Enterprise 2.0 Isn't a Checklist

The FASTForward blog posted a nice perspective on "Enterprise 2.0" that deserves a look. Yes, this term (and the pursuit it represents) has its own set of risks, but it also embodies a shift in corporate climate that deserves clear focus and understanding. Summing up the purpose, Paula Thornton writes:

So what IS Enterprise 2.0 focused on? People: tapping the human potential, helping to change the way business gets done by optimizing it not to the systems but to the people. Not shaping the people (via training and documentation) to the systems and the business, but changing the systems and the business to optimize the potential of the people.

Under the heading of "How to get to 'Enterprise 2.0'", the article goes on to describe a number of the critical success factors:

1. Truly Utilize Resources - Determine the typical scenarios for problem solving and recognize that departments or hierarchies do not hold the answers to business problems/issues: people do.

2. Shorten Distances - Simplify all aspects of "doing" business. Repeatedly ask: What can we stop doing? Leverage what's working (from the perspective of all individuals impacted, not just those with "management" responsibility to execute) - bypass the rest.

3. Embrace Organic - Organic is not chaotic. Nature has order, but that order is under rapid cycles of repeated construction and destruction.

4. Shift Focus - It's not necessary or beneficial to make things "binary". Good designers are comfortable with the "squishiness" of heuristics.

5. Shift Thinking - Design Thinking requires a different approach: it focuses on trying out multiple possibilities (fail fast) to test an algoritm - a problem statement. Many solutions fail because they either 1) started with the wrong question (the solution is the answer to the question) or 2) did not adapt to change the question (the problem statement) as more was learned along the way.

6. Shift Culture - A company that has been optimized for "machine" design (command and control), will have a culture that reinforces such behaviors. Such a culture will undermine E2.0 potential. It will seek to eliminate the efforts as a "foreign body". A different culture is not a prerequisite, it's a corequisite.

Some things to take note of.

Check it out at Enterprise 2.0 Isn't a Checklist