Great blog. I also have been thinking about this top down v bottom up question from the perspective of a VC. I have been a believer in bottom up adoption, but you and your commenters have changed my mind – a go to market strategy that aims at the grassroots and senior management has got to be optimal. With hindsight that seems very obvious.

My biggest fear about E2.0 from an investment perspective is that adoption will be very slow. Indeed part of the reason I have been a believer in bottom up adoption is that I don’t see much evidence of senior management really buying into the benefits of E2.0. In fact one social bookmarking company I know went to see a bunch of potential customers and they all advised him to build a taxonomy into his product so they could control the vocabulary for tags.

Nic

If you hope to attract any more than the 1% of alpha bloggers (see Solving the 1:10:100 problem) then the person driving the E2.0 deployment must have authority of some sort to drive the information process.

If the goal is to capture product ideas, then the product manager must make clear to the enterprise that product ideas are now collected in the Enterprise Product Management Wiki.

If the goal is to capture and comment on sales status reports, then the sales manager must make clear that he or she wants to receive such reports on the Enterprise Sales Blog.

If you are looking for 100% E2.0 adoption and want it quickly, then you have to engage the beta bloggers into a defined process. Generally, this must be done by a manager with domain control over a group or over organization-wide input to his or her group. Or, if the goal is to spread adoption over a wider set of groups, then executive involvement (but not necessarily executive control) is key to success. See this story about ShoreBank’s IT group for one solid example.

The question has overtones. It also addresses the Jeffersonian belief that no human being is fit to wield power over others. This has proved itself often enough in the corporate and world stage yet the reality is that organization performance depends on top-down management power. Drucker sought to liberate employees with Management By Objectives, which still underpins most management practices. It enables subordinates to work with autonomy and “self-control” rather than as pawns manipulated from above.

The operational question then becomes: Do Web 2.0 tools enable autonomy and self-control? They could if they were to assist communities of practice but they securely belong to the paradigm that ‘IT is a tool’, viz., they cannot assure a practice within the community. The tools have the potential to foster ‘freedom’ but the fact is they do not.

Yet E 2.0, by demonstrating that colonisation of the virtual space can release the power of truth, is a huge leap in the right direction.

I recently did a presentation on exactly this topic. It was based on an on-going experience we have building a E2.0 type program. The origins of the program started as a grass roots initiative. Outside of my “day job”, I had come up with an idea which was eventually brought to a senior executive of the company that I knew to be open to these “new” models. We assembled a completely volunteer team of about 8 people, borrowed excess computing power, leveraged existing licenses and built our first application. Eventually, we tied this back into the the corporate stream to drive momentum and harvest the insights of the organization. It’s become succesful enough that the company has created a new organization with part of it’s mandate to facilitate the roadmap in E2.0 space. I happen to be heading it up now.

The point here, is that my experience shows that it’s not one or the other. The grass roots approach was successful in getting things going, but it only happened because senior management had opened up the doors from other programs. Once successful, it became institutionalized (with a mix of grass roots) and is the basis for several other “spin-off” initiatives. Combining bottom-up and top-down has been very powerful.

You might find it interesting to note that the original prototype program (technology & Processes) was done at virtually $0 to the company. Just passionate people…

You can read more about it on my blog

http://rexsthoughtspot.blogspot.com/2007/02/6-degrees-of-innovation.html

You can see my thoughts at http://blog.acidlabs.org/2007/02/16/management-buy-in-on-enterprise20-tools/.

A wise man told me recently that the best strategy for penetrating the enterprise is to try to get managers to want to stop their people from using the consumer version!

Can you tell me the RSS Feed URL per Mail please.

Thanks

STS

This kind of evangelizing typically comes more easily to senior managers than to the rank-and-file for two reasons:
First, senior folks are a lot more willing to tell colleagues what they think. (If a senior VP and a mail clerk both think wikis are cool, which one is more likely to mouth off about it?)
Second, senior managers typically enjoy greater access to the means of communication. They speak at company gatherings. They’re constantly meeting with different parts of the organization. Their emails are more likely to get opened and read.

That said, senior managers aren’t the only ones who can spread the word effectively. As the social networking wonks love to remind us, a company’s most connected people aren’t always its most senior and vice-versa. A well-networked middle manager is almost certainly a more effective evangelizer than a Senior V.P. locked away in his corner office.

And then, of course, there’s passion. I don’t know Euan personally, but I imagine that he’s effective largely because he truly believes in this stuff. And when you believe in something, you tell everyone.