What Can I Learn From the Meeting With IT? A Cultural Change Is Necessary!

The meeting with IT department brought up some interesting thoughts and potential roadblocks I did not think about. But the contribution was very helpful on my way to create awareness for the necessity for enterprise 2.0 in my company.

After a short introduction about what I am out for, it was once again amazing for me how much is already there! Isn't that a sign for a big breakthrough that is shortly before happening? The colleague from IT just nodded to all the points I made. He has the same opinion. One more supporter joins!
He showed me that a prove of concept has been done for a new version of the intranet based on web 2.0 technology including blogs, social networking and category based content search. The concept was presented across the company and agreed to be very supportive to forster collaboration and information sharing. He even told me that our CEO was very open for these kind of approaches. Everybody agreed that even one design error that could be prevented in a product development would pay off the investment for the new intranet concept. The complete implementation takes about half a year. So there should obviously be no doubts, right? Unfortunately no budget was given to the project yet. How can this be I asked. Then we discussed about issues seen and that there is still a good way to go - it is really a cultural change that is and has to take place.Of course there exist people who are more pro-active with sharing knowlege even if it takes some effort and some who are less pro-active. But some employees see knowledge sharing as a threat. They try to build up knowledge as a competitive advantage against other colleagues. Isn't that a logical result from the leadership style and rigid structures built on distrust? Is it because of a bad personality of these people or more because of the hostile environment for collaboration? Managment and leadership is a good keyword. Jobrotation is in everybody's mouth and considered a good thing, right? Not everywhere! I was told that also some resistance is coming from leaders who are afraid of losing good people to other departments in the company. Is that the case? Does a collaboration tool really make the difference if somebody leaves for another job or department? And if people change positions, is that bad for the company? Also social networking is seen somehow problematic. Yes, you can find technical experts or people with information or tacit knowledge! But if they are asked to share this knowledge by other people, they are kind of working for other departments leaving a lower percentage of working resource for the department paying for them. This shows that also in the way companies are organized new ideas and approaches have to be found.
Especially blogging is seen problematic. Worries exist about opening a new communication channel for people to just complain about things or even post illegal contents. This means, an implementation of web 2.0 tools also poses a need for review of contents. Additional manpower and ressources are necessary to achieve that.

Apart from all these challenges one message clearly shows that the whole topic of social collaboration is heavily evolving: within my company more than 20 from one another independent Wikis were created!! There is a huge amount of energy that tries to bubble up! But clearly ways have to be found to foster and remunerate solid contributions in order to boost Wikis and blogs with contents. E.g. Microsoft has variable pay of their evangelists partly based on number and content of their posts. Incentives could work as well.

All in all the support and positive responses I got so far provide me with more and more energy to move on with that idea of creating awareness for the need of enterprise 2.0.

First Steps

Preparation of my presentation to the executives
After reading Denning's book, I tried to put together a presentation for the business unit manager in my company. I put a first draft on our MBA google sites collaboration platform and got some very valuable feedback from our course instructor of the soft skills & leadership qualities class (thanks Charles!!). These will flow into the next version. While looking for available information on enterprise 2.0 I am really amazed how much is already out there!

Do you know, what blogging, tagging, social networks and mashups are about? What amazing things can be done with them? Can you imagine how much energy is emerging in collaborative networks?


First approaches in my company
Speaking with colleagues about my idea, I was surprised how easy it was to convince them and get support. A lot of them see the necessity of collaboration and welcome my approach a lot. They even already come up with ideas about how or where to use it. My department manager supports my as well and encourages me with it.
In order to have a more solid bases for my idea and presentation, I called IT to find out, which web 2.0 technologies are supported. And I was surprised again! Guess what? There is already a "media wiki" implemented and running by our R&D departments in Austria, which is officially supported by IT! Next week, I will have a meeting with the eCommerce manager from IT and discuss what else is already supported in our company. That makes it a lot easier to convince the management board, as the efforts for implementation are minimal. With a colleague of mine, inspired from what I showed him, we already came up with the idea to set up a blog for external customers. This would give us the possibility to have a closer contact and find out about their issues and ideas about our products. Additionally this would give the company a more personal face.
Stay tuned, I keep you posted. It's already starting to take off!!

Motivation

Easy collaboration and exchange of knowledge are central topics to deal with future challenges for companies and leaders. The use of web 2.0 technologies is the first step to a co-creative working community.

How are enterprises affected by these changes? What effect does that have on leadership?

Reflecting on future leadership attributes during my MBA studies, I decided to take the challenge to introduce a wiki in my department and roll it out to the complete business unit. This is my personal contribution to change my company into a co-creative working community. I want to use this opportunity to test out my leadership abilities using Stephen Dennings approach of "inspiring action through the narrative" (ISBN-13: 978-0787987893).

I invite you to participate on my journey to find out how to drive change in today's companies.