Here are my notes from the first session of the Enterprise 2.o Black Belt Workshop: Learn from the Vanguard

Speakers:

• Megan Murray, Community Manager/Project Coordinator, Booz Allen Hamilton @MeganMurray
• Jamie Pappas, E2.0 & Social Media Strategist, Evangelist, and Community Manager, EMC Corp @JamiePappas
• Rawn Shah, Social Software Practices Lead, IBM @Rawn

Notes:

[These are my quick notes, complete with  (what I hope is no more than) the occasional typo and grammatical error.  Please excuse those. Thanks!

From time to time, I'll insert my own editorial comments - exercising the prerogatives of the blogger.  I'll show those in brackets. ]

Exercise:  Doing a SWOT Analysis for Putting an E2.0 Plan Together

(This is for a hypothetical company)

• Strengths
  • Executive sponsorship
  • Ability to address pain points successfully
  • Early adopters and grassroots support
  • Highly mobile, dispersed workforce
  • Organizational flexibility
  • A tightly organized company can also be good if it can encourage widespread adoption
  • A clear corporate strategy
  • Decent IT is in place
  • Mature business processes [can also be a weakness]
• Weaknesses
  • Organizational culture focused on proprietary information
  • Working across multiple languages and geographies
  • Bridging multiple silos [both a weakness and an opportunity]
  • Obstinate managers/execs
  • Not understanding the possibilities
  • Low level of participation is misunderstood
  • Fear of change
  • Fear of information overload
  • An organization that is used to structured data may have trouble grappling with unstructured data
• Opportunities
  • Crowdsourcing ideas
  • Cross-pollinating ideas across the organization
  • Bridging multiple silos
  • Creating loose ties that lead to useful relationships
  • Opportunity to bring your great external marketing to an internal audience
  • Enthusiasm of the employees
  • Collective intelligence leads to new business opportunities
  • Organization has the ability to better align IT resources to user needs
  • Keeping up [and exceeding] the Joneses
• Threats
  • Resistant middle managers who don’t want to participate
  • Legacy applications and processes
  • “I want to do it my way”
  • Inability to scale and support growing use
  • Legal issues
  • Privacy issues
  • Competing initiatives
  • Competing vendor offerings
  • High use expectations
  • Fear of transparency / fear of being open
  • Handling inevitable organization change resulting from E2.0 use.