Enterprise 2.0: Great Advice on How to Get it Wrong from Andrew McAfee

What Not to Do if You Want to Implement Successful Enterprise 2.0 Solutions

I just returned from the 13^th annual KM World conference this week and listened to a really interesting keynote from Andrew McAfee (the "king of Enterprise 2.0" according to KM guru Tom Davenport).  McAfee summed up his talk with a list of basically how to get it Enterprise 2.0 wrong:

• "Declare war on the enterprise" - McAfee describes this as just "bad marketing."  If you are trying to roll out any new initiative, you are certainly not going to win friends and influence people if you declare that your new initiative is going to destroy existing ingrained organizational structures.  For example, adding social computing to your intranet does not mean that the org chart is going away.

• "Allow Walled Gardens to Flourish" - With this warning, McAfee echoes a principle that I have long advocated for SharePoint solutions if sharing, collaboration, and knowledge transfer are part of your organizational objectives. That is, don't allow the creation (by default) of separate inaccessible private team sites.  If sites are private by default, you are defeating the purpose.  I like to advocate "read access for all" as the default.

• "Accentuate the Negative" - In other words, spend all your focus on the potential risks associated with social computing.  McAfee argues that most organizations have not seen any of the possible bad things they imagined could happen with adopting social computing inside the enterprise and advices organizations to "stop obsessing about the risks" by making it easy to correct mistakes rather than super hard to make them.  I guess I agree in principle with this approach, though I do think that you've just got to pay attention to productivity issues and at least provide some guidelines and expectations.  (I read a small article in the print version of CIO magazine (November 15, 2009) this morning referencing a British study that said that employees who use Twitter and other social networks in the office are costing U.K. businesses more than $2.25 billion a year.  The estimated use is an average of 40 minutes per day, which adds up to a lost week per year per person.)

• "Try to replace e-mail" - To make his point here, McAfee quoted some fascinating data that basically says that in order to get mass spontaneous acceptance of a new technology it has to be perceived as being 10 times better than that which it replaces.  He used this argument to explain why Facebook is so popular - there was no easy way to communicate and collaborate with all your friends at once prior to Facebook - and why Tivos, which have an obsessed collection of devotees who say they could never imagine TV watching without it (including me), have not penetrated the market the way you might have expected given what amazing devices they are.  He basically concluded that that you can't necessarily assume you will replace e-mail with social computing.  Here's where you definitely have something to look forward to with the recently announced Outlook Social Connector.  This incredibly cool feature brings social views of colleagues directly into your Outlook inbox - in other words, displaying your colleague activity feeds (a new feature of SharePoint 2010) directly to your inbox.  The inbox is one of the primary "comfort zones" for knowledge workers and if you want to get the most out of new functionality, it helps if you can integrate it into a comfort zone application (the other big one is Microsoft Word).  Rather than killing e-mail, the Outlook Social Connector may be the perfect way to get the most out of emerging social computing technologies in the context of a technology that is so entrenched that it will be hard to imagine replacing or finding anything that is 10 times better.

• "Fall in love with features" - In other words, trying to do too much.

• "Over use the word social" - I love this advice.  Think about it - the last thing you really want to present to your executives is a new technology that you describe as a "social" application when their major objective is getting work done.  As he said, "Social scares executives - they think fantasy football, not making more widgets."

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I plan to finish reading McAfee's new book Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization's Toughest Challenges.  The book, though written by an academic, is practical and "consumable," backed by a lot of research and conversations in this fascinating and emerging space.

• Microsoft
• Andrew McAfee
• enterprise 2.0
• Outlook Social Connector