I had slightly mixed feelings about the Enterprise 2.0 conference last year, which I felt was far too vendor and technology-led and quite weak on adoption strategies and techniques
This year’s event has given us the chance to shape the agenda, with a survey that needs to be completed today in order to give the organisers a sense of what we want from the event
I have submitted a proposal for a specifically behavioural session on what we think of here as transition strategies for the adoption of social tools in the workplace. Hint: if you want to vote it up, you will find it on the first page of the survey
What do we mean by transition strategies? Essentially, our starting point is often to work out how to enable people to do what they already do, but using different (social) tools, in order to create a bridge between existing and new ways of working. I plan to outline the most effective ones we have used, with examples of how they are working (or not!)
For example, in the adoption of Enterprise RSS (a topic I shall return to shortly), we often advocate giving senior people Blackberry RSS clients very quickly to build on their existing patterns of Blackberry email use, and then to gradually expose the additional features and affordances of RSS clients when they begin to see the improvement in information quality and relevance over email
Another example is the use of newsletters and internal briefings within companies. We sometimes try to build newsletter-type functionality based on wikis (for drafting) and blogs (for publishing), but at least initially based on existing workflow until people become comfortable with this more lightweight and connected way of working
There are many more examples, some really on the micro-level, and whilst they are not rocket surgery, we believe they are important for adoption strategies in the real world. It all comes down to our ethos of mapping the features of existing use cases to the behavioural characteristics of social tools (catchy, eh?!)
So take a second please to let us know whether this is of interest at such an event, and also have a look at some of the other great session proposals from Jevon, Peter Kim, Ross Mayfield and many others
And then hopefully see some of you in Boston!