Enterprise Initiatives

I have written about my experiences implementing Web 2.0 in the work place and the initial reactions to the technology when I first mentioned it. My architecture team has been piloting Mediawiki as our wiki for several months and have been testing Wordpress as our blogging software. Last week we launched both of these tools to the company. We restricted the blogs to the architecture team as a vehicle for communicating our vision, progress, and lessons learned for our BPM/SOA initiative. After only one week, here is what I have seen.

Adoption has been relatively slow (as expected) but people are starting to collaborate with us through blog comments. They are asking questions which gives us an opportunity to further clarify the direction of the BPM/SOA initiative. Several people have now come forward and asked us for their own blog to communicate the status and direction of their projects. I can already tell that over the next few months the wiki and blog usage will sky rocket which should greatly improve our ability to communicate more effectively to large audiences.

My company is working hard to optimize business processes and bring more modern tools and technologies into the organization. Some areas are further ahead then others. One area still far behind is user documentation. We still do the 1980's thing and create huge manuals in large clumsy binders and hand it to the end user. The end users of many of our systems today are mainly comprised of Gen-Y people. One of them was recently handed a huge binder and responded by saying, "Do you really think people learn this way?" That sent a clear message!

So as my title suggests, when it comes to Web 2.0, or if you prefer, Enterprise 2.0 technologies, Just Do It. Trying to explain the ROI or justify costs with Baby Boomers is a tough sell. Some of the best tools are open source and require very little time to setup. Get the tools implemented and in the hands of the users. Unless your workforce is mainly older, you should see rapid adoption of these tools. Just Do It.