Three Common Mistakes in Pursuit of Enterprise 2.0 & the Next Generation Workplace

The pursuit of the Enterprise 2.0 utopia promised, described and promoted across the web has attracted the committed, the curious and the cautious. As we move further up the adoption curve the amount of success as well as failures increase. This is the first in a short, three part series about the common mistakes in Enterprise 2.0 strategies and how to avoid them.

The three common mistakes of E20 are:
1. Technology treated as an ends rather than a means.
2. IT as leading the business rather than supporting the business.
3. Information architecture that is walled and gated when there is no good reason for it to be that way.

Let’s take these one by one.

Mistake 1. Technology as an ends rather than a means
All too often the newest, brightest and shiniest technology (let’s call it BSTechnology – bright shiny technology) grabs the attention of someone with purchasing power within the organization. Immediately all problems that person is facing seem to be solvable if only that new BSTech was in place. This is a myth. Unfortunately it is a myth that the BSTech sales rep is all too happy to promote. “Never confuse sales with implementation” the BSTech rep will tell his colleague down at the pub. An example of the may be seen when blogging platforms or team collaboration systems pass themselves off as enterprise ready content management systems.

Users, advocates, pundits and devotees need to remember that by itself BSTech does nothing. It cannot get “out of the box” by itself to even start delivering “out of the box” functionality. This fundamentally means that technology, even BSTechnology, is a tool. It needs users and users have needs. Those needs come from their tasks and responsibilities. BSTech should be evaluated to the extent that it can help solve business problems, make tasks easier or quicker and produce better quality output. But having BSTech will not make your organization any more “fit” than simply owning a treadmill will make you thin. You need the goal, the discipline and then the tools to get there.

Many organizations find themselves now with an over abundance of these tools. They bought into that EULA. They signed off on that unlimited seats license agreement. They are left asking, “Now what?” AIIM found last year and Fierce Content Management finds this year that doing more with what you already have is a key trend. This is not as much of a belt-tightening as you might think at first. Instead a large part of this trend is because of the near-gluttonous spending and BSTech acquisition that had gone on in previous years. The almighty ROI consideration has renewed focus and those numbers can be daunting for organizations who bought everything. Figuring out how to leverage what you already have is key. Leverage presumes purpose. Purpose presumes a goal and focus. Within this framework technology, even BSTech, can only be appropriately framed as a goal-enabler rather than the goal.

Ron Miller of Fierce Content Management sums it up this way:

“Companies should always try to get the maximum value for their investment, and many times that means incremental investments. It may mean buying different solutions from different vendors or buying the piece you absolutely must have now and waiting for the pieces that are nice to have. CIOs are suddenly taking a long look at everything. It makes little sense to buy hundreds of desktop licenses only to find a hundred would have been fine. Maybe you give your power users access to the system for starters and bring others along over time (LINK).”

Next time we will talk about problem #2: IT leading rather than supporting the business.