Jul 22nd, 2009 |
I recently presented on NRCan’s wiki experience at a conference. It went well, but it was challenging. The attendees were just beginning to come to grips with technologies that NRcan has been ’storming and forming..then storming some more’ around for two years. So I ended up getting questions like ’What did you base you business case on?’ ‘What were the identified business needs you were trying to address?’ etc.
What makes these questions challenging to answer is that with the initial pathfinder rollout of these tools at NRCan we didn’t have an explicit business case nor did we have a detailed project plan. What we did have though, were strategic and high level views that we needed to collaborate and share our information and knowledge more effectively. Senior managers were becoming frustrated with information they knew existed but could not easily find. NRCan employees were working in their sector silos with no way of sharing their information let alone collaborating to create it. With these strategic business needs in mind (more of a vision really), we engaged a community of “frustrated but willing to experiment with new tools” employees and we launched the tools and watched what happened.
This approach did generate discussion as it always does alternatively being called “ technology push” or putting the cart before the horse. Our response to this was, as always focused on a two key aspects. The first is that the social media tools we are looking at for the most part allow us to do this. They are simple and viral and they cost very little to implement so the traditional requirements for upfront business needs definition to control risk and guide investment are not as important. In fact, in my opinion it would take more time to write a proposal and business case than to just put something out there and see what happens.
More importantly though social media are fundamentally new technologies and the best way to understand their business value is to get them into the hands of the users as soon as possible and have them tell you through the use of the tools. To a large degree this is what has happened with the NRCan Wiki. Most of the innovative uses of the wiki have come from the employees experimenting, coming up with good ideas and having the freedom to implement them. They have not come from a clearly articulated business needs analysis or business case done in advance.
In fact, determining business needs in advance of having a tool in hand may actually lead to status quo approaches and tools. There is the famous Henry Ford saying about the introduction of the Model T I first heard at an nGenera conference last year. The quote goes something like “if I had asked people what they wanted in a car they would have said faster horses”. We social media folks usually deploy this quote to highlight the weakness of focusing too much on responding to people’s perceptions of their existing business needs as a determinant of technology solution since people invariably define their needs in terms of improving the way they are already doing things, not how things could be done in a fundamentally new way.
This is not to say that business cases and business needs analysis are not necessary or valuable. In fact we DID do a business case for collaborative technologies and we HAVE analyzed the business uses of our wiki and other tools. The big difference here is that we did it at the same time we launched pathfinder versions of the tools. And, the primary source of information on business need and value for the business case was what emerged and continues to emerge out of the tools. So to put it into a few phrases we knew what basic IM issues we needed to address, we got going with the tools then trusted to the wisdom of our users to more clearly define the business need - then we completed our paperwork.
