The short answer is yes, viral adoption can work BUT only in certain situations. This is my attempt to pin down some of the factors I’ve observed out in the field.

Firstly, let me explain what I mean by ‘viral adoption’:

1. It may involve users by-passing IT (“CoIT“) or the initiative may have corporate sponsorship (to a degree) but the technology is planted without any deliberate effort to facilitate use (and it might even be called a pilot).
2. The expectation is that the network effect will drive exponential growth.
3. The software (and human network) is completely self regulating and requires no organised human oversight – i.e. administration, training, community management or content curation.

Looking at these three points, you can actually extrapolate potential issues. But when I compare those theoretical issues, these are the anti-patterns I’ve actually seen:

• Competing Solutions – someone else has the same great idea, but attempts to solve it with a different solution. Sometimes one solution wins out, but sometimes everyone is a loser.
• Late Adopters – it all goes well for the first wave of users, but there is a group of users who just ignore the invites and don’t participate. Eventually the network starts to lose momentum.
• Works for one, but not another – similar to the Late Adopters anti-pattern, but in this case growth stalls not because people won’t use a solution but because the solution doesn’t actually meet the needs of subsequent groups.
• Lack of Customisation – the solution meets 80% of needs, but can’t be customised to meet that remaining critical 20% that would make a real difference to the organisation. People get frustrated and move on to the next good idea.
• Growing Too Fast – this is probably a situation many people who love to have, but rapid growth can also be killer when it happens. The social experience that worked for a handful of users at the beginning may not be effective for 1,000s or 10s of thousands.
• Internal Politics / Lack of Budget – great idea, but for whatever reason the initiative is killed off. Often the stated reason is an excuse, so its hard to pin point the real reasons. Remember, organisations don’t always make decisions rationally.

Clearly these issues can be managed but the difficulty is that there is a cost to fixing these issues after they happen:

• The organisational culture may not accommodate failure, making it difficult to come back and try again.
• The pure cost and challenge of retrospectively addressing these issues may be considered too high.

I think a completely viral adoption approach is a big gamble when really what organisations need is an iterative approach that allows for the best solution to emerge. An iterative approach facilitates a network-based adoption approach, by steering and anticipating user needs based on social experience design. This allows the right supporting mechanism to be put in place, including the political and budget support that will be needed over the long term.

Resistance to the new doesn’t always mean the technology is a failure for the organisation, it could simply be a misunderstanding of the purpose. Of course, the purpose may be well defined for the project team, but it’s not the user’s responsibility to figure it out for themselves. While communications teams are well aware that simply communicating a message without consideration for the way in which it’s delivered only gets the job half done, software implementations are frequently lacking effective communication of purpose.

When it comes to encouraging adoption and collaboration, we can go one step further. Learning styles can be a great way of approaching an adoption strategy – identifying how your user group prefers to learn and then adapting the strategy to meet the particular needs of those groups can help get users through the learning curve earlier and faster:

• If a group of users learn best by early use and testing features that interest them, give them access early to increase their comfort levels. They will be an asset to your adoption strategy in the long run by joining other early adopters like the project team.
• Give people who prefer to learn by observing access to the space to watch and learn from others. Observers will eventually start talking about their learning and this may take place somewhere others who haven’t yet adopted the technology can hear about positive experiences and useful features.
• Create a space either within or outside the technology itself for users to discuss their experiences with it (i.e. a conversation backchannel). Creating this space is a good way to identify another group of learners – those who like to talk about their experiences and have conversations with others.
• Participating in the backchannel in a non-intrusive, positive way is key to bringing these two groups (those who discuss and those who observe, together) to the point of adoption.

Enabling and integrating learning preferences into the adoption strategy in social, open, and collaborative ways is essential to them being a successful factor in the adoption process. Being social is nuanced and everyone has their preferences. The same goes for learning. Using learning strategies to enable changes in behavior can be supported by identifying preferences of the groups of people you’re engaging with – those preferences are the first step towards making the adoption strategy a success.

One of the biggest challenges these efforts face, whether they are internal or external, is that engagement via social media is generally perceived as a voluntary activity. As in, workers can collaborate and customers can choose to interact with a business through older channels that are often more familiar and better supported by the organization itself. Or they can engage through social channels. For people to choose the social path of engagement as the most suitable one, there need to be motivations and incentives that are aligned with that path.

As companies seek to ensure the highest level of success with their social business efforts, I am seeing that they want a proven, reliable way to drive adoption of their social business strategy, whether it’s an Enterprise 2.0 initiative, a social media marketing program, or Social CRM effort. But social media is not as deterministic and controllable as the channels that have come before it. It’s one of the reasons I say that adoption of social media can only be co-created. It is as much up to the those engaging to create value, sustain engagement, and build community as it is to those that sponsor them. You can’t own a community like you can buy software or a marketing campaign, social business is a two-way street like nothing quite like it. This makes adoption of social business a very different creature from the way businesses used to engage before.

Fortunately, after over half-a-decade of experience in scale, we can see the broad outlines of adoption, which have stages that are very different based on the state of maturity and overall rate of social business adoption in the organization. In other words, as much as we might like it, there is no “one size fits all” approach to it. Fortunately, we can organize around these different stages, which fall roughly into four parts given below. Specifically, these are:

Phases of Social Business Adoption

• Early adoption This is the most nascent and delicate state, where there is perhaps only a seed of community and there is no network effect yet or core membership that can help with the essential work of social business building. The goal is to validate the direction, tools, and social business design. This is often called the pilot phase.
• Critical mass adoption This is transforming a successful early adoption phase into broader uptake that is self-sustaining. I’ve previously observed that this critical mass is around 20% of workers, but has been verified as even less.
• Mainstream adoption There is usually a long pause between the first two waves of adoption and late adoption. Early adopters are often very early and the remainder are often represented by those who have challenges in engaging in a different way, for a variety of reasons. Specific steps must be taken to address these adoption issues.
• Sustainable adoption A successful social businesses contains communities of people, their business activities, and supporting tools. They will largely self-organize and grow on their own once you’re well into the critical mass phase and beyond. However, these communities can also decline over time without appropriate care and nurturing. Employees move on, customers decide to leave, your company changes direction. All of these affect the long term health of your communities, and so specific adoption strategies are required for as long as you have a thriving social business environment.

This post is part of a four part series on social business adoption that will explore each of these phases, with early adoption being examined here. For this effort, I’ve contacted over a dozen experienced social business practitioners, tapped into my research, and aggregated the results of numerous case studies. The outcome is what you see here and while it’s probably as definitive as you’ll find, it’s a necessarily limited view of a rapidly moving new field. Also, in the end, what drives adoption best is whatever actually works for your social business project, and what works best for your project often isn’t what’s in the check lists, no matter how good. Social isn’t as predictable or as deterministic as we might like, and that’s the challenge. Of course, it’s also a large part of the opportunity to drive innovative new outcomes you could never otherwise achieve or imagine. So while your mileage may vary somewhat, the adoption strategies presented here can be a very useful jump start of your social business journey.

Recognizing that that although social business is part of a single continuum across workers, business partners, customers, and the marketplace, that internal use of social business and external uses involve participants that have a very different relationships with the organization. Adoption strategies therefore vary the most between these two groups and so they are presented here separately, though there is often significant cross over, particularly in areas like community management and connecting social business activities to relevant business outcomes and bottom-line benefits.

Note that these adoption phases also take place during the journey of becoming a social business in the large and will be directly informed by that journey. Individual social business efforts, and their adoption strategies, should be loosely connected to what the entire organization is doing and “calibrate” to align themselves in the same direction.

Early Adoption Strategies – Internal Social Business (aka Enterprise 2.0)

While the blur between internal and external communities continues to increase, for now most efforts are still separate. Listed beow are the top adoption strategies for external social business efforts. Begin with these but experiment along the way and find the adoption patterns that are unique to your environment, culture, and constraints.

• Establish a clear purpose. Ill-defined and vague social business efforts end up with a similar outcome. As Susan Scrupski, who formed the active and highly engaged Social Business Council (disclaimer: this is a Dachis Group online community), conveyed when I asked her what the single most helpful action she took to foster adoption was this: “We established a clear purpose for the community, combined with fostering a sense of trust and a culture of sharing.” Clearly stated intents and objectives let participants self-select, join in, and find what they are looking for while contributing more of the same.
• Identify and engage adoption champions. Locate and identify unofficial leaders in your target community and get them involved and participating early. They will ultimately do the bulk of the work during the early adoption phase in drawing in participation using the social networks and good reputation.
• Help leadership set the tone. One of the biggest triggers for adoption is when leadership clearly communicates how they’d like workers to participate in social business. While setting a personal example through participation is best, all it takes is direct, regular, and public involvement by several well-respected executives.
• Communicate clear policies for usage (cans and cannots.) Social media policies have come a long way from the 7 page fine print of years gone by to simple and clear directives. Specifically, the lessons learned over the years have distilled to focus on explaining exactly what employees can and can’t do in the most understandable terms. Bonus points for providing effective suggestions on when they should use social business solutions.
• Test social UX usability with workers. Inexplicably, usability of a social business design is too often under-tested or performed as an afterthought despite it being one of the biggest drivers of early adoption. If you don’t have budget set aside for A/B testing (which is proving to be the very effective, though more expensive) and time in the schedule to fix the biggest usability barriers you discover, you will take an adoption hit.
• Use a consumer-style marketing campaign. How you communicate to workers and the tone you use will set stage for the way its perceived, and in the early days perception of everything. It must be credible but it must also be memorable and convey what’s new and provide motivation to join and try it. John Woodworth of 3M Lab Collaboration used this approach successfully: “Employees already have a preferred product. By using market segmentation and a value proposition for each ‘segment,’ we identified what they would need and how they wanted it delivered. A good customer doesn’t just try your product; they buy it often and endorse it. Focus the sales on finding the ‘good customers’ and the best markets.“.
• Strategic community management. Especially early on, the facility of community management is one of the only real assets you have to drive social business transformation and adoption. Rachel Happe, co-founder of the The Community Roundtable and a world authority on community management, notes that “community building is a critical element of social business success and typically organizations cannot get there by deploying social technologies alone. There are a variety of contextual factors that can increase or decrease the ease of building a community but there are also some common best practices“. I’ll note these best practices in this list.
• Connect to business purposes. This seems obvious stated this way, but many look at social business approaches as a horizontal or general purpose communications method more akin to e-mail to IM than a way to improve a specific business activity. Sometimes this is true of course, but the best results often seem to come from those that aimed their social business design at a specific business opportunity. As Lauri Buczek, social media strategist at Intel, recently noted in Mark Fidelman’s Sure Fire Ways To Become A Social Business, “First, identify the business objectives.” Ken Domen, an enterprise collaboration lead at a large enterprise, conveyed to me that finding a “killer app” that solves a particular business problem better than before is a strong adoption technique. For example, Ken finds that IM and calendaring apps, embedded contextually in his social environment, to be particularly effective.
• Proactively share the adoption process. Communities are built by their members, not companies alone. Time after time, as I see particularly effective examples of social business, I see that this is a core value. The more the process is open and members are encouraged and empowered to provide structure, rules of the road, and spread the word, the more ownership, involvement, and productive work results. Experimentation should be encouraged. A leading example is SAP’s million-plus member Community Network (case study) with their SAP Mentor program.

Early Adoption Strategies – External Social Business

As social business scales up and goes external, successful adoption has a new, though often complementary set of requirements. Some of the differences revolve around motivation in that external participants aren’t typically paid to work for the organization like internal participants and so usually have a very different set of reasons they are involved. Other issues that tend to be unique to external social business includes appealing to a much broader demographic and competing with similar communities elsewhere on the Internet.

• Identify and engage influencers. Enlisting those with strong reputations and contacts related to the purpose of your social business effort has long been understood as an effective adoption pattern. Engagement with influencers takes many forms and should be connected to adoption whenever possible early on.
• Use content as a participation seed. At first, there’s little in a new community to draw in initial participation. Rachel Happe says this is one of her top three adoption patterns: “Create a content calendar that provides members with something they value and creates opportunities for them to interact.” Obtaining seed content can be resource-intensive and can require more investment than expected if influencers are not well-engaged early. This should be sustained until at least the critical mass phase of adoption and usually beyond.
• Go to the audience, draw them in. Building a community on a far corner of the Internet makes it hard for new participants to find it. This is one of the reasons that Facebook pages have become so popular, by going directly to where a vast, already social and participative audience is. There are many approaches to this but it can greatly aid adoption when integrated properly.
• Personal engagement from key business stakeholders. Having the presence of company leaders and providing structured access to them by recognized members of the social business ecosystem provides the deep engagement that’s more likely to both increase participation and lead to useful outcomes. SAP’s Community Network does this proactively (see case study link above.)
• Reward the remarkable 1%. By now just about everyone is familiar with the 90-9-1 rule, where 90% are passive browsers, 9% contribute a little, and 1% account for a disproportionate amount of the value created. These are rough numbers for external social business participation. While the specific technographics continues to fluctuate a little as the market evolves, the key to driving adoption is ensuring that your most valuable contributors are incentivized appropriately to contribute, once you identify who they are. While timing and perceptions of conflict of interest can be issues, rewards typically run the gamut from simple recognition to more formal business relationships.
• Proactive community management. Community management continues to make my top list of what helps define a successful, vibrant social business. Rachel Happe includes this in her top three list as well, noting “allocating a full-time community manager that both encourages member activity and keeps the conversation on track.” The biggest misstep I see many social business efforts make is greatly under-resourcing this capability early on. SAP’s Gail Moody-Bird has observed that resources like this “are not a part time job for everyone.“
• Keep it simple. To be usable and effective for the broadest demographic, simplicity in joining, user experience, and conversation are essential to reduce abandonment and maximize the value being exchanged. This is Rachel Happe’s top adoption point as well, “keep the functional environment simple so new members quickly grasp how to participate.“
• Be authentic, don’t overproduce. Over the years, as I’ve collected best practices for online communities, I’ve noticed a common pattern. The fanciest and slickest social business experiences don’t necessarily achieve nearly the uptake as ones that are simple, basic, and straightforward. Though social media marketing aspects of social business can be an exception, excessive polish conveys a sense that too much lipstick is being put on. As John Hagel has talked about a trust paradox and social business, that being truly genuine and letting human realities be exposed is much more likely to sustain adoption and less likely to actively repel participants.
• Employ the “Us First, World Second” strategy. Time and again, when I’ve spoken to social business efforts, they explained how in the early days everyone was on deck in the organization and helped create the seed of participation. I’ve even heard it phrased that at first “it was 90% us and 10% them, and then later it was 90% them and 10% us.” Driving early adoption in this was is successful but unsustainable at a high level for long and must be timed right. “All hands on deck” may be problematic for your organization for various reasons but it’s a powerful tool for early adoption when it can be used.
• Build trust and a culture of sharing. This is one of Susan Scrupski’s adoption lessons and has been repeated by just about everyone I’ve spoke with over the years. It’s not just enough to build trust, the culture must be one where the free exchange of ideas is valued and encouraged, because that’s the observable value that drives innovation, better decisions, and more. Building that culture requires leading by example and rewarding contributors both.

Note that this list cannot be exhaustive and there are literally dozens of techniques large and small that one can attempt to drive adoption of social business. You should also never forget the fundamental cycle of listen, analyze, measure, and respond. However, these cover the more widely used and repeatable techniques that I’ve seen of the many social business efforts that I’ve examined over the years. I’ll be covered the remaining adoption phases in upcoming posts but welcome your feedback to improve and extend this list.

Whilst many things have been written about aficionados and early adopters, it’s critical to involve non-power-users for their insight into the maturity of a deployment. It’s those people that offer the most valuable and realistic view of adoption. Like slow-burning logs in a fire, they take some time to get going but eventually beam us through to a mature roll-out.

Is adoption successful when we have 6000 likes and 1200 posts?

Not necessarily. In my view, these are the sentiments of successful adoptees:

1. “I’m using this to get my work done”
2. “This is helping us get things done”
3. “Our function is improved now”

Whilst it’s tempting to measure at higher/macro levels, such efforts are generally fruitless. Imagine handing out a screwdriver to 10,000 employees and then trying to work out how useful the screwdriver is and how frequently it’s being used. It’s important to hand out the screwdriver, since the cost of not doing so is likely to be large.

All this assumes that your social software deployment is well-designed, with due concern for the situations in your business.

What are well-designed social software rollouts?

The maturity in use of a social software system is still open to consensus for rating purposes. Metric approaches have a certain vulgarity. Some don’t sound sensible – especially web-centric analyses like page views. Making social actions accountable to verbs, is something I’ve written about before – they would make metrics look trustworthy and close to business goals. We’ve even seen ROI-driven approaches that might lead to better processes.

The ultimate goal is process-oriented sociality where critical business processes have been transplanted/forked at points where theprocess is designed to get better through collaboration. The outputs of such business processes being “better” or “quicker” is then easily judged. Results should be more pronounced in companies operating with rigorous processes already.

Theories of motivation

Whenever you decide that an internal social software project has gone beyond a pilot, you need to foster understanding in the people who still don’t see any value. These people will have peers. Acolleague pointed me to the VIST theory of motivation which is linked to empowered teamwork. VIST is a model of a members’ motivation in groups. To identify missing components in the motivation of people who don’t use your system, consider the following:

• Valence – the subjective importance of team goals for individuals.
• Instrumentality – the perceived indispensability of individual contributions for the group outcome.
• Self-efficacy – the perceived capability to fulfil the tasks required in a team.
• Trust – willingness to rely on a person, group, event or process. This covers the expectancy of team members that their efforts will be reciprocated, and not exploited by other team members.

The recognition of this human connection is where the dominoes that lead to adoption begin to fall. It goes wide and deep, but it’s necessary to be an adoption practitioner. Make it known that colleagues are in the circle and attempt to re-configure how you relay motivations to adopt the system in groups. Borrow approaches from this great vision in marketing that led Apple into its’ epic Renaissance. You can create a movement that uses your system as a vehicle – but make it a grassroots effort, not an institutional ploy.

Alternatively, you could target groups on a situational basis with anenterprise app-store to support business processes, or it could be through “guerilla” exposure, which is more likely to get results. I favour the simple approach of exposure, since it nudges usage of your social system in context – replacing whatever was done before, and without prejudice. At first contact with your system, people will use the tool they heard was relevant to them.

Spreading the word

How can people “hear about” the thing that “everybody seems to be using” in a business? Despite our best intentions, my gut feeling is that it’s not too different to the way that people hear about celebrity gossip in the media. It’s centrally pushed through a medium you have chosen to read, or you find out verbally. Maybe you could offer an incentive – but be very careful as it shouldn’t be monetary. As we know well, game mechanics in social software can go some way to encouraging stickiness from power users and newbies alike. Don’t get too hung up on stickiness – it’s attention-seeking and more suited to public sites like Facebook where more eyeball time leads to more ad-clicks.

When new people land on your well-designed social software deployment, you can often make a cup of tea and relax. The best part is the open-ended nature of social software. Discovery leads to usage. Simple things like editing a document or updating a status are done without friction. Using the tool in any way can lead to a cascade of affinity, if everyone tends to do it at the same time. You need to fan the flames of the network effect to some critical point, which is likely to be the most important aspect of such a system tipping into full-scale use. So the lesson is – don’t consider always doing a pilot first but give serious thought to a global rollout from day one. One of my clients did that for their social intranet with great results.

Ensure you are listening

The most simple things work. Advertise it with a context. Push usage through traditional, mobile and digital means. Most people will not interact, they find it useful to just view/consume. You will know when you’ve hit a wall when:

• Your initial assumptions were wrong and you need to re-jig what you deployed.
• You need to dive into specific teams and get the tool to fit their work pattern – or commonly, a work process. While finding out the details, try not to change the work processes of teams – they might realise and change it themselves.
• Some people don’t have any use for your social software (rare).

This is why you need to think about designing your adventure into a collaborative experience. You need to have a strategy and pick the brains of people who have done it before.

Cultural friction

As much as I want to say that some corporate cultures impede the use of social software (by nature or due to being a regulated/professional services business) – I don’t personally believe it’s true. It’s really about changing the mind of individuals and their peers, case by case. A colleague wrote a series of posts on the barriers to adoption in that sense.

In summary

People promoting social software internally are like entrepreneurs launching a product into a messy world. There’s no set paths that give you the best results. In time, as more organisations build a library of stories about how they became a Social Business, I look forward to tales that are rich with experimentation.

The process of people adopting internal social tools to constant use is the next frontier in Social Business. We don’t need to grab all the real-estate on the screen and take all the attention. We need to show it helps people get work done faster, better and easier. You will see this being reflected in an organic change to your business processes. Do this properly, and your company will endure.

This post originally appeared on the Dachis Group | Headshift blog.

The above stories are just a few quick illustrations of how the mobile and social worlds are continuing to merge in new and interesting ways around location-based services (LBS). As LBS adoption continues to spike (comScore notes that nearly 17 million US subscribers engaged in check-ins in March 2011 alone, and an Edison Research/Arbitron study found that 30% of smartphone users were now familiar with LBS) the cultural anthropologist in me started asking, “What is it about ‘checking in’ that is so compelling?”

As with all human behaviors, there is no simple answer, and behind the couple smartphone clicks that make up the observable reality lies an environment rich in social context. Paralleling successful mobile applications, the reasons for expanding use of LBS spreads across a continuum of user motivation that runs from play (i.e., wasting time/having fun) to utility (i.e., saving time/money, earning status). Some great reading of late from around the web (like this post from @stephenanderson) and around the world (like this pdf from Sweden’s Mobile Life Centre) spurred my creation of the following list of LBS archetypes (meant to be illustrative, not exhaustive or mutually exclusive):

The “trend setter” … takes pride in being the first of social group to begin using a new service or feature.

The “time killer” … looks to alleviate boredom or fill time using mobile apps such as LBS.

The “social surfer” … sees who else has checked in to a specific place, enjoys voyeuristic exploration of other user profiles.

The “mayor of players” … enthusiastically engages in competitive behaviors such as “mayorship battles”.

The “scavenger hunter” … looks to create a collection of experiences, badges and/or other artifacts.

The “status seeker” … only checks in to the “right places” and is concerned with maintaining and enhancing personal brand.

The “knowledge miner” … searches for the most recent or relevant information from LBS services to improve customer experience by gaining the knowledge of regular patrons.

The “do-gooder” … is incented to participate by a perception that their activities are having a positive impact on others, the planet, etc.

The “social seeker” … announces location in order to facilitate real-world interaction with friends or enable serendipitous interaction and connection with friends or strangers.

The “trip planner” … facilitates social bonding or group cohesion by using LBS to plan group outings.

The “life logger” … obsessively tracks life lists, captures past activities/personal or experiential history for pleasure or for “quantified self” programs.

The “discount hunter” … actively searches for location-based coupons/deals to save money.

A final wild card archetype to consider in this LBS tarot deck is the “privacy activist”, who is so concerned about privacy issues that overly promoted check-ins, push notifications etc. may cause negative sentiment or hostile or aversive behaviors that then are relayed to their social network – which is the exact opposite of the intended effect of any social campaign.

As with the tarot deck, each of these archetypes represents some elemental aspect of human behavior, and only combinations of cards provide the fullest picture of the complex web of motivations lying behind the check-in. (One LBS heavy user told me that, taking into account the many services he uses, he is reflected in every single one of these archetypes depending on the market niche and desired outcome.) Point is, in this age of games and group buying, marketers might be tempted to overfocus on competitive or deal-seeking behavior, and thus miss an opportunity get those with “do gooder” or “life logger” instincts over the barrier to sharing, which in turn provides less content for the knowledge miners and social surfers to consume, etc.

A strong focus on user experience is another key to any successful campaign. With LBS the crucial points of interaction happen within the (often locally-run) bricks and mortar world, so pains should be taken to provide consistent messaging and user experiences across both online (digital/social experiences) and offline (retail experiences), as well as other marketing channels, campaigns and collateral. Also, despite the spike in uptake described above, consumer familiarity with these services is still building, so simplicity and clarity of language, as well as some user education, can forestall cognitive dissonance (or worse, backlash).

Finally, marketers and strategists should realize that these campaigns need end-to-end operational support, otherwise “build it and they will come” may turn into “once you’ve lost them, they won’t come back”. Customer-facing personnel can become your superstar “social middlemen”, but only if they are empowered with knowledge of the latest/greatest social media programs and equipped with solid processes that are consistently applied, consumer-focused and scalable. This extension of the “hive mind” to the “front line” will ensure that the pains taken in strategy and design pay off in sustainable business value – no matter what future lies in the cards.

As I recently pointed out, it’s not hard to see why this is happening now: the writing is on the wall and the consumer world has driven much of this change to the extent the social is now essentially the dominant model for communication globally, at least on the Web. Social as the driver for business activity is still usually not the case in the enterprise, but it’s now clear that too will soon change.

Here were some of the largest take-aways for me and what I saw at the event:

Designing Enterprises for Loss of Control

British Telecom’s CIO JP Rangaswami gave a thought-provoking keynote that was notable for the lack of slides (instead, a real-time social media stream was produced live, alongside) as well as for putting forth the concept that enterprises boundaries are increasingly blurring with the greater network and that businesses must start getting good at “designing for loss of control.” This topic has long been discussed in Enterprise 2.0 circles and many of us already realize that the shift of control from institutions to communities of individuals has been long underway, yet it was only at the conference this month that there seemed to be ready understanding and acceptance of this concept in a mainstream way. While we’re still learning exactly what it means to design for loss of control, particularly in the enterprise, it’s readily in the spirit of social software with its general lack of barriers to participation or preconceptions about how people should come together and build value on the network.

Enterprises Are Going Social

If the presentations at the opening day’s The 2.0 Adoption Council customer workshop weren’t convincing enough, many of the presentations later on in the week were impressive. While most organizations worldwide now have social software in some form, at least departmentally, the deeper and wider use of Enterprise 2.0 strategically, across all stakeholders (customers, partners, and workers) is still emerging in most organizations. While this is leading to more sophisticated and mature discussions, such as the one around Social Business, extrapolating from the 200 organizations already participating in the council is sobering and I predict the data for 2010 will show that around half of all organizations globally had an internal enterprise-side social media strategy created to guide efforts across their business units.

I don’t know ANYBODY that takes the public transport for 25 years just to wait for the moment that he/she can buy that car. Why? Well you do need to go from point A to point B, so you just need something that does that job if your budget is bit limited. You settle for a solution that works NOW, something that does the job, gives you value for money and you settle with the fact that it is a little less glamorous than the Ferrari…

Over time, when you start to settle down and kids come there is a chance that you value other things in life, like a big house with a garden. The Ferrari is off the plan.

Sounds simple?

It sure does, so why don’t we take this very simple life approach and apply it to adopting Enterprise 2.0 systems in large global corporations then?

Awaiting the Walhalla

I’ve seen large global corporations not having a business collaboration platform because they have a hard time aligning all their business units who are each using their own tools. Or there are so many different views of what needs to happen that it takes ages to reach consensus. The larger the company, the more widespread and the more independent the different business units, the more likely this will happen.

What would you prefer?

1. Not having a business collaboration platform at all for three years, with the risk that after three years you get something that only partially fits your needs, or
2. having a business collaboration platform now, that has a high value add to your particular business unit, with the risk that in three years there will be 6 to 8 different platforms in your 100 000-people company?

Or let me rephrase it: do you want to drive a Fiat now, or don’t drive a car at all and wait several years for a Ferrari that might never come?

Gimme a Fiat please

“All good and well, but Lee, didn’t you say earlier that we should also focus on platform consolidation as a good manager?” – I hear you rightfully saying. Yes, my suggestion to go for the Fiat, does have the implication that over a couple of year’s time we might end up with several platforms. From a pure IT cost point of view a dreadful option because it will cost much more to keep eight different platforms up and running instead of one to rule them all.

But how much business value does it bring you? Or rather, how much do you lose each day by not having a proper collaboration, communication and knowledge platform? I’d say that in most cases the business benefit of having multiple platforms that work, outweighs the higher IT cost.

It’s only a problem if you let it be one

And there is even better news: multiple knowledge repositories/silos don’t necessarily need to be a problem. What do you think that Google is doing? They are indexing a gazillion knowledge repositories all over the web and trying to make sense out of it. In my previous post I’ve argued that we should start to rely on smarter software and better hardware, well here’s exactly why. With the proper software from vendors like System One, Inquira, Autonomy and some others, we can index those knowledge silos and take it to a whole new level.

These search++ (++ because it is SO much more than just search) solutions index everything and cross-link all the data in your organisation and do tons of voodoo things: entity recognition (it recognises dog, but also that Labrador is a dog), similar content (ideal for searching for instance similar contracts or project initiation documents), enriching content (mashing different internal and external data sources), translations, etc

So, shall we just give up?

Does that mean that we can happily give up the ideal world scenario? Not at all! Keep in mind that I urge you to strive for Walhalla, however in my posts I try to point you to some (temporary?) solutions that will help you bridge the time needed to reach Walhalla. Solutions that might sound inefficient or weird at first sight, but that will give you direct business value.

An approach you could take is to identify which ones of those 6 or 8 platforms are really successful, identify the usage patterns and user stories. Run some workshops and do some stakeholder interviews. Genuinely understand what our business users need and want. Then see if you can consolidate systems, move communities to other platforms, migrate data, etc.

Be careful with this: pick the right battles, on the right moment. It makes sense that if you have an extremely successful platform and community, that you don’t just migrate them away for the sake of migrating. Also, focus on good opportunities like when you need to upgrade to a newer version of the particular platform.

It’s a never-ending story

So when is your job finished? Most likely if you are working in a large knowledge-intensive organisation, I’d say: never. Nowadays, everything changes at such a rapid speed, that also the needs of the people in your organisation and the organisation itself changes at a rapid speed. The perfect solution you are adopting today might not fit your needs anymore in two years.

Knowledge management, collaboration and communication are not an end-goal. They are just supporting you in doing your business more efficient and effective. Your business changes over time, and so do your Enterprise 2.0 systems.

Need some help in a pragmatic approach in starting with business collaboration or Enterprise 2.0 solutions in your organisation? Drop me a mail at lee.provoost@headshift.com.

This post originally appeared on the Headshift blog.