Problem and Process rather than Incentives for E2.0 Tools
Over on Quora, Ben Lopatin @bennylope has a best-answer to a question on the best ways to incentivize people to use E2.0 knowledge management and collaboration.
- Focus on the problem for which the tools are to be employed.
Most people don't care about enterprise wikis, they care about being able to do their jobs, - Provide people with a working demonstration of an existing business process.
- Actively help people figure out how their processes, tasks, etc, can be accomplished with the new tools
- Get people up the ladder using the new tools.
. if you want to achieve pan-organization adoption you need leadership to show that they're using it, too. - Be careful about overestimating how easy the tools are for everyone.
And not just the interfaces, but changes in underlying concepts.
I wish I had an Blog1326: Emergineering! badge to put on this answer because it captures the essence of understanding the problem and underlying process, figuring out how to address it in a way that enhances productivity, and finally getting the organization around the new approach.
I'd also hand out the badge to Catherine Shinners @catshinners for amplifying the benefits of social process transformation.
In her notes from the E2.
There are specific benefits of a social business process:
- immediacy - better access to the information
- serendipity - enabling discovery of new information
- transparency - supporting honest and ethical behavior through openness
A business process does not become social simply because it's in a social network.
- unstructured processes – the opened ended “hey I've got a question does anyone know the answer” or easy invitational “why don't we?” kind of interactions
- semi-structured – direct queries to engage a constituency or cohort in a group conversation or comment about artifacts i.
e. , “please review or provide feedback” - structured – business process workflow kinds of structure “approve my expenses - request time off”
Beyond simple productivity gains of moving process from email and the water cooler to E2.