Well, I'm just diving into this at our office so not a lot of specific
approaches yet. One of the things I have suggested is for our admin staff
to move notices of available “freebies” – sports tickets, event openings and
tickets, etc. to our Yammer site rather than using email. Our company is
very positively focused on employee wellness, and sponsors many events as
well as provides a lot of wellness bulletins and so forth. I am hoping we
can move that endeavor over to Yammer as well. All of this provides a
crucial piece missing in email communication – interaction. We have a few
dedicated users on Yammer, but not wide-spread buy-in so hope this is one
way to get people used to going there.

I have also been setting up Meeting Workspaces in SharePoint, now will use
our leadership group as a pilot to get them involved in using workspaces;
hopefully, they will then make use of that tool in their client projects to
provide more inter-action through agenda development, decision capture,
note-taking, etc..

I have had some success in bringing key individuals “into the fold” in using
OneNote – so far just as individual installs, but hoping to see interest in
using that tool for sharing, much like a wiki model in terms of
collaborating on project notes, etc. We are intending to focus on
SharePoint, but plug-in's or layers such as OneNote, NewsGator, SocialText
are interesting to me to provide enhanced capabilities such as tagging,
communities, search, etc. These tools are geared toward user involvement
and may be more attractive at the bottom-up level.

Aaron

You're wise to focus on users as well as sponsors. Working on a top-down basis alone rarely is successful. What methods are you using to “allow people to go where you want them to go?”

- Mary

Well, I'm just diving into this at our office so not a lot of specific
approaches yet. One of the things I have suggested is for our admin staff
to move notices of available “freebies” – sports tickets, event openings and
tickets, etc. to our Yammer site rather than using email. Our company is
very positively focused on employee wellness, and sponsors many events as
well as provides a lot of wellness bulletins and so forth. I am hoping we
can move that endeavor over to Yammer as well. All of this provides a
crucial piece missing in email communication – interaction. We have a few
dedicated users on Yammer, but not wide-spread buy-in so hope this is one
way to get people used to going there.

I have also been setting up Meeting Workspaces in SharePoint, now will use
our leadership group as a pilot to get them involved in using workspaces;
hopefully, they will then make use of that tool in their client projects to
provide more inter-action through agenda development, decision capture,
note-taking, etc..

I have had some success in bringing key individuals “into the fold” in using
OneNote – so far just as individual installs, but hoping to see interest in
using that tool for sharing, much like a wiki model in terms of
collaborating on project notes, etc. We are intending to focus on
SharePoint, but plug-in's or layers such as OneNote, NewsGator, SocialText
are interesting to me to provide enhanced capabilities such as tagging,
communities, search, etc. These tools are geared toward user involvement
and may be more attractive at the bottom-up level.

Aaron

You're wise to focus on users as well as sponsors. Working on a top-down basis alone rarely is successful. What methods are you using to “allow people to go where you want them to go?”

- Mary

You’re right that we should be more realistic. However, it can be hard if we’re swimming in vendor hype.

- Mary

Excellent post, thank you! I am working toward a very similar mindset for
my organization – objective is to expand our knowledge sharing process and
scope, with the understanding that I must find strong sponsors along with
users who are ready for the change, and the tools to effectively facilitate
a move to new ways of collaboration and knowledge discovery. One of the
greatest challenges is to “allow” people to go where you want them to
go…letting them discover that the new direction is beneficial to them.

Regards,

Aaron

- Mary