Falling Into Old Habits
July 19th, 2007by Jeremy Thomas
I’ve made a lot of effort in promoting Enterprise 2.0 and in using E2.0 technologies in the workplace. I discussed in an earlier post how my team uses blogs to communicate ideas about technology trends. And we are starting to use wikis and social bookmarking internally.
But I must say my natural inclination is to write and email MS Word documents - especially when it’s crunch time and the rest of the team can care less about Enterprise 2.0 - we need to make a deadline. In fact, I’ve noticed that in the face of pressure people tend to abandon Enterprise 2.0 all together and fall back on communication methods they’re used to. Everybody uses email, everybody is expected to respond to email, and a lot of important work gets done via email.
I suppose the point is cultural change is hard. It’s hard not to fall back on old habits. But I suppose to make this work I need to be stern and fight my inclinations.
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July 19th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
The cultural change has to be supported by technology to make it work.
What we really need is to figure out what people does in such an event, and think of the possible functionalities that we can possibly integrate/create to enhance the Enterprise 2.0 (or sort of like bridging the gap) experience. Google is doing that with their online free solutions (Google Docs and etc..) so you ever only need to open up a browser. The WIKI, Blogs and etc are still segregated by their own.
Imagine a iGoogle-like enterprise app where all information are subscription-based and shown on gadgets (including emails!!!!). You can reply and do emails on the run in an app like that (since it provides instant access). In fact, iGoogle does just that for gmail and I only use it till today to check updates. A RESTful design of the entire app allows that.
I guess the real and biggest challenge in promoting a cultural change is exactly how well that change can be supported by technology.