“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” – H.L. Mencken
This quote is appropriate for so many things – including implementing Web 2.0 (or any other new) technology within an organization. As easy as many Web 2.0 technologies are (and more of them are supposed to be), implementing them successfully is neither simple nor easy. Here are some tips for making these tools work within your organization.
Social learning environments need to be seeded and weeded.
There is a myth that social learning grows spontaneously. A few stories have emerged of viral information spreading seemingly spontaneously on the internet. Star Wars kid became famous with a video he never intended anyone to see, and unintentional video fame became something to worry about. On the other side of that coin, thousands of people have created and uploaded youtube videos, hoping to become internet famous to no avail. Our YouTube video of The Training Word, in contrast, has gotten a whopping 152 views. In more than a year. (No comment on how many of those are my friends and family.)
Caterpillar has had some well-reported success with communities of practice. They have more than 3,000 topics, each with a subject matter expert who moderates the group because the information they exchange help them to do their day job. It might seem like spontaneous success – unless you look a little deeper and see that half a dozen people at Caterpillar have full-time jobs focused on making the communities successful.
Geeks will spend their free time building quality content. The number of geeks in your user pool will vary widely based on your organization.
Geeks are wonderful. They can be so passionate about their work that they lose track of the difference between work and fun. Remember the dot com start-ups with their workers sleeping under the desks? (Even before the IPO craze that made them think they were all going to retire at 32?)
Some organizations have a lot of geeks in them. Case in point – Intel created in internal wiki to capture knowledge. They were able to generate 20,000 articles in less than 2 years. They have 5,000 active authors, and up to 200,000 page views in one day. Others have fewer geeks. It’s a much safer bet to make sure the creation and maintenance of important information is part of people’s primary job responsibilities.
The right information is still hard to find.
A Google search for performance management will return more than 2.3 million results in less than a quarter of a second. Overwhelmed yet? The crazy pace of information has created a world in which supplying information is barely useful. I had an English class in college where the professor required all our pages be no longer than 1 page. That sounded really easy to my 19-year old self – until I tried to write one. We know from research that the more concise the instructions we give learners, the more likely they are to remember those instructions.
Not everyone will adopt new tools.
I have a very sharp and tech-savvy colleague at BLP who keeps telling me “I’m never joining your little birdie cult.” Which is fine. Unlike many other lists right now, I don’t see microblogging (Twitter, Yammer, etc.) as a particularly fabulous tool for formal corporate learning. Whatever new technologies you implement, it can take up to 18 months for your group to get up to speed. Some people will adopt quickly – but others will resist and for a variety of reasons. Plan that time into your learning curve, and you’ll save yourself a lot of grief.
The experts in your organization may not be who you think they are.
Rob Cross, a University of Virginia management professor, says the maps help firms uncover work-force dynamics hidden by organizational charts and performance reviews. He leads a group of around 100 companies testing network analysis, including Microsoft Corp. and Pfizer Inc. He recently asked employees of about 20 companies to identify colleagues who have helped them perform better; about two-thirds of the names weren’t on the firms’ previous lists of top performers, Mr. Cross says.
The good news is that Web 2.0 tools give you an opportunity to learn who these people are. But they won’t come out of the woodwork by magic – you have to be willing to pay attention to where the value is being added.
Experiments don’t necessarily make good strategies.
It’s important to experiment with these technologies. You’ll see some of our experiments coming online in the next week or so, with a couple of podcast formats hitting this blog for your enjoyment. As this presentation notes, though, there is a lot to think through before taking an experiment and implementing it throughout an organization. New technology toys can be fun to play with long before you figure out how you’re going to moderate, measure and administer wide-spread adoption throughout your organization. But the reality is, if you don’t have a strategy to deal with all of those, as well as other issues like instructional integrity and user experience, your implementation is going to go poorly.
What tips and tricks have you picked up in your experience that you’d like to share?
