In his post Is Management the Problem? Andrew McAfee talks about his surprise at the responses of early adopter, big-corporate panelists on a panel he moderated at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston.
His question: "If Enterprise 2.0 tools and approaches really are so beneficial and powerful, why haven’t they spread like wildfire?"
He expected to hear that the bureaucracy-clinging managers in these large organizations (Wachovia, Pfizer, SONY Computer Entertainment and the CIA) get in the way. Despite his best efforts to tease it out of them, the Web execs on the panel said they did not believe this was the case.
I mean, really, did he think that there be any juicy stories told of managers berating employees for going on a discussion board, collaborating online with a project team or contributing to a wiki? With all the time they spend in meetings and the pressures they themselves are under every day, employees checking Facebook is way below the radar screen -- unless something blows up.
As McAfee summarizes, "Entrenched practices and mindsets, some degree of technophobia, busyness, and the 9X Problem of email as an incumbent technology combine, they said, to limit the pace of adoption. These factors slow the migration from channels to platforms and necessitate continued patience, evangelism, and training and coaching." It's not about not bad managers per se (managers, they say, are just another user group).
Is it really all that surprising that these technology-savvy execs identified users as the biggest barriers to faster and deeper adoption of Enterprise 2.0? I don't think so.
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