A Social Life

Enterprise adoption of social bookmarking and tagging May 4, 2006

Posted by Steve in : enterprise, tagging , trackback
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Continued from Enterprise del.icio.us
Continued in Content roles and the Del.icio.us Lesson...

Assuming enterprise del.icio.us to be a useful application, we’ll still face some challenges in getting corporate adoption.

When using the internet at home, we’re used to web sites as the format for public information sharing, paired with email for private or limited groups. More than that, we’re used to using different web sites depending on:

the format of the information: pictures, video, text;
the type of interactions we expect: one-way, two-way, collaborative creation;
the audience we’re trying to reach;
etc.

As a result, it hasn’t been very hard for us to adapt to using one or more social apps, such as del.icio.us and flickr. When we see a website we like, we just click on a bookmarklet (or increasingly likely, a Firefox extension) and save it away.

When we’re at work, on the other hand, there are usually only one or two kinds of public sharing:

Office documents via e-mail (or fileshares, occasionally), and
Data entry into a process-specific application (CRM, bug DB, etc)

These present huge barriers to adoption, both technical and behavioral.

First, unlike the web where most data can be retrieved from an URL, people in an office typically work with data in dozens of repositories. Each of these has its own addressing scheme, that is if data can even be referenced at all from outside the app.

Where data can be shared, it’s not always seen as a good thing - enterprises put a lot of effort into controlling access to data. One of the most common questions we get about our knowledge sharing application is what can be done to prevent information from being shared with the wrong people!

Finally, people - especially non-techies - are just not interested in adopting a new destination site or separate application, probably because their experience indicates that this results in more work. The reality is that a new application will not be widely adopted unless it integrates into the current working process (or better yet, directly into their current applications), and appears to make that process easier.

Sure, there will always be some people who take to anything new, but most people will ignore it as yet another mandated time-waster. Any new app will have to show value with, let’s say, only 1% of its potential audience actually using the app. Where some new apps have found greater traction, notably search and team/project portals, it’s usually because they’ve significantly simplified something that employees are already doing.

Worse yet for someone who wants to build this application, there’s no ad-revenue supported business model for the enterprise Enterprise customers will typically put the application through its paces with a limited pilot audience, and expect to see some measurable result on the bottom line.

So, if we’re going to create an enterprise bookmarking application, and want to see adoption, we’ll have to overcome, at least:

the natural resistance to new applications
the variety of existing technologies, platforms, and data formats in an enterprise
the differing process, taxonomy, and security requirements of any company
the need to demonstrate clear “ROI”

In my follow-up posts I’ll present my own ideas about how these can all be addressed through social bookmarking and tagging, and why it’s not “enterprise del.icio.us”. At least, not exactly…

(But first, I’m off to LA for a few days - I’ll pick up after I get back)

related: enterprise adoption