The Adoption of Enterprise 2.0 - wildfire or slow burn?

Suw Charman-Anderson blogs about an Andrew McAfee observation at Enterprise 2.0:

Andrew McAfee asked a deceptively simple question to a panel at Enterprise 2.0 last week, "If Enterprise 2.0 tools and approaches really are so beneficial and powerful, why haven’t they spread like wildfire?" He was surprised that no one fingered management as the culprits.

In their initial responses all of them identified users, not bad managers or inadequate technologies, as the biggest barriers to faster and deeper adoption of Enterprise 2.0. Entrenched practices and mindsets, some degree of technophobia, busyness, and the 9X Problem of email as an incumbent technology combine, they said, to limit the pace of adoption. These factors slow the migration from channels to platforms and necessitate continued patience, evangelism, and training and coaching....

....That is in fact what they were telling me, and I didn’t get the impression that they were just being diplomatic. They said that managers were just another category of users that needed to migrate over to new ways of working, and not anything more. In other words, the panelists hadn’t seen managers in their organizations actively trying to impede Enterprise 2.0.

Now Suw has written an interesting take on her blog on the failures of Managers which is well worth a read. I'd like to defend them a bit here in response, as we have worked with many CIOs over the years (even ones putting in Enterprise 2.0 tools) and know them to by and large be interested in new technology but also diligent and careful. We did a survey for a client earlier this year on adoption of a range of new technologies (incl E2.0). Some findings that may be relevant here are:

(i) SOHO/SMEs are adopting more than large corporates, faster, mainly due to cost benefits rather than any inherent superiority.

(ii) In quite a few cases the tools are felt to be less robust than commercially available ones - and the O/S support model has its limitations in real operating environments, which worries CIOs who are on the hook for reliability, uptime, data security etc as well as functionalty. Can you imagine basing your UC strategy on Twitter for example? Great functionality, lousy uptime.

(iii) Many larger companies already have existing "good enoughs" - ie why would the IT support X 2.0 when they already support say Lotus Notes. Especially as Notes comes with SLAs

(iv) Most of the CIO's we met were not against E2.0 per se, but as Ian Betteridge noted in the comments on Suw's article, they are very interested in ROI - and that's total lifecycle ROI - and are worried that they have to fill in the support costs as so little is provided by the (small, often flaky) supplier companies.

(v) CIO's have to manage risk and balance the risk of not doing the New Thing soon vs the risk of going down the wrong path too soon. The wrong path cost is often huge, so they tend to hold back until some form of standard / consensus emerges.

(vi) In fact what CIOs wanted was more unbiased information on what works, what doesn't etc - they felt that there was a lot of hype out there and not a lot of fact backing much of it up - bitter experience tells them to do small pilots in areas where they can see a real need, and wait and see what survives the initial hype.

If you look at the latest adoption predictions by Forrester, Gartner, Analysys etc you can get more nuances of this sort of view too. Companies are not against the new tools, but typically its not the most pressing need they have right now. The CIO game theory here is simple - failure to adopt potentially useful new technology fast enough = lose a bit of karma with the Digerati, whereas failure to keep the infrastructure delivering BAU reliably = lose job. Game over.

Also, most CIO's have been around the block often enough to know that fast following with stuff that works pays off better than very early adoption.

Our take - its easy and convenient to blame managers, (and it was ever thus, just as it was ever thus that there are consultants beating the drum - MRP, ERP, 4GL, CRM...the list goes on) but their barriers to adoption are both rational and systemic. In fact, as one of the commentators observed this systemic replacement has been noted before in technology adoption:

The 15 year adoption rule for technologies has been mapped to introduction of: relational databases, 4GL, client-server architectures, case tools, mobile computing and many more. There are academic studies that might be of interest (it's not an arbitrary "rule" like sod's law or the peter principle).

Its also easy and convenient to exonerate users, or paint them as the go-ahead groovy types fighting against The Man and The System - but we've been implementing technology in enterprises for c 20 years now, and like anyone who has done this for a while we can bore for England on how impatient / ignorant / self serving / stupid / negligent / arrogant / well meaning / ordinary (insert your epithet) users can really f*ck up even the simplest systems - and there are a lot of them (yup, and some of those users are Managers ), and one tends to forget most are not Digerati - heck, most of them only use Apples for iTunes

And don't even mention all the virusses the little bleeders introduce into the company networks if you don't lock their systems down

Boring, I know, but our findings match those on the panel.

(Afterthought - there is a whole 'nother issue I want to write about regarding social media in Enterprises, and how enterprise real life social networks, which are hierarchical, do not map to the ones modelled in consumer Socnets, but that is for another day)