Saw an excellent post today published yesterday by Seth Gottlieb, founder and principal of Content Here. Gottlieb was at the Enterprise 2.0 conference at published some observations and suggestions on how to accelerate user adoption in the enterprise:
I heard several times at the conference that knowledge management is 90% people and 10% technology but what I didn’t see was how to get people to step up and deliver their 90%. Most of the ideas that I heard were around making it easier. I think that the secret to Enterprise 2.0 is how to make collaboration and knowledge sharing more personally rewarding. That is where I think we can learn the most from Web 2.0 (more so than with the mechanics of blogs, wikis, and tagging). People out on the web want to publish and put in extra effort to get their contributions noticed. Maybe companies should create their own internal information economies that reward employees for creating content that other people want to read.
You should read the full post to absorb the gist of his argument, but I could not agree with him more and have to admit I had not looked at enterprise 2.0 tools and adoption in this way. Good stuff.
Incidentally, I was pleased to see that Gottlieb is somehow associated with Molecular. I referenced Molecular in a post back in September of last year. They’re part of Isobar which is a global interactive agency network. I still believe marketing will be the preferred gateway to the enterprise, depending on the industry, I suppose. Maybe it’s time to start looking at the IAs again…
The key to most contribution is the personal recognition one gets. This is typically pretty abstract (reads and references) and the new connections at conferences etc.
What’s interesting is in an enterprise setting these personal rewards are mixed with financial, career objectives as well tinged by orginisational politics. The combination is made all the more difficult because the population of readers constrained in size which effects the abstract rewards.
Still an interesting area that is important for deployment.