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

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:

• Social Bookmarking Tricks for Group Learning
• Personal and Group Learning Using Web 2.0 Tools
• eLearning Technology: Adoption of Web 2.0 and eLearning 2.0 Revisited
• Enterprise 2.0 – What’s the PU?
• Web 2.0 Adoption in the Enterprise – It’s Personal

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.