Six Steps to Company-Wide Adoption

Michael Idinopulos's Blog on Social Software in the Enterprise

Micheal has good explanation and a very realistic view about organization-wide integration and implementation of social software. He clearly explains why not one size fits all every time. As we have discussed before in this blog - technology is not the solution to our challenges, utilizing the technology in the best manner is.

Technology is evolving as we talk right now. Micheal tell us that the focus was on individual technologies (wikis, blogs, RSS, etc.) a year ago. However, the system is bending towards technology revamp as a whole in an organization. But this " Big Step" demands big efforts and a lot of strategic planning. Micheal gave us a brilliant example of US Presidential campaign - you're not really running one national campaign, you're running 50 state campaigns...or 5,000 regional campaigns. Each of those campaigns has its own local leadership, demographic profile, issues, and economics. The same line of thought applies to the change that comes with company wide adoption of technology.

Micheal's six pieces of advice to successfully implementing social software on a grand scale are :

1. Encourage a broad range of use cases.
2. Recruit energetic champions across the organization.
3. Launch the tools with hands-on experiences for new users.
4. Route repeated activities through social software.
5. Integrate with existing systems of record.
6. Leverage public communities.