This is a refreshingly realistic post that repeats what those of us who have studied and consulted in adoption of new technologies know based on tough experience: adoption takes time, different groups adopt at different rates, and some groups just never "get it." I also think it's important to distinguish between the people who are paying their mortgages via actual sales of web 2.0 stuff, and those who are paying their mortgages from other sources. (Interestingly, the second most frequently used tag in my del.icio.us list is "adoption," so that tells you a bit about where I'm coming from.
Adam Carson
· 2 years ago
What about...'if we build it (and do a good job), they will come'???
I agree that the Empty Quarter is going to be hard to convert...but time will do that on its own (ie., the youth rising)...and a little web 2.0 training for those who don't 'get it' can't hurt either.
Think about a big corporation replacing their corporate directory with a social network with similar features to Facebook (profiles, network building, ad-hoc group creation, etc.). Employees will have no choice but to adopt in some fashion. AND THIS IS COMING!
I know that you don't like the idea of 'forced E2.0'...or in fact that the word 'force' is inherently contrary to E2.0. But when there is only one primary system to use for certain functions (and it happens to be a platform rather than a channel), then what happens?
Or what if you turn channels into platforms without the end-user having to change their activity. Example - capturing email groups into message boards, or emails directly copying blogs as posts.
Just a few thoughts to ponder,
Adam
Abe Murray
· 2 years ago
I found this post fascinating - to think so many folks would assume adoption inevitable, let alone be a bit hostile to it not being so. Adoption (and distribution) are probably the two toughest areas for any new product, let alone a new market.
5 years is actually a rather short time when it comes down to it... especially when people are busy doing their everday business.
I guess time will tell - nevertheless, as an Enterprise 2.0 hopeful, I am going to worry deeply about adoption for the near future.
Andy Scherer
· 2 years ago
I agree with the person who pointed out that 5 years is a very long time. 5 years ago my organization was running Alta Vista. 2 years ago I proposed to the head of Communications that our Chairman blog about his global road show experiences and I was summarily blowtorched. Last December the same fellow asked me to help him set up a blog for the Chairman and that he also wanted me to help identify the value proposition for wikis. Vendors are taking notice and have E2.0 on their roadmaps.
Its moving very fast of late. While I agree that it'll be some time before the social computing aspects of E2.0 are broadly embedded but my experience is that the resistance to E2.o in general is abating.
Bud Gibson
· 2 years ago
I sort of wonder if this is not the difference between academics (observers) and implementers. Implementers generally want to know what to do to succeed. How could it work? Not, will it work?
Jennifer Okimoto
· 2 years ago
Andrew - your post is timely, I just created a presentation called, "Navigating the Web2.0 Frontier: helping organizations and their people adopt new technology." My talk is targeted at consultants at my company. We have a pretty robust set of enterprise2.0 apps and a large community of users. However, the consultants have not been the early adopters (although they're coming around). After many iterations of my presentation, there are four ideas that I hope my audience remembers:
1) Go try out what we have at our disposal. Start a blog, comment on others' blogs, bookmark sites, tag people, check out the wikis, meet people in other organizations and geographies who have interesting things to say and who might give you insight, help you build upon an idea, be more effective in your consulting. Do not talk to your client about this stuff in the abstract!
2) Any discussion about investing in enterprise2.0 must be tied to business value. What are the client's pain points and how can the technologies help them improve speed, reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction, improve employee morale? If value is not clear, the conversation is a non-starter. I recommend the use of scenarios to help companies figure it out. Also, I believe companies that do figure this out will have a leg up on their competition.
3) Adoption will not be easy. I talk about past technological frontiers and how when we first encountered them we had no idea how they would turn out. The continuum of leaders, followers, and naysayers were all there...and look we're still laughing at the email printers. So, just as we had people teaching people how to program their voicemail, use a mouse, and set up folders in their in-box, we're going to need to help people use the web2.0 stuff too. It may be intuitive for the kids and the enthusiasts, but for a lot of really intelligent people their brains click off when confronted with yet another new thing.
4)Finally, you're right, heavy handed approaches are not the way to drive adoption! But in all honesty, half the battle is awareness. Despite 10's if not 100's of thousands of people using these technologies at my company, I'm continually amazed to still find people say, "now, what exactly is a (fill in the blank with your favorite 2.0 app)?
Your post has given me a number of new things to think about, and it validates some of my ideas...I just wish you'd written it a couple of days earlier. Cheers!
Matt Moore
· 2 years ago
Newsflash: If you build it, they won't necessarily come. And if "they" do, it probably won't be everyone.
To extend the KM metaphor. Lots of organisations are doing KM-style projects. They might not call them that but they are. The critical change is that they are now much more targeted around a specific issue rather than just "knowledge sharing".
So I am pretty much in agreement with Andrew. E2.0 take up will be patchy. There will be some loud successes. And many more quiet disappointments.
And 5 years down the track, we will be doing E2.0 stuff - we just won't be using that term. And we'll be a lot smarter about what does and doesn't work (hopefully).
Yoav
· 2 years ago
"I asked the room how many people wanted to be remembered as this decade's equivalents of KM enthusiasts and evangelists, and got a few chuckles."
It is possible that E2.0 will follow the steps of KM. However, I think there is one bright shiny example of E2.0. A success story so great, that it will encourage companys to continue working on adopting E2.0 technologies - The internet.
When companies realize that it is not the technology but the reward-structure and culture that makes the internet bloggers and wiki-workers produce all these ideas and insights, some of them will probably make the cultural shift that will allow knowledge sharing to emerge.
You can find an excellent article on how organizational culture prevents knowledge sharing on Peter-Anthony Glick blog.
Good discussion. I suspect adoption will be varied across suite of E2.0 concepts and this will be directly related to measurable business value.
Wiki's for example may have a higher adoption rate because of their strong measurable tie in to business value. Blogs on the other hand make several organizations nervous because of legal implications, confidentiality, "un-productiveness", etc... The E2.0 suite of tools will look different then W2.0, as organizations morph the concepts and tailor them to business needs. To suggest that internal corporate blogging is inevitable may be true, but to what extent? For example, personal websites became popular in W1.0 as a means of expression. I suspect we would have seen the same empty quarter picture here with recent grads & techno-savvy individuals building their personal sites. It didn't translate directly into the enterprise. Internal sites are often goverened, not personal, branded, etc... Even policies on access to the Internet varies across companies. Will this happen to blogs? Will we govern them and lose the value of transparency? Is it restricted technology?
How we persue adoption has direct implications on what we adopt. I don't see it being the same across all organizations, and therefore as a practitoner, these early years are key to setting up the framework adoption upon which we will grow in the next 5 years.
Euan Semple
· 2 years ago
I understand where you are coming from Andrew and I know how long this stuff takes probably better than most.
However I do still feel that there is an inevitability about the underlying expectations that drive the changes we are seeing and that they will become pervasive whether companies like it or not. Yes there will be those for whom it will never work and those for whom it will work only a little but for the rest there is huge and exciting potential. All those of us involved in this space can do is make it happen more easily and possibly slightly faster and IMHO the way to do that is being understated, patient and persistent.
Perhaps rather facetiously I just wrote on my blog - "It struck me as funny to turn something into a thing when it doesn't need to be and to then make that thing seem harder than it needs to be!"
Michael Idinopulos
· 2 years ago
Andy, History supports your concern about adoption of Enterprise 2.0 tools. The closest analog we have to E2.0 is knowledge management--another set of tools and processes designed to stimulate sharing and collaboration across enterprises. What we've learned there is that, with a few notable exceptions, adoption is a *huge* issue. That's because the incentives to collaborate (reputation enhancement, pats on the back, the warm glow of sharing what you know) do not typically outweigh the personal costs (loss of privileged knowledge status, increase in unwanted phone calls, etc.) So is E2.0 sufficiently different from knowledge management that it will avoid KM's fate? The E2.0 technology doesn't do anything to reduce the personal costs of collaboration. But it does deliver certain personal benefits that knowledge management never could: reduced email levels, enhanced findability of critical content, automatic backup of critical files, etc. Will these benefits allow E2.0 to clear the adoption bar that knowledge management so ungracefully crashed into? I suspect the answer is that it will for some enterprises, but not for others. And I suspect the outcome will have more to do with how the enterprise works than with the age or flickr habits of its workers.
Jeremy Francis
· 2 years ago
In times gone by I think I'd have landed on the 'mandated approach to driving adoption' for these technologies (and behaviours perhaps more critically) - and in doing so I'd have welcomed an energy vampire across my threshold.
Now, a few years to the wiser, I suspect that a tipping point will be reached, driven by a combination of societal behavioral change (already happening), new blood into the workforce and younger, prolific enterprise leaders (who've already crossed the tech/behavioural Rubicon) setting an example. The value proposition, privacy and security issues are distractions, which will get solved, as they did when email got introduced.
So then the question for me is how do I influence the pace at which we (my firm) take the plunge?
I want to focus where there's passion, particularly if that happens to coincide with organisational influence (new intake and leadership) and to let the evolving networks do the leg work. There was a time when only academics used email and the Internet (10 years ago?) and look where we are today......
NitinK
· 2 years ago
I think you've nailed it with this post - adoption is a *key issue* that will need to be overcome by Enterprise 2.0. Regardless of how useful it is (even if ten-fold), it is far from given that widespread adoption will happen and certainly not automatic.
In your post, you point out that users will vote with their feet and adopt only those technologies that make the most sense for them and that are easy to use. I would go one step further - in a corporate environment (unlike for the Internet at large), there are forces that will actually *obstruct* the rapid adoption of cutting-edge technologies - very often, the IT departments of large companies fall in this category.
The reasons are not particularly sinister - the problem is that the risk-reward profile for the IT group is often quite different (and in conflict) with that of the Enterprise at large; they have little to gain, and a great deal to lose, by encouraging early adoption of risky new technologies, even if those technologies could provide an overall competitive advantage in the medium term.
So what I am saying is: Even in the consumer space, the use of these technologies is promising but not inevitable.
NitinK
· 2 years ago
Great point, Matt! But the fact that 8% are blogging is not to say that the total *participation* is only 8%; if you count the occasional commenters and the total lurkers, then the overall community participating in blogging is a great deal larger.
Working inside the enterprise 2.0/web 2.0 model is much like learning a new language. And like language learning, I have found the best way to gain adoption is immersion. In a program that I developed for the American Library Association, 50 librarians were given a complete web 2.0 tool set (blogs, wikis, podcasting, and a directory) and were asked to immerse themselves in the tools and through that immersion develop applications for them. At the end of six weeks, a number of things had happened. The librarians had taken over the tools and made them their own in terms of look and feel and features. They had figured out many interesting and powerful applications for them. Now a year later, this program has been cloned at over 20 libraries. It has a very 2.0 structure and seems to be a powerful way to gain adoption. Rather than "build it and they will come," the motto should be "Give us the tools and we will finish the job." (Winston Churchill)
NCauldwell
· 2 years ago
I'm reaching the older end of social networking generation. From my perspective, adoption of E2.0 tech won't be a problem, so long as advanced communication experiences, provided by the likes of Facebook, can be transitioned to E2.0 apps.
Email feels archaic in comparison to the web services I use for my social life. Why would I want my comms with colleagues to be disjointed, un-tagged, and un-attached from rich personal profiles? These are people I work with, not email addresses.
If someone could just take the principles of Facebook, inc. the 'Live Feed', they'd have a tool I'd use and recommend to others. If you're a E2.0 developer, please, look at Facebook, analyse the transactions and artefacts that initiate the respective transactions, and convert the whole thing to work with docs, presentations, spreadsheets, and most importantly, rewards.
Ross Dawson
· 2 years ago
Thanks Andrew. Taking the counterpoint of Euan Semple's recent comments, we have a solid discussion on the table, which I think is a useful one. I side with you on this Andrew - not only is it difficult to get adoption, it is particularly difficult to create a technological and social context where there are useful emergent results for the enterprise. My blog post on this: http://www.rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2...
Jane McConnell
· 2 years ago
Andrew,your post and the following comments make for good reading for intranet managers who are struggling with if and how they should implement internal blogs. The "if" is a bigger question than the "how". It is clear to me that 2.0 functions used internallly will be much slower coming than on the public web. This is supported by figures from a Global Intranet Study I conducted in June - August 2006 with just over one hundred companies around the world. You can see one graph on this post on my blog which is a snapshot of the "internal blogosphere" of the survey population.
It seems to be around 30% of US internet users have played around with something that Pew labels Web 2.0ish.
Based purely on observation & guesswork, there are probably around x3 regular comment posters per internal blogger (or participants) and about x10 people who are aware that this activity is going on. Unless that blogger is the CEO.
To what extent do power laws apply inside the firewall?
And does anyone have more robust data?
(Please excuse me, I am a stats junky)
Vietnam travel agency
· 2 years ago
Vietnam, a country made famous by war, has a unique and rich civilisation, spectacular scenery and friendly people. From the Red River Delta in the north to the Mekong River in the south, the scenes throughout Vietnam are timeless, with green rice paddies tended by labourers in conical hats.
All Comments
I agree that the Empty Quarter is going to be hard to convert...but time will do that on its own (ie., the youth rising)...and a little web 2.0 training for those who don't 'get it' can't hurt either.
Think about a big corporation replacing their corporate directory with a social network with similar features to Facebook (profiles, network building, ad-hoc group creation, etc.). Employees will have no choice but to adopt in some fashion. AND THIS IS COMING!
I know that you don't like the idea of 'forced E2.0'...or in fact that the word 'force' is inherently contrary to E2.0. But when there is only one primary system to use for certain functions (and it happens to be a platform rather than a channel), then what happens?
Or what if you turn channels into platforms without the end-user having to change their activity. Example - capturing email groups into message boards, or emails directly copying blogs as posts.
Just a few thoughts to ponder,
Adam
5 years is actually a rather short time when it comes down to it... especially when people are busy doing their everday business.
I guess time will tell - nevertheless, as an Enterprise 2.0 hopeful, I am going to worry deeply about adoption for the near future.
Its moving very fast of late. While I agree that it'll be some time before the social computing aspects of E2.0 are broadly embedded but my experience is that the resistance to E2.o in general is abating.
1) Go try out what we have at our disposal. Start a blog, comment on others' blogs, bookmark sites, tag people, check out the wikis, meet people in other organizations and geographies who have interesting things to say and who might give you insight, help you build upon an idea, be more effective in your consulting. Do not talk to your client about this stuff in the abstract!
2) Any discussion about investing in enterprise2.0 must be tied to business value. What are the client's pain points and how can the technologies help them improve speed, reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction, improve employee morale? If value is not clear, the conversation is a non-starter. I recommend the use of scenarios to help companies figure it out. Also, I believe companies that do figure this out will have a leg up on their competition.
3) Adoption will not be easy. I talk about past technological frontiers and how when we first encountered them we had no idea how they would turn out. The continuum of leaders, followers, and naysayers were all there...and look we're still laughing at the email printers. So, just as we had people teaching people how to program their voicemail, use a mouse, and set up folders in their in-box, we're going to need to help people use the web2.0 stuff too. It may be intuitive for the kids and the enthusiasts, but for a lot of really intelligent people their brains click off when confronted with yet another new thing.
4)Finally, you're right, heavy handed approaches are not the way to drive adoption! But in all honesty, half the battle is awareness. Despite 10's if not 100's of thousands of people using these technologies at my company, I'm continually amazed to still find people say, "now, what exactly is a (fill in the blank with your favorite 2.0 app)?
Your post has given me a number of new things to think about, and it validates some of my ideas...I just wish you'd written it a couple of days earlier. Cheers!
To extend the KM metaphor. Lots of organisations are doing KM-style projects. They might not call them that but they are. The critical change is that they are now much more targeted around a specific issue rather than just "knowledge sharing".
So I am pretty much in agreement with Andrew. E2.0 take up will be patchy. There will be some loud successes. And many more quiet disappointments.
And 5 years down the track, we will be doing E2.0 stuff - we just won't be using that term. And we'll be a lot smarter about what does and doesn't work (hopefully).
It is possible that E2.0 will follow the steps of KM. However, I think there is one bright shiny example of E2.0. A success story so great, that it will encourage companys to continue working on adopting E2.0 technologies - The internet.
When companies realize that it is not the technology but the reward-structure and culture that makes the internet bloggers and wiki-workers produce all these ideas and insights, some of them will probably make the cultural shift that will allow knowledge sharing to emerge.
You can find an excellent article on how organizational culture prevents knowledge sharing on Peter-Anthony Glick blog.
http://leveragingknowledge.blogspot.com/2007/03...
Wiki's for example may have a higher adoption rate because of their strong measurable tie in to business value. Blogs on the other hand make several organizations nervous because of legal implications, confidentiality, "un-productiveness", etc... The E2.0 suite of tools will look different then W2.0, as organizations morph the concepts and tailor them to business needs. To suggest that internal corporate blogging is inevitable may be true, but to what extent? For example, personal websites became popular in W1.0 as a means of expression. I suspect we would have seen the same empty quarter picture here with recent grads & techno-savvy individuals building their personal sites. It didn't translate directly into the enterprise. Internal sites are often goverened, not personal, branded, etc... Even policies on access to the Internet varies across companies. Will this happen to blogs? Will we govern them and lose the value of transparency? Is it restricted technology?
How we persue adoption has direct implications on what we adopt. I don't see it being the same across all organizations, and therefore as a practitoner, these early years are key to setting up the framework adoption upon which we will grow in the next 5 years.
However I do still feel that there is an inevitability about the underlying expectations that drive the changes we are seeing and that they will become pervasive whether companies like it or not. Yes there will be those for whom it will never work and those for whom it will work only a little but for the rest there is huge and exciting potential. All those of us involved in this space can do is make it happen more easily and possibly slightly faster and IMHO the way to do that is being understated, patient and persistent.
Perhaps rather facetiously I just wrote on my blog - "It struck me as funny to turn something into a thing when it doesn't need to be and to then make that thing seem harder than it needs to be!"
History supports your concern about adoption of Enterprise 2.0 tools. The closest analog we have to E2.0 is knowledge management--another set of tools and processes designed to stimulate sharing and collaboration across enterprises. What we've learned there is that, with a few notable exceptions, adoption is a *huge* issue. That's because the incentives to collaborate (reputation enhancement, pats on the back, the warm glow of sharing what you know) do not typically outweigh the personal costs (loss of privileged knowledge status, increase in unwanted phone calls, etc.)
So is E2.0 sufficiently different from knowledge management that it will avoid KM's fate? The E2.0 technology doesn't do anything to reduce the personal costs of collaboration. But it does deliver certain personal benefits that knowledge management never could: reduced email levels, enhanced findability of critical content, automatic backup of critical files, etc. Will these benefits allow E2.0 to clear the adoption bar that knowledge management so ungracefully crashed into? I suspect the answer is that it will for some enterprises, but not for others. And I suspect the outcome will have more to do with how the enterprise works than with the age or flickr habits of its workers.
Now, a few years to the wiser, I suspect that a tipping point will be reached, driven by a combination of societal behavioral change (already happening), new blood into the workforce and younger, prolific enterprise leaders (who've already crossed the tech/behavioural Rubicon) setting an example. The value proposition, privacy and security issues are distractions, which will get solved, as they did when email got introduced.
So then the question for me is how do I influence the pace at which we (my firm) take the plunge?
I want to focus where there's passion, particularly if that happens to coincide with organisational influence (new intake and leadership) and to let the evolving networks do the leg work. There was a time when only academics used email and the Internet (10 years ago?) and look where we are today......
In your post, you point out that users will vote with their feet and adopt only those technologies that make the most sense for them and that are easy to use. I would go one step further - in a corporate environment (unlike for the Internet at large), there are forces that will actually *obstruct* the rapid adoption of cutting-edge technologies - very often, the IT departments of large companies fall in this category.
The reasons are not particularly sinister - the problem is that the risk-reward profile for the IT group is often quite different (and in conflict) with that of the Enterprise at large; they have little to gain, and a great deal to lose, by encouraging early adoption of risky new technologies, even if those technologies could provide an overall competitive advantage in the medium term.
I recently posted a graph of these differing risk profiles here, on the Software Abstractions blog:
http://blog.softwareabstractions.com/the_softwa...
A Pew survey from last year stated that 19% of US 12-17 year olds blog (& 8% of adults).
Not bad but compared to SMS penetration among consumers (76% in the US for 18-24 year olds) - kinda punny.
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP Bloggers Report July 19 2006.pdf
http://psmsus.blogspot.com/2007/01/us-sms-penet...
So what I am saying is: Even in the consumer space, the use of these technologies is promising but not inevitable.
Bradley Horowitz represented this best with his 1-10-100 pyramid:
http://www.elatable.com/blog/?p=5
Email feels archaic in comparison to the web services I use for my social life. Why would I want my comms with colleagues to be disjointed, un-tagged, and un-attached from rich personal profiles? These are people I work with, not email addresses.
If someone could just take the principles of Facebook, inc. the 'Live Feed', they'd have a tool I'd use and recommend to others. If you're a E2.0 developer, please, look at Facebook, analyse the transactions and artefacts that initiate the respective transactions, and convert the whole thing to work with docs, presentations, spreadsheets, and most importantly, rewards.
My blog post on this:
http://www.rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2...
link to my post:
http://netjmc.typepad.com/globally_local/2007/0...
More data: http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Web_2.0.pdf
It seems to be around 30% of US internet users have played around with something that Pew labels Web 2.0ish.
Based purely on observation & guesswork, there are probably around x3 regular comment posters per internal blogger (or participants) and about x10 people who are aware that this activity is going on. Unless that blogger is the CEO.
To what extent do power laws apply inside the firewall?
And does anyone have more robust data?
(Please excuse me, I am a stats junky)