Enterprise Adoption

Cutting through Big Blue Tape, Management Innovation Exchange Hackathon

Conceiving an idea for transforming how people work in an organization can be challenging when it comes to redesigning the processes and resources involved, yet this shies in comparison to what it takes to encourage enterprise participants to adopt them as part of the normal process. A great deal on “this is how we work here” is embedded calcified in the culture, and it takes substantial work to transition to a new mode.

My interest in this space began in the mid-2000s which led to my book, Social Networking for Business, which focused on different models of collaboration, of community, and social interaction. Community adoption is a focused scale version of cross-enterprise adoption where there are entire ecosystems of communities; some of which, such as customer communities, may even be larger than the organization itself.

My years in enterprise transformation at IBM towards becoming a social business helped to reshape the foundations of the global organization. As part of the core team initially faced with encouraging adoption, we spent a great deal of time investigating and establishing what are now common standard practices for many other organizations and IBM customers. Much of this is recounted in the article we submitted to the Hackathon (see the first reference below) competition initiated by Prof. Gary Hamel‘s Management Innovation eXchange group.

This continues to evolve as organizations are evolving their perspective on the focal point of transformation itself: from individual tool tasks to people behaviors, and now to enterprise processes. In addition to this, the process for most organizations takes years of development. Therefore, this will continue to be a topic.