Mine, Mine, Mine....

We had an interesting class last week on Enterprise 2.0 and the adoption of social oriented tools for companies and organizations.  It was interesting to do some research on the transition from focusing on technologies, platforms and workflows to enabling innovation, collaboration and processes centered around people.  This adoption, of course, is being accelerated by the widespread use of consumer focused social technologies.  The new work force is not asking for the adoption of these tools and humbly waiting for their incorporation, they are demanding them and if they are not available, well, there is always options like your competition.  New technologies are being built from the ground up around collaboration (sort of a social DNA).  This is driving the legacy vendors focusing on document and content management to become more social.  The space is getting increasingly fragmented and confusing with IBM’s Lotus Connections and Microsoft Sharepoint layering on collaboration and social networking features, the social platforms like Telligent and Jive offering a suite of tools and sophisticated analysis around collaboration and content while the more point  oriented solutions like SocialText and Yammer are deepening and extending their offerings.  There is even a whole slew of pundits focusing on development in this space. Dion Hinchcliffe now at the Dachis Group is doing some pivotal work in getting enterprises ready for the wave of new collaborative tools and work processes. With all this momentum around application enabling innovation and collaboration, a majority of companies are adopting these technologies at glacial speed.  One answer could be the relative maturity of the industry. A continuously changing landscape does not make for rapid decision-making and deployment.  Another answer might be in the metrics.  We know this very well from our social media analysis class at CMU.  Companies are trying to understand how to effectively measure consumer focused social media campaigns to provide the necessary justification to allocate required budgets and resources.  The metrics and timeline for evaluation differs significantly from previous campaigns so there is a paradigm shift happening.  Within the enterprise, the metrics to evaluate success (innovation, process improvement, resource reduction, etc) are also being re-evaluated associated with a more collaborative organization.

I believe one of the primary reasons these enterprise tools are not getting adopted rapidly is not based on the availability of tools, integration timeline into current platforms or collaboration/social processes but the shift in focus around individual effort and achievement.  Let me explain.  In many companies, tacit knowledge is viewed as an asset, tightly controlled by individual employees since it provides accolades, control and staying power.  “We can’t fire Bob because he is the only one who knows how to successfully run the work process”: hence Bob has job security.   Also, Bob gets rewarded based on his accomplishments to a large extent so there is little motivation for Bob to share his knowledge and a disincentive for Bob to spend a great deal of time on collaboration.  This type of thinking (culture of I, greed is good, whats mine is mine, whatever) needs to change to a culture of sharing for collaboration to firmly gain ground and it all starts with compensation.  Whether we like it or not, this is the biggest motivator.  You can want employees to “do good” for altruistic reasons till the cows come home but ultimately it won’t be put into practice until it directly impacts compensation.  What this means is a change in placing collaboration activities into an employee’s job reqs and reviewing an individual not on how they finished a project on time and under budget but how they used the community to achieve it.  Social oriented compensation schemes need to reflect a person’s contribution to their immediate groups/teams.  Perhaps the next generation of social software will directly spit out reports that managers can review reflecting a person’s collective contribution and then this will be used for assessment.  Once this gets put into lace we will see more widespread adoption of these practices and collaborative tools…