April 29th, 2009
You Were Never 1.0, but get ready for Enterprise 2.0
By now your company or organization should already be well on its way adopting technologies and new behaviors that enhance internal communication, collaboration, and productivity. If you are not, its OK. I am giving you the tools here to take that step. You are now aware you should be thinking about your workforce and the future of your business. Harvard Business School Professor Andrew McAfee’s re-visualization of Chris Argyris’ work on moving from a Model 1 organization (where things are locked down and ordered), to a Model 2 (where an environment is conducive to collaboration) is a great example of where you should be looking. This transition to the Model 2 type of organization is what many businesses are still trying to achieve. No doubt your business is still a Model 1, but it wants so badly to be Model 2.
Your company or organization’s employees should embrace the Model 2 environment because the tools are social in nature; and as your business community adopts these tools, the old ways of doing business will be replaced with more efficient behaviors. Chain emails sent hours earlier in the day are replied to all, and most of the time not salient to an individual, can be moved away from email and into a wiki or blog platform. Letting those who it is applicable, subscribe to the feed as desired.
This allows for one hand should know what the other is doing without having to clutter your inbox with noise. For example, if you are a large business and you were putting out a press release about a major development, the information should be vetted through your outreach staff and come from official feeds pulled from internal sources. This information should not be released from just anyone in the company or — *gasp* — someone not in the company at all. You need to be in control of the information that is out there about your business.
When adopting internal collaboration and productivity tools you must include your Public Affairs, Public Relations, or content management team; essentially your outreach office. If your outreach office is in the know about the work that is being done at all levels and by whom, it is more apparent what can be released, and in a timely manner. This gets the story out to the market with more accuracy and currency. Your outreach office should be the ones managing your public brand on these social networking sites. This does not replace the current content management process that is published to your external sites; this is an enhanced supplemental process. Bottom line: take control of your brand before someone else does it for you.
You would also be wise about putting up a blog on your public website before you have an understanding how to manage blogs and the comments they receive. You need to be prepared to deal with trolls, frequently asked questions, and spam. Not to mention, you should have a strategy formed to respond to legitimate comments or requests for more information. If you do not have a plan in place for this, then I suggest you pause a moment before you hit publish. I would encourage you to foster and internal environment for blogging on your intranet. Have your outreach team set up their own team blog and establish an open-door policy for questions. In practice, this team blog could pre-release any planned press releases for company comment.
With a platform to converse, your employees will ask and answer questions of one another. And you will start to see trends. This is where your organization must embrace the Enterprise 2.0 Life-Cycle internally to become a more collaborative workforce. The life-cycle is Evaluation, Implementation, User Management, Training, Evolution, and finally revolution.
Your workforce will help you evaluate what the needs are in order to grow from a pilot collaboration platform into the enterprise implementation of more tools to compliment their behaviors. As you bring on more tools you will be able to customize them to the needs of how your employees are using them. Overtime you will train your employees on how to replace their old behaviors with new ones using new collaborative tools. Not everyone in your organization knows how to deal with technology as you do, so you must prepare to work with your workforce to evolve them in to the new way.
Eventually this all becomes more natural and just how the way things are done. Leading to the revolution. This is not a new concept just a new way of interpreting what we all have seen happen. We have transitioned from typewriters to word processors to computers and from rotary desk phone to multi-line phones to VOIP, cellular, and smart phones. With the introduction of each, we had to learn a new behavior in how we used them to conduct business.
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Jennifer Leggio, aka "Mediaphyter," writes about the "social business" side of social media - including enterprise, security and reputation issues. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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