[After a couple of years attending the Enterprise 2.0 show in Boston I decided to save myself the hassle of traveling cross-country and skipped the show this year. Turns out it was the best Enterprise 2.0 conference to date. My colleague TJ Keitt thankfully did attend and sent along the following impressions.]

Being Boston-based typically isn’t convenient for an analyst covering companies that congregate in Silicon Valley, which explains why this blog’s regular author decided to pull up his stakes and head West. But last week’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference happened to be held in my fair city, allowing me to drive 15 minutes to meet with vendors that would ordinarily require a six-hour plane ride. After spending two days cruising the pavilion where vendors showed off their wares to a business world at once fascinated with and wary of social technology, Oliver asked me to share my impressions.

Going to this conference, what I really wanted to hear from vendors was how you go about convincing end users to take up your blog, wiki, social network, etc. This is a question that has been coming up more and more as companies shell out money for solutions that will ostensibly make their employees more collaborative, only to find that just a small sub-segment of the workforce is actively participating. It is particularly troubling for companies trying to move their workers off of social technologies that they do not control, like Yammer, and onto solutions that they do, like the vendors on display at Enterprise 2.0.

Coming into the show I didn’t feel that the vendors had a particularly good answer. Walking away I was left with much the same impression. There wasn’t a clear sense among the vendors as to how to spur adoption, and some of the answers they provided were wanting. For vendors who target lines of business in a bottom-up manner, their schemes for viral adoption work so long as users actually take to it and the IT department doesn’t eventually shut them down in favor of an enterprise-wide solution. For those with a more traditional IT-centric selling scheme, their reliance on corporate standardization on their offering works only so long as end users accept it and don’t have workarounds that they prefer. What I did not hear from these groups are the three things that I think are crucial to encouraging use amongst the rank and file:

1. Helping business leaders map out what specific business problem the tool will solve. What we typically hear from information and knowledge management professionals is that there is some corporate mandate to “be more collaborative.” So, someone is put in charge of finding tools to make this happen. But without a clear sense of what “be more collaborative” means in the context of the business, there is no clear vision of who will be affected by the tool, what issues they face in their work and where a solution can begin to help the workers. [Oliver: I could not agree more. I hear from WAY too many businesses who's stated goal is to "collaborate better"]
2. Providing assistance in re-engineering the business process that will be served by the tool. When bringing in any new technology and telling workers to use them in their job, you are mandating that they fundamentally change the way they work. This can be especially hard for someone who has become accustomed to doing something one way over the last ten years. A vendor could play a significant role here if they are willing to provide the professional services to help a client figure out how to tune the business process to naturally route people to the tool without completely disrupting their work.
3. Embedding the tool within areas that the information workers live. Going hand-in-hand with the business process re-engineering is having the tool attached to the applications that the workers use in the course of their job. This is what makes offerings like EMC’s CenterStage and Microsoft SharePoint so compelling – the social tools are linked to the content that information workers are using in their daily job. This makes the experience natural and part and parcel of the assigned task.

Now, I am not saying that I did not see any of these things in the tools that I viewed at Enterprise 2.0. Most of the vendors had a story around the third point, but I did not see the complete vision – tying all three of these things together. For the point solution vendors, this combination of smart sales, consulting and product design can go a long way toward making them relevant as we race toward Oliver’s “Day of Reckoning.” And what could create excitement among those of us somewhat jaded from hearing the same pitch over and over is vendors coming up with innovative ways to address those three issues to drive end user adoption.

[Give TJ a piece of your mind in the comments or at tkeitt [AT] forrester [DOT] com]

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