It really does not matter what you are trying to achieve; whether implementing content management, search, portal or something “social”, the project is certain to face internal organizational challenges along the way and will require a level of organizational maturity in order to avoid complete failure. How do you figure out whether your organization is indeed ready for that big web technology initiative you are dreaming of?

Unfortunately the chosen route often turns out to be a “dead end”. Don’t expect any digital agency or other type of vendor to tell you that you are not ready to buy their solutions. Many buyers start the conversation with their vendors much too early in the process, naïvely hoping for some honest feedback. What normally happens is that the vendor challenges the buyer to define their functional requirements, while important aspects such as governance and organizational readiness are left unchecked.

If you suspect that your current agency is milking you for what you are worth, you may just be right. In fact, considering the scenarios at some of our members, I’ve sometimes thought that any other vendor or any other system would be a dramatic improvement on the status quo. Actually making the change is the difficult part.

If you are able to make the decision and change things on your own, then you belong to a tiny minority of online professionals. Most have to liaise with managers, other departments and a group of critical stakeholders often not placed in the same location. Moreover, getting the permission to go ahead with a vendor evaluation process is really only the initial and easy part of the project. The implementation is much more cumbersome and risky.

In my experience, typical indicators of organizational readiness include:

• a sizeable team of experienced online professionals, including at least one knowledgeable manager, ideally with strong project management skills
• a clear strategy for your online activities with success criteria and a clear vision
• a governance model that enables you to make decisions, including how to allocate resources, set priorities, definition of roles and responsibilities
• a few failed projects under the belt with organisational learning on how to prevent it from happening in future projects

Digital projects hardly ever come in on time and on budget. Add to that the factor that if the organisation is not ready for the change, a new technology or a new vendor could actually turn out to be a competitive disadvantage.

On several occasions, on this blog and elsewhere, I’ve discussed why and how culture matters for Enterprise 2.0 to happen. In my most recent posts, I’ve specifically discussed how certain values and cultural characteristics are pre-requisites for Enterprise 2.0 to happen:

• Why culture comes first and technology second
• Don’t expect too much from Enterprise 2.0

My main point is that there is no chicken or the egg situation: Sure, a culture change can be supported and accelerated by technology, but there must always be a spark somewhere – a culture or subculture (a social group that shares certain values and behaviors) – that initiates this change.

If you, like me, are interested in what makes collaboration tick and what it might take besides technologies to make Enterprise 2.0 happen, there are a few readings you should look into.

First, there’s a fascinating read by Rob Paterson about the new virtual workplace at IBM. To illustrate the culture shift that is taking place at IBM, he describes how my friend Luis Suarez can control his own time and work space. Location just doesn’t matter as Luis can work from anywhere at any time -be it at an airport, at an office, or at his home in small village on the Canary Islands. This is achieved by making sure he and his fellow 200 000 coworkers at IBM can be connected to each other and any colleague at anytime from anywhere. But technology is just an enabler of the new virtual work place. The key to make the new work place happen is, as Rob puts it, to “stop measuring presence – i.e. punching the clock as at a factory – and to start measuring results and outcomes”. Such a shift requires a real change in corporate values and behaviors.

Another great read is “Enterprise 2.0 initiatives and corporate culture awareness” by Gil Yehuda in which he shares some really good examples and counter examples of supportive cultures to help him make his point:

I say, the path to Enterprise 2.0 is paved on a supportive culture. If you don’t have a supportive culture, it’s nearly impossible to find real success with any social tools (beyond small scale deployments — which may be very successful for your team, but not at the enterprise level).

If you roll it out, don’t expect “they will come”. It’s not that simple. You have to tune into the underlying culture to see if it can support Enterprise 2.0. I believe some companies have a culture unwelcoming to Enterprise 2.0 — at least now. I also believe that in time this will change as a new generation of leadership emerges in the post-recession economy.

A different but very related perspective on how culture matters is provided by Tony H in his post “Your Culture is Your Brand” which explains how companies, like it or not, are becoming more and more transparent and that their brands are shaped by the sum of all interactions customers have with anyone at the company.

The fundamental problem is that you can’t possibly anticipate every possible touchpoint that could influence the perception of your company’s brand.

At Zappos.com, we decided a long time ago that we didn’t want our brand to be just about shoes, or clothing, or even online retailing. We decided that we wanted to build our brand to be about the very best customer service and the very best customer experience. We believe that customer service shouldn’t be just a department, it should be the entire company.

So what’s a company to do if you can’t just buy your way into building the brand you want? What’s the best way to build a brand for the long term?

In a word: culture.

“It’s standard practice at many companies to conceal information as a way of controlling employees – a formula that’s toxic to trust”

Gary Hamel

“In the knowledge economy everyone is a volunteer, but we have trained our managers to manage conscripts.”

Peter F. Drucker

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.
- MR. TAMBOURINE MAN

A change is as good as a holiday, they say. Well, after ten brilliant years at the company now known as LBi, it’s time for a change. I wasn’t looking for anything, but an opportunity came along that, had I turned it down, I’d probably regret for the rest of my life. More on this here; I plan to keep this blog going strong – time and lawyers permitting.

To all my LBi colleagues, thanks for the wonderful times, the beers and the things you’ve taught me. You’ve got an awesome gig going, and the road ahead looks rosy. In particular, thanks to the exec for their vision and guidance, the technical architects for all their wisdom, and my development teams for fucking up far less projects than the industry average.

To the Dream Team (@mislip, @laurajaybee, @dacrumb, @skinnybouffant and @shakster), congrats on a job well done and I’ll be watching a certain site with eager anticipation. And a huge huge thanks to my boss, Mark, for keeping me honest for the last few years.

To end my Paltrow-esque blubbering – to all my wonderful, well-informed clients that read this blog, thanks for letting me go near your projects, and for making most of the work a pleasure.

We’ll always have The Pride. It’s been real.

P.S. If anyone wants my old job (the best job at the best agency in London), mail careers@lbi.com for the attention of Mark Agar and the subject “I want Jon’s old job”. I’m serious.

Here are three authentic concerns from real world adoption of enterprise micro-blogging that my colleague Henrik Gustafsson has captured and which he also helped me answer. Some of these concerns might sound strange to long-time and frequent Twitter users, but you need to deal with these kinds of concerns when trying to facilitate broad adoption within an enterprise.

1. Platform hijack

“A few very active people have hijacked our internal micro-blogging platform”

Can a free and open platform such as a micro-blogging platform be hijacked by a few individuals?

My answer to this is no. And yes.

I answer no because the platform as such does not exclude people who want to participate. Anyone can grab the mike and join the conversation, or start a new one.

I answer yes because even though the platform does not impose any restrictions to participate, we might impose these kinds of restrictions by our attitudes and behaviors as individuals and/or collective. Though, the subjective feeling of not being included that some individuals might have does not necessarily mean that other people deliberately exclude them or don’t want them to participate.

The fact that some people are more active than others is no surprise and nothing strange. This is illustrated by the 90-9-1 principle, which claims that in social groups, some people participate more actively than others. Social participation tends to follow a 90-9-1 rule ((cc) Jake McKee & 90-9-1.com):

Everyone is free to participate if they want to, and choose how they want to participate. If someone just wants to listen, then fine. If someone wants to create, then just do it.

2. Emergent spam

”Some posts are beginning to look like spam.”

Does spam exist on a platform where it is each individual who chooses whom to follow and listen to, and where you can use tags to filter out the stuff that is relevant to you?

Yes, it does. Temporarily, until you adjust and fine-tune your filters. That is something you must learn to do, and to continuously. If someone you follow is mostly babbling about stuff you don’t really interested in, then unfollow that person. No damage done. Someone might start following you, and then choose to unfollow you. You need to do the same if you want to avoid a feeling of information overload (or spam if you like). That is the name of the game, and what you are doing is just calibrating your filters.

Anyone is free to opt in and opt out from any conversation that takes place in public. You need to choose which ones are important and valuable to you. No-one forces anyone to follow someone else. And you can’t (at least you shouldn’t) force anyone to follow you.

3. The risk of being misunderstood

“What if I will be misunderstood?”

All communication brings a risk of being misunderstood. That is because the purpose of the communication is to be understood. If the communication fails, it means per definition that you have been misunderstood.

The graphic “10 levels of intimacy” below by Ji Lee can be used to illustrate a communication continuum from the most intimate way to communicate to the least intimate.

The Big Shift cascades through all dimensions of our life. The Big Shift will also transform how we communicate with each other. We are moving from a world of deep analysis communicating explicit knowledge to a world of rich, personal narratives communicating tacit knowledge. Narratives powerfully help to shift perception from static objects to dynamic relationships.

Today, we tend to apply process thinking as a default ”solution lens” to all problems, failures and challenges we encounter, even those which cannot be solved by process. When we hear about a failure, we point at a it and shout ”process failure!” without even thinking twice. Or we shout ”technology failure!” because we knew technology was somewhat involved.

But what if it’s actually culture failure? How often do you hear anyone shout that out (”Guys, it’s culture failure!”) ? If someone point to culture failure, would you expect that person to try to do anything about it?

A culture failure is much more alarming and also much more unconfortable than a simple process or technology failure. It signals that something is fundamentally wrong, something which is very complex and hard to change. It means that you not only have to change your own attitudes and behaviors, but also those of your collegues, including management. You might need to change the entire incentive model, which in the end determines the bonus of your CEO. What is worse, you most likely also need to change the attitudes and behaviors of your CEO (”Impossible!”).

So what would most people do when they start thinking in the direction of culture failure?

Answer: They stop thinking in that direction.

The reason is simple; we prefer to see simple causes and to apply simple solutions, because then we can manage to do something about them. If not all by ourselves so with a reasonable limited team effort. If it gets too big, we try to forget about it.

This CIO article highlights 3 enterprise microblogging case studies – two of the case studies are about large technology companies (still interesting, but not necessarily reflective of everyone’s experience). However, the other example describes the experiences of St. Louis Public Radio in the US, which only employees around 33 staff.

For me this reflects my own personal rule of thumb that its not just the size of an organisation that makes enterprise social computing useful, but the structure of the organisation and how these different roles relate to each other.

While the marketing consultants focus on buzz and engagement, their in-house colleagues are trying to use social media to change how companies operate. The goal of Enterprise 2.0, a descendant of the “knowledge management” movement in the ’90s, is to reroute the information traveling through corporations, undermining rigid hierarchies.

Many argue that a fixation on hard numbers could lead companies to ignore the harder-to-quantify dividends of social media, such as trust and commitment. A Twittering employee, for example, might develop trust or goodwill among customers but have trouble putting a number on it. “There is this default assumption that return on investment is the correct measure for everything,” says Susan Etlinger, senior vice-president at Horn Group, a San Francisco consultancy. “Everything needs to monetize within 12 weeks, so we can understand that we’re successful. But frequently the thing they’re measuring is misleading.”

This can lead to confusion. The risk is that a backlash against the consultants’ easy promises could reduce social media investments just as the industry takes off.