On the same day we had our seminar, I went directly to my company’s boss – who happened to also attend the seminar I was talking about in my last post.
My intents here were simple : Get a candid view and eventually to start getting ready the field for our OWN implementation!
Unfortunately, he hadn’t seen the whole pitch (can’t blame him – a CO line of work hardly allows sitting down for hours listening to someone explaining concepts) – so some work had to be done – and that’s within the allotted amount of time he could spare for me.
So when I came in his office, with all my high hopes and renewed interest in the matter, I was slightly put down when he merely brushed away the whole concept – and pretty much gave me the “unbeliever” look. “Nah.. I don’t believe in this whole 2.0 thing”
But Enterprise 2.0 is not a matter of faith ! It’s a matter of business and hard facts.
And his first rebuttal was actually my anchor : Basically, he was stating that he couldn’t get his employees (yours truly included) to file reports or transmit simple facts to the rest of the team. He gave me an example of what happened when one of our partner’s salesperson changed – and no-one was aware of this because the information wasn’t spread around. So his objection was : How can we expect our people to sign onto blogs, wikis and whatnot when we can’t even get them to fill in simple forms ?
So it hit me. This is *exactly* what 2.0 is about ! How can you expect a busy person to browse through a hierarchical file structure, find the right form, fill it with intricate and (mostly) useless details when all you are asked to convey is something it would take you 20 seconds to just “say”. The answer is simple : Just allow the people to enter their information the way they would “say” it! And leave it to the 2.0 tools to sort it out for you.
Not only is it more simple for the employee to fill some non-formal report – without having to search the whole internal document hierarchy to find the appropriate form (something that will never get done unless under duress), but instead just feed it to the information bin. The tool is there to classify this for you (and if you can give hints, so much the better !). And not only this, but when the critical piece of information has been fed into the system, it now becomes part of the whole. The next time someone needs to know about “Salespeople at partner XXXX”, not only do you get the latest news, but you also get *who* brought it up (and you may then be able to ask for more details if necessary)
So it goes from 10 minutes searching the forms, and 3 minutes filling in the form – for some information no-one will read to a 30 seconds quick type in a text box, adding a couple of tags – for some information that is easy to find and that can be relayed to you so you can give details if people are interested.
At this point, my boss started looking fairly intrigued. He hadn’t thought of it that way. He didn’t give me the go to start implementing a whole 2.0 infrastructure in the company. Although I might have convinced him – or at least – given him food for thoughts, there are other considerations to take into account (some way more political than I care to even think about !).
But it was a step forward !
–Ivan