London Part III of III - Commitment Counts

On the last night of my trip, I grabbed Sushi dinner with a customer and Suw Charman. Suw is a Corante analyst, author of Strange Attractor and author of Dark Blogs Case Study 01 - A European Pharma Group. Conversations ran the gamut as they should when a virtual colleague is first met in person. Among other things, Suw briefed me on the Open Rights Group, which she heads in her copious spare time, and, we exchanged ideas on social software adoption. We are both steeped in various implementation projects and have seen some similar, some divergent trends. What's clear is there are no hard and fast rules, but lessons to learn from each deployment.

Mike Gotta lays out three major technology adoption factors which include "organizational (social), business (process) and IT (infrastructure)." This is a useful model, especially when all three factors are taken as interdependent.

For example, supposing you want to post project status reports to your boss, you need agreement from the team that everyone will blog reports, process alignment to ensure that the information will flow properly up and across the corporate food chain to the right people, and IT facilitation to enable e-mail notifications for those who prefer their e-mail boxes to RSS feeds.

Suw and I focused on the Social factor and first debated the two usual deployment models: Top down vs. grass roots. Top down requirements can be suppressive, I suppose, but offer instant alignment throughout the organization and increase chances for success. Top down efforts can come with the encumbrance of requiring worker overhead and solving problems for management rather than day to day business process. Grass roots efforts, when they take off, provide increased self-satisfaction for the "do-ers" and may be likely to solve business process problems for those behind the effort.

The problem with grass roots efforts, however, emerges ugly head when stakeholders (upwards or downwards from "the grass" in the organizational hierarchy), don't align with the process introduced by the effort.

Participation in the social networking software platform (be it blog or wiki or workspace) does not require a commandment from the boss (top down), but it does require commitment on the part of the stakeholders who benefit by, need awareness of, and must interact with the information entered into the platform. Otherwise, the social platform isn't social at all.

The grass roots + organizational commitment model is not the best or only approach, but it certainly aligns the social adoption factors in a way that are likely to facilitate rather than conflict with the process and infrastructure factors.