Part 3: What’s in the workflow is what gets used

Note: this is the third blog in a series reviewing each of the 6 pieces of the McKinsey Article “Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work.”

McKinsey’s third recommendations is “Participatory technologies have the highest chance of success when incorporated into a user’s daily workflow. ” Of all of the recommendations delivered in this report, this one I believe is the most important, yet most often overlooked recommendations that one can give regarding the implementation of Web 2.0 in the workplace. Web 2.0 in the enterprise already suffers from a stigma: “it’s not real work”. And, quite frankly, people have enough work to do without adding wiki contributions and writing blogs to the equation.  If you are going to deploy new tools (at least successfully), it is crucial that they be connected back to “real work” and not just added to the pile.

The Stigma

While most new tools have the difficult task of having to prove their worth over the tools that they replace, Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise have the added weight of being associated with the tools on the open Internet, knowing only horror stories and that these tools are largely by employees’ children. When you add this stigma to the fact that it’s just seen as another thing to do in a long busy day, it’s hard to escape the illusion that Web 2.0 is just a new way to distract employees from their job.

It’s about replacing processes

In order to fully realize the value of Web 2.0 tools in the workplace, people have to use the new tools to actually do their work. If you just impose the wiki as another duty, adoption’s going to be low. This is the classic problem for knowledge management platforms: It’s easy enough to contribute, but it still requires people to do extra work, so you get less than ideal adoption.

This means during the roll out, the benefits of a wiki need to be communicated to the workforce: How can it help them do their job significantly better and/or faster? How can social bookmarking help reduce email and improve people’s access to information?  How is wiki collaboration better than collaborating via email?  While the previous recommendation stated that organizations should let users decide the best way to use the new tools, organizations will need to communicate the realm of the possible to the potential audiences. The goal should be to inspire users to change the way they do their jobs.