acidlabs

Andrew McAfee posts on the need for management buy-in for implementation of Enterprise2.0 tools.

Here in Australia, Enterprise2.0 is only just beginning to get the slightest toehold.  Certainly, tech-savvy organisations have implemented Web2.0/Enterprise2.0 tools in a significant way across a number of industry verticals, however those that I am aware of are niche at best.  It’s probably true to say that fear on the part of senior management is the predominant driving force in non-tech implementations; whether as a force for implementation or blocking of efforts.  That fear can have a number of root causes - what are the competition up to, what are these mad technical people up to, etc.

In my previous job, we implemented a pilot project wiki, largely inspired by the efforts of Avenue A|Razorfish also described on Dr McAfee’s blog.  That said, gaining traction for those efforts beyond the skunkworks, web-savvy immediate participants was, and remains a major challenge.  It will take a significant amount of time for this project to gain legs, if it ever does.  And that’s not because the people there aren’t smart.  In fact, they are collectively and individually among the smartest people I know.  The fact is, the organisation I worked for is a major management and IT consultancy, yet is deeply conservative both at the management and general staff level.  Also, the staff are largely non-technical in makeup.  Very few of them would use RSS, or del.icio.us or even read Wikipedia.

I think the bottom-up/top-down split is less of an issue than conservatism at the management level, where deep buy-in is critical for the success of projects in the Enterprise2.0 space.  While business managers remain largely risk-averse, their ability to see value in Enterprise2.0 implementations, whether they be wikis, corporate blogs, collaboration tools, group ownership of data, etc., will equally remain low.

My view is that the tipping point IS coming.  In the US, it appears close, the UK seems around 12-18 months behind the curve and Australia is a good two years behind the US.

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