Quicklinks: Enterprise 2.0 adoption, Wikis at the core of collaboration suites

Today I’d like to share some of the most though-provoking articles I’ve read this week.  Several of them confirm trends I’ve been wondering about myself.  Let’s talk about them, shall we?

These first two clips give a great look at technology adoption and avoiding “silver bullet” thinking.  Enterprise 2.0 strategies are definitely going to help your company improve responsiveness and communication levels while saving costs.  This is probably in your company’s recession-proofing strategy already.  Take some tips from Stewart Mader on the diversified approach to E2.0 implementations:

Technology Adoption Mistakes & Managing Digital Nomads

They offer excellent advice on how to avoid these mistakes, and their best suggestion is to try multiple things at once. Don’t bet too heavily on one choice, and don’t focus too hard on making that one bet successful. The combination of hedging bets and giving each one breathing room gives people a chance to find the best uses, and grassroots adoption is much more likely to stick, and stay successful, in the long run.

- Stewart Mader, Future Changes

Wiki++ in 2009: Moving Toward Suites With Wiki at the Core

This isn’t the oft-promised “portal” of the ’90s – it’s something different, and better, because people have a much easier time with a tool that’s centered on one major capability, but can do other things as needed. Think of email: you can send a simple message to one person, but you can also attach a file, send to multiple people, etc. That flexibility is why email has become so popular, and its why wikis are poised to keep growing dramatically as well.

- Stewart Mader, Future Changes

This next article says to me “someone at Cisco read Wikinomics“.  Suddenly we’ve got 500 managers involved in decision making and strategy instead of ten.  Responsiveness levels are up! Competitive advantages abound.  Let’s each of us figure out how to get this sort of first-mover advantage as we head into the recession, shall we?

Cisco as an emerging Enterprise 2.0 case example

The bumpy part — and the eye-opener — is that the leaders of business units formerly competing for power and resources now share responsibility for one another’s success. What used to be “me” is now “we.” The goal is to get more products to market faster, and Chambers crows at the results. “The boards and councils have been able to innovate with tremendous speed. Fifteen minutes and one week to get a [business] plan that used to take six months!

- Jim McGee, FASTforward blog

This last one attacks some of the sacred cows of Enterprise 2.0 and posits a few emerging trends for next year.  Most poignant to me is the following bit about picking up side jobs as a means of diversifying one’s income and reducing the risk inherent in relying on a single paycheck.  I hope you and I both make it through 2009 with our jobs intact, but if we don’t it will certainly be nice to have a little cushion in the form of a side job or even a self-sustaining business.

Will Your Enterprise 2.0 even make sense in 2009?

In a sense, there are no layoffs in the 2.0 era. You just reinvent yourself as a multiple-streams of income cloudworking professional. The people cloud lives in Starbucks, so even if they downgrade from lattes to regular brews, the coffee shop industry will revive and Starbucks especially will put its painful restructuring behind it. Of course, most of us have income portfolios skewed 90-100% in favor of one source, but still, these are better times to be thrown out of work than any other recession in history.

- Venkatesh Rao, Enterprise 2.0 blog

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