• The not invented here barrier
• The hoarding barrier
• The search barrier
• The transfer barrier

The not invented here syndrome hinders people to reach out to others who might already have found the solution to the actual problem.

Hoarding in this context has the meaning of unwillingness to help other people. This is especially true in hyper-competitive environments.

The search barrier is more or less a technical barrier which can be overcome with modern technologies like ECM or collaboration platforms such as Jive, Socialtext, blueKiwi, MSSP2010 and others.

The last barrier, the transfer barrier, is one quite common in larger organisations.  As communication is the essence of working together and communication between mutual unfamiliar people is at least lacking, the ability to work together is vital.

But is this view of the four barriers comprehensive?

I was born into GenX. I can remember having to disc drives and no hard drive, computers used to have 1MB Ram. I had my first email-account when I started to study in 1995. There was no Google in the beginning it actually started in 1998 only as a test. We were using webcrawler and other portals. Since then the web has gone a long way. We have had static websites, we had news groups, then it started to change. But I´m still here, I´ve gone with the change. I can´t see why I should be called an immigrant into the digital world.

Humans are adaptive by nature. And so we have also adapted to the new ways of communication. Most people I know from Twitter are of the same demographic cohort than me. Maybe that´s because of shared interests.

But if you look at the numbers you can see that 31% of Tweeters are between 35-49, 47% between 18-34, the median age of  Twitter-users is 31, for linkedIn it´s 40 only for facebook it´s 26. So to me it seems that the Millenials are not that predominant in using social software.

Howlett mentions the case of the CIA-Intellipedia which McAfee uses a s example for an organization with strictest hierarchical structures where an Enterprise 2.0 effort was fruitful. There was the distinct need to shift from an organization with information and knowledge silos (which might have prevented the intelligence agencies to predict 9/11) to an organization where information can flow more freely.

In McAfee book also the concept of “Strength of Weak Ties” (Granovetter 1983) is used to illustrate the benefits of social computing.  I can not imagine an organization where there is no need to improve on communication between those weak linked ties.  Even companies already using E 2.0 can improve their internal communications.

Is it that easy? Find a business problem, align the Enterprise 2.0 effort with it, add a little community management and have a social computing policy in place?

I don´t think so.

Most authors also name culture as one of the crucial factors in deploying social computing.  But there they stop agreeing. There are the ones who say that it needs a certain culture to begin with, and there are the ones who say that you can change culture with these tools.

I´d rather believe that in addition to business needs E2.0 adaptions should also be aligned to the culture of one organization. Either E2.0 supports an already existing open culture of trust and flat hierarchies or governance and policies help with adopting web 2.0 principles in organizations.

For example in innovation the biggest benefit could be to link knots of a network that are not very closely to each other. New and radically different ideas are more likely to surface if people who are not strongly connected interact with each other. For this reason community managers would ideally be gate keepers to span the structural holes in the networks and are able to ease  the forming of new ties between otherwise untied hubs.

As Dion Hinchcliffe puts it:

“Select versatile, effective, positive communicators that have social media competency as community managers .”  (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=913)

So when there is a chance to promote people from a community to community managers, wouldn´t it be beneficial to choose those that are bridge builders to less related hubs in a network?

Their potential reach could be far wider than of those who are at the center of a hub. And aren´t these people more likely to have a higher social competency than those who are only linked to people with which they are already closely linked?

It took me a while to come up with an answer. Not all aspects of implementing social software are new, but what makes it special is that the focus lies not in defining a process. It is the focus on people and how work is organized in contrast to classic IT-solutions.

So which key features of organizations are ultimately important to analyse before starting the implementation?

First of all there is corporate culture. This is a point where everyone agrees.  But in addition to that,…?
Is it legal issues, from collecting personal information on organisational members to facilitate social networking?
Is it demographics?

Which are the other key factors?

Considering the focus on the users of social software, in a business context the personal benefit of using these new applications should also be a consideration. Since participation cannot be forced (or rather I believe it should not be) this seems to be another key factor.

If the implementation is not about a platform (sorry Mr. McAffe, but I think not every E2.0 effort is about an emergent social software platform) an additional consideration should be how this/these tool/s are tied to other systems used in an organisation. Standalone tools may help in the short run, but will never bring bigger profits in the long haul. But this is also not an unique feature of social software.

Security is of limited interest to the users, maybe with the exception of personal data, but immensely important to an organisation trying to start with E2.0. Since information security is always an issue this is not so special for E2.0 addoption. Also educating the users on how to use the new software is not unique for E2.0.

Something that strikes my mind is community management which does not come up in classic IT adoptions. So identifying the evangelists, internal sponsor, or whatever you like to call them is a further need.

This ideas are by no means complete, but for me it´s a start and I will add to it in the near future.