Social Software in Business - An adoption strategy:
Installing social software in a variety of companies - as a consultant...
As a social software consultant Suw goes into organisations to fix "socially broken" social software applications - how to get people to use it.
Trojan mouse method - bottom up approach...
Top down adoption..
Neither of the above strategies actually work on their own...
Need to consider more carefully about how to use the software - a series of steps to go through in organisations towards effective implementation:
1) Understand who your users are... identify specific user groups, common tasks eg. PAs doing lots of information organisation - mainly in email.... how can you pull it off email and put it into a wiki or blog. Find people who are capable of learning and prepared to change - willing to take a risk. Main block is accidental, fear of social humiliation.
2) How are you going to introduce them to the software: short ad hoc, f2f training sessions. Ah hoc support network to ask dumb questions - simple and easy - saves them from public humiliation (chat channel) or something similar. These people now become evangelists (super nodes) ...and future trainers...
3) Getting management buy in - focused on fear of loss of data... buy in from colleagues as well.
"Eat your own dog food!"
Adoption is not a goal in and of itself.
Parts of the organisation get in your way eg. IT, Marketing, Legal.
9 months after wiki installed - took 6 months to cover all the questions.
It's refreshing to hear that Suw's experiences and process link very closely to my practices and experiences in the organisational learning context and the use of social software as alternative learning process to augment the formal learning (or training). The barriers Suw cites replicate the inhibitors to organisational learning I presented in my paper at the DREAM conference in Denmark.
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