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.