Sometimes the seemingly small story that has the biggest impact. Bevin Hernandez story of Penn State's outreach organization let us in on some important perspectives about moving an organization to collaboration. Bevin presented today at the end of a morning tutorial session at the first San Francisco Enterprise 2.0 conference.
The first part of the session, co-chaired by the capable Oliver Marks and his colleague Sameer Patel (now new business partners) was focused on identifying key elements to the process of "selling" Enterprise 2.0 to executives. These were classic strategic business project selling and proposal techniques adapted for Enterprise 2.0; helpful, but not, perhaps, groundbreaking.
The Penn State story, however, was compelling. Bevin and her colleagues were tasked with not only implementing a collaboration platform, but breaking through a culture that was fractured, protective of turf, deeply compartmentalized and unengaged. (not so unusual, no?).
The first part of the process, according to Bevin, was moving solidly into the Web 2.0 realm...no small incremental steps, or as Bevin quoted Nicholas Negroponte - "Incrementalism is the enemy of innovation."
To this end, the Penn State team chose ThoughtFarmer as their platform. In a way, that was the easy part; its' ease of use and ease of deployment was apparently a factor.
Here's some things they did to move the culture as well.
Building from a small team to a network effect: Bevin and two other colleagues focused their communications and outreach effort from a tight team of three people and built their "network effect" towards change from that point.
Tantalizing and engaging communications: As the launch of the collaboration solution approached, they created intriguing communications pieces that focused on emphasizing the people, talents and background of the collaboration community.
Barn-raisings and volunteer recruitments: The Penn State collaboration team reached out to the entire organization recruiting for needed skills and resources that could be allocated on a spot basis to help load content and expand outreach efforts. This created buy-in and commitment early on, and established a second level of a core group that could help facilitate participation as the community evolved.
Let it Be: For Bevin and the Penn State team it was as much about the technical solution as moving the culture from "Me to We" and allowing the collaboration environment to develop more organically than the typical business process application rollout. They encouraged and supported a sense of trust, openness, ease of participation.
Low Tech But Effective: The collaboration implementation team created a professional development series of printed briefings about effective ways to use and become comfortable with collaboration and Web 2.0 technologies.
In the early days of Enterprise 2.0, (a mere two years ago), stories of engagement centered around cowboy tales of a cadre of bleeding edge technology movers and shakers implementing at the outer rims of the organization. Now, as Enterprise 2.0 moves across the chasm, there's more discussion about deploying Enterprise 2.0 solutions as another enterprise application, with all the attendant issues of integration, interoperability, switching costs, etc. What's often missing is recommendations on how to move the culture into collaboration.
Bevin Hernandez' Penn State story was a refreshing tale of engaging people directly with a gentle but focused approach at transforming behaviour and practices as a key part of implementing E 2.0 in their organizations.
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