Web 2.0 technologies are changing the ways companies do business. But can these tools help them achieve their goals?
In recent years, using technology to change the way people work has often meant painful disruption, as CIOs rolled enterprise software programs through the ranks of reluctant staffers.
Today, employees are more likely to bring in new technologies on their own — and to do so enthusiastically — through their web browser, whether it’s starting a blog, setting up a wiki to share knowledge, or collaborating on documents hosted online.
Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has been watching this shift closely.
His new book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges, explores the ways that leading organisations are bringing Web 2.0 tools inside. McAfee calls these tools “emergent social software platforms” — highly visible environments with tools that evolve as people use them — and he is optimistic about their potential to improve the way we work. McAfee spoke with McKinsey’s Roger Roberts, a principal in the Silicon Valley office, in Palo Alto, California.
How is Enterprise 2.0 changing the way we work?
I think it’s a lot closer to fitting into the way that we actually want to work. For me, it was really illuminating to understand the early history of Wikipedia. They always had the goal of creating an online, freely available encyclopedia. But at first, they thought the way to do that was to define a very precise, seven-step workflow of people — some of whom would be writers, some who would be editors, some who would be proofreaders — and to march everyone through that seven-step process. And they attracted almost no energy with that approach. It was only when they said, “OK, let’s forget all that. Let’s just set up this weird, new thing called a Wiki, an online whiteboard where anyone can do whatever they want. And we’re going to let people self-select into the roles they want to play, the content they want to create, what the articles can be about. And we’re just going to see what happens.” And what they saw happen was that people were extremely enthusiastic about coming together in this way and about doing whatever felt natural to them. What was amazing to them, and to me as I looked at it, was the quality of the output they got as a result. Wikipedia is not only huge, it’s actually not bad quality. And this is not something that I was expecting and that a lot of people were expecting.
How do you get this started in an organisation?
There’s a lot of debate about that question right now. And the debate is typically between people who advocate (a top-down approach and those who advocate) almost a purely bottom-up approach — in other words, deploy the tools, stop worrying about what’s going to happen, and get out of the way as the management of the company and let it percolate up from down below. Or, if you hear about a grassroots effort, encourage it, support it financially, but, again, get out of the way, let the bottom-up energy happen.
The other school of thought says that you need some top-down energy, or at least signalling — that this is appropriate, we want this to happen, this is in line with the goals of the organisation. And the top-down school of thought says if you don’t have those signals from the top of the organisation, people are going to sit on the fence for a long time and they’re going to wonder if this is a worthwhile use of their time, if it will increase their human capital in the organisation or not. And until they have clear answers to those questions, they’re going to do nothing, or they’re going to sit on the sidelines. I have a lot of sympathy for both approaches. I find myself agreeing more with the top-down crowd, though. We know how important it is for management to create culture and to signal what’s valued inside the organisation. These tools are not an exception to that; I think they’re a great example of it.
One of my initial assumptions was after looking at the web, you see the phenomenal growth of things like Facebook and Wikipedia and Flickr and YouTube and all that. I thought these technologies were essentially so cool that when you dropped them in an organisation, people flocked to them. That was the assumption I carried around in my research.
I very quickly had that overturned. And in fact what you see is — particularly for longer-tenured workers, particularly for older workers — this is a big shift for them, changing their current work practices and moving over to Enterprise 2.0. This is not an overnight phenomenon at all. And while there are pockets of energy, getting mass adoption remains a pretty serious challenge for a lot of organisations.
I’m a fan of: deploy the tools, talk a little bit about what you want to have happen, and then find pockets of energy, highlight them, discuss them, show the good stuff that emerges. And also, again, signal from the top that this is what you want to have happen.
So, when I see executives launch blogs, either internally or externally, I get pretty optimistic, because that’s a very clear signal. One of the things that makes me pessimistic, though, is when the blogs read like press releases and when they don’t, for example, turn on the commenting feature on their blog, so that it’s just another megaphone for an executive to shout at the organisation. There are plenty of those out there already, and people don’t react too well to that.
What else can undermine adoption?
[There are a] couple different failure modes that I’ve seen. One is the “if we build it, they will come” philosophy. Some enthusiastic people deploy some new tools, they come back and look around a couple months later, they don’t see really thriving communities, and then they say, “Well, we did an experiment. It was a failure, so we’re going to turn this stuff off and go back to business as usual.” They don’t have the patience to let people migrate over to the new way of working, and they don’t invest enough time in signalling that this is actually what we want to have happen. They don’t think enough about how to encourage use. Another failure mode is to be too concerned about the possible risks and the downsides. If we get wrapped up in those, we’re not going to take the plunge and actually deploy any of these new tools and turn them on and encourage people to go ahead.
Comments