On an internal company blog this morning Scott referenced an article on The FASTForward Blog about the growing wiki culture at Jannsen-Cilag (luckily he’s also posted it on his blog). The article focuses on how the CIO has implemented a wiki as the corporate intranet and how it’s kind of sneaked under the radar of the employess and they just use it.
First off, that brilliant news. Nice to see some people taking a step in the right direction. Well I think it’s the right direction anyway. But it also got me thinking about the implementation of E2 within very E1 organisations.
The reason it got me thinking was because in the article it was the CIO who was responsible for the initiation. That’s someone who is quite senior, someone in a position of power, who made that decision. Now I’m a bit of a romantic at heart, wishing that implementation of E2 would all come from the bottom up. In that vein I’ve been pushing an internal blog for my department with some success. I started at the beginning of the year and the readership quickly grew to around 350 people per month. For the last few months though no matter what I’ve done I haven’t been able to get anymore people to get involved. Then I started to talk to someone in semi-senior management. They saw how passionate I was about this stuff and figured there must be something to it. They quickly got on board and in one fell swoop the readership of the blog went up by 100 people, the majority of who already knew about the blog. Brilliant news on the one hand but on the other it was a huge disappointment that these people didn’t feel they could blog without the “permission” of someone senior.
So I guess E2 will still suffer some of E1’s problems. Most people will probably still want to be led rather than lead. The learnings from this though…get someone senior on board with you ASAP. Approach things from various different angles, bottom up, top down, side to side and round and round.
2 Comments
Hi Daniel (got your name right now!),
You are right on the spot with the importance of management buy-in, given the impact that has on others!
Andrew McAfee once wrote about the Pursuit of Busyness, which echo’s what you are saying. In my comment on that blog post I said in response:
“So our strategy is really geared towards exploiting management buy-in signals whenever we can, besides the usual highlighting of beneficial user cases etc.”
Perhaps nice to share here that I started an internal weblog on Enterprise 2.0 in August 2006, trying the spread the message. My readership has climbed from 0 to around 350 uniques per month. One of the nicest things is finding a new commenter on the blog, being interested in E2.0. Then you know you have found another “node” to work with. But I still have another 120.000 persons to go! (I work for ING Group).
Best regards,
Marcel
(Shed – Altered so link displayed properly. Content remains the same.)
Hi Marcel,
I guess I’ve been trying to avoid involving management for a number of reasons but recently I’ve seen the benefit first hand of getting them on your side.
I’ve been nicely surprised by management lately. They are starting to get this stuff more and more and last thing on Friday I was CCed on a mail that senior management sent out encouraging the use of blogs across the department. I’ll probably blog about the content in the future but the line that I remember most is, “…it’s about time we looked beyond e.mail for communication”
So it’s still step by step but we’re getting there. It might take sometime but it’s worthwhile and it’s still a lot of fun.
Good luck on getting those other 120,000 on board. Imagine the sense of achievement when you do!
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