In my studies of Enterprise 2.0 adoption, there are two major methods by which these new applications take hold. ^{link »}

The first is the traditional model where the IT department or some part of the business decides at a high level to adopt these new tools and begins the process of evaluation, acquisition, deployment, training and adoption. This is the traditional model that most IT large-scale software acquisitions still use today. ^{link »}

The other model is where individuals take it upon themselves to find the best solutions to a given problem at hand and solve them creatively and collaboratively at a grassroots level. This is becoming increasingly more common, particularly in organizations that are less strongly hierarchical and I’ve identified this story in many large organizations, from AOL’s stunningly rapid viral adoption of MediaWiki (the open source platform that runs Wikipedia) to the story of a large utility company getting ready to roll out Enterprise 2.0 only to find that the majority of departments had already adopted a solution on their own. ^{link »}

we seem to be coming from a push-based era of command-and-control management and are heading into an era where more and more work is being conducted using a decentralized pull-based model that’s more scalable, efficient, and leads to increasingly innovative outcomes. ^{link »}

The results of pull-based software models ^{link »}

Ad Hoc Processes and Problem Solving. While prescribed policy and procedures will always have a place, workers on the ground often need to make on the spot decisions and develop their own solutions to problems as they occur rather than waiting for one to be developed. Enterprise 2.0-enabled environments can give workers access to the right information and talent to solve their problems and enable solutions. ^{link »}

Cross-Pollinating Innovative Methods. Pull-based systems are good an enabling innovation, particularly across what are known as weak ties in far flung parts of an organization. Enterprise 2.0 tools are good at flatting the organizations and leading knowledge stream from every corner, allowing the sharing and leveraging of ideas not possible before. ^{link »}

Competition-Driven Outcomes. In the top-down hierarchical model of management, there is less competition for ideas, solutions, and especially software. In a decentralized, bottom-up environment, multiple solutions can emerge and the best ones can win. ^{link »}

Pervasive Social Computing Interactions. We are just beginning to understand how social computing is transforming the work landscape, as it already has the consumer world. A highly social enterprise seems to enable a higher level of collaboration, communication, organizational awareness, which leads to the improvement of processes depending upon these activities. ^{link »}

Situational Software Solutions. Self-service is a classic hallmark of 2.0 solutions. The organic use of blogs and wikis to create simple dashboards and mashups is a commonly recurring theme in organizations deploying Enterprise 2.0 tools. Now, more and more businesses are looking at the potential for putting software creation directly into the hands of workers to enable solutions to be created for business situations as they occur. ^{link »}

tags: mar 09, blogs.zdnet.com

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