and so they became open to adopting the tool as well, eventually employing for real time coaching while monitoring calls with no involvement from me.
In my experience, creating an evangelizing strategy by profiling the empty quarter was more difficult when working “up the ladder” as opposed to down it, because I was lacking the managerial clout in that direction to make the initial push. I suppose I could have made it 9x harder for upper management to reach me on my cell than to check the wiki, but that didnÂ’t seem like a great career move. It seemed that the techies and I were getting tired of endlessly saying, “ItÂ’s on the wikiÂ…. Did you check the wiki?… Have you seen the wikiÂ…?” However, progress was made. I donÂ’t work there anymore, now, but right before I left, I smiled when one day a chat window popped up on my screen from the president of the company, “Hey, IÂ’m stuck on the phone with [client.] Can you come down here, IÂ’m on the wiki thing, but I canÂ’t find X.” Sweet.
We’ve been discussing a similar issue in the world of eLearning. What we’ve seen is similar adoption patterns and now we are asking about the crossing the chasm phase of getting broader adoption.
I’ve posted a bit around this and I still believe that adoption will be based on personal, immediate value. And that’s what I think we’ve been seeing. So, Social Bookmarking for link sharing among groups. Blogging for inside/outside the group discussions. Wikis for content sharing. They are easy-to-use, a little better mechanisms for what we already do.
A few links on this:
I think an effective way of evangelizing the empty quarter is including it as a performance objective. There are many different ways to measure the effectiveness of the data posted, but the most obvious one is simply for the manager to let the employee know they will ask for X number of sample postings that demonstrate knowledge sharing. At the very least, managers will get X number (and no more) of participations. On the best side, employees will start actively utilizing the system beyond the minimum requirements.
Nice site. Great work.
I found this post very helpful:
1) It provided a framework for addressing my organization’s Executive Leadership’s concerns about the generation gap and about ease of use and adoption rates for more tenured staff
2) It provided some helpful initial strategies for achieving adoption rates in the empty quarter.
Thanks for this great post – one of my new favorites on Del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/EphraimJF/AndrewMcAfee
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