Getting management buy-in

[John McDermott]

It seems that many of us see the benefits of these Web 2.0 tools. Now, how do we get management support? Some things to consider:
- How to get IT to understand that these tools are not giant security holes?
- How to convince higher-ups that these tools are not time-wasters?
- How to get management to see the business value of and encourage the use of the tools?
- whatever else is a barrier where you are

[Clark Quinn]

John, you get buy in by using your already established credibility (hopefully), and talk about the benefits.

Done right, you should be seeing collaboration, creation, innovation, mentoring, knowledge capture, sharing,...

If informal learning counts as 80% of organizational learning, don't you want to scaffold and support that?

Time-wasting? They trust people with email and phones, yeah? If you can't trust them not to waste time, the problem isn't the social network, ahem.

IT security hole? Install behind the firewall. Even if outside, have some sensible policies. Heck, these people *talk* outside the office, and make phone calls and email, and take training materials and work home. See previous paragraph...

And use case studies: what we need is a good repository of wins. Look at the Guild report on Learning 2.0, read Jay Cross and Mark Oehlert and Brent Schlenker's blogs, and...

[Susan Neva]

One current tool that is widely used that can end up being a time-waster is the use of endless email strings to get things done. Wikis, twitter, instant messages, can all be used to get things done as well. I guess I would have to look at how and why email became the tool for knowledge workers to use to go about their daily business.

Is it a question of having a permanent, legally verifiable record of communication?
Is it to communicate directly with one person, or a group of people?
Is it to time and date stamp a communication?

Web 2.0 tools can provide these benefits, and more.

And what about the fact that once something is published in "cyberspace," it can never truly be erased?
If we dare to conduct business by email, why not other methods as well?

[Dave Ferguson]

I always believe it's easier to get support by talking about the work that gets done, rather than about the tools that did the work. If the results are relevant, people will get around to asking about the tools.

In the kind of corporate settings I've been in, decision makers tend to be skeptical about excess enthusiasm, peculiar names, and anything that sounds overly hip. Exceptions exist, as Clark suggests when he says to use your own credibility.

There's a hospital that saves time, money, and frustration in the scheduling of its operating rooms. When an operation is scheduled, a surgical nurse loads a web-based template for each planned procedure. The template includes the equivalent of checklists for supplies, instruments, and so on.

The surgeons can then access the page and make modifications based on the patient and the situation -- we need more of X, we need less of Y, and we want this other gizmo as well.

So there's less waste (of unused items that can't be resterilized), less lost effort (re-sterilizing), less delay (no one has to go and get the gizmo that wasn't part of the standard setup), and less backup (see "less delay").

Notice that I didn't use the word "wiki" in describing that. I feel confident that the description would catch the interest of the hospital administrator or the head of surgery.

[Michele Martin]

Dave, I'm with you on this idea that it's better to not use some of the terms (like "blog" or "wiki"). Not only do many people feel that they're overly cute and strange, they also have pre-conceived (and wrong) notions about what these words mean.

To the uninitiated, a "wiki" is Wikipedia, and they immediately think of a band of uninformed nuts creating a page of unvetted information. Blogs are either something a teenage girl keeps as a record of her daily activities or a marketing tool to be used with customers outside of the organization.

Lately I've been listening to clients tell me about a particular project or problem and then suggesting that we can use a "website" to solve that. It's been much more effective at getting people to buy in when I avoid using Web 2.0 words.

[Karyn Romeis]

I'd like to frame my answer by means of an anecdote:

A few years ago, I was desperate to introduce some elearning into the blend I was offering the staff at the company I worked for. He-who-signed-the-cheques was having none of it. The culture wasn't right, it was too expensive, he wasn't sure what all this elearning stuff was anyway, yadda yadda.

So, I colluded with the helpdesk to identify the most frequently asked questions. Then I used PowerPoint and SnagIt to create some little learning nuggets addressing those. These I posted in the public folders on Outlook Exchange. Next, I asked the helpdesk staff to respond to the calls by pointing users at the nuggets rather than telling them the answer. Pretty soon, the staff and the helpdesk started to request nuggets addressing this or that issue. So I created a central PowerPoint with hyperlinks, which served as a kind of primitive content management system, and I called it "Show me how..."

When the MD found out about it, it was taking several hits a day. He was thrilled. "See?" he crowed, "We don't need elearning! We need more of this kind of thing." I didn't have the heart to tell him that what we had here was effectively a suite of elearning resources.

Now I know that this isn't an example of social media, but I think the principle holds.

It's a case of introducing a small thing in a matter of fact way somewhere where it will deliver the goods, and allow it to expand of its own accord. The beauty of social media is that it isn't a top-down solution. Yes, we need IT to unlock those virtual chastity belts, but there is much you can do even if Facebook and its ilk are blocked, because it is usually still possible to use google docs, blogs and wikis. Nor do we need the board to approve any great capital outlay.

It sounds quite subversive, but it's when you make a big song and dance about these things that the impression is given that they are something 'other', something to be feared, guarded against. That we're propogating a culture of 'social not-working'. If they're simply introduced piecemeal as being perfectly logical components of a wider solution, I think you may stand a better chance.

[Michele Martin]

So true, Karyn! I think that the mistake a lot of elearning professionals are making is to use their old elearning paradigms to think about "rolling out" some major elearning solution. Web 2.0 is very much about the small pieces, loosely joined idea of using specific tools to address specific problems. That's not to say that you shouldn't have a bigger picture idea of how to connect and use these tools, but their implementation needs to be based on solving specific problems. That's actually what social media does best--it's what it's really designed for, while at the same time being very scalable.

[Mia Louise Rydahl Due]

Hi John

I know it is a long road, and I'm struggling with some of the same challenges. Still though I'm privilegued as our management pay some interest in some of the tools - that's a big step, I know.

I have noticed that they pay interest in the tools that they need right now - this is online meetings at the moment.

What I do is to catch the managers' slightest interest in any web 2.0 tool when it's there, and give them solo lessons in using the tools. Therefore at the moment I invite the relevant managers to online try-out meetings just him/her and me, to show them the system and the possibilities in it. This gives a good effect on their motivation to start using it.

[Tony Karrer]

John - I have a different take. Try to avoid as much of this as possible and find tactical interventions that just make sense and sneak it in for these. You do need to know what tools will work in your environment. Can you use Google Docs / Spreadsheet? Can you use a password protected pbwiki? If you have a specific case where it just makes sense to do things with these tools, you will find that it's hard for people to put up roadblocks. It's also somewhat a forgiveness vs. permission thing.

[Brent MacKinnon]

An excellent Research document by dotOrganize titled - Online Technology for Social Change: From Struggle to Strategy gives some additional tools to sway management towards giving more support. The report applies to the social change sector, however it certainly has commercial implications as well. The PDF report is available for download at their site.