Fear of failure in Enterprise 2.0

Posted 3 months ago by Jon Mell
08/07/2008

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"Fear of failure" is often seen as an inhibitor in life, both professionally and personally. I was with a client the other day who certainly had a fear of failure around Enterprise 2.0. They wanted to get it absolutely right, and had spent up to a year getting input from various stakeholders - essentially doing a traditional requirements gathering exercise. They then prioritised the list, and had come to a loose agreement on the features of phase 1, due for release in August 2009!

During the workshop, we gradually got them to realise that they didn't need to get it right all in one go. With Enterprise 2.0, you can quickly start a wiki or a blog for a small department. If it doesn't work, you haven't failed, you've learned how not to do it. So you try again, until you get it right. Then as usage grows, you can start to implement profiles so that people from different departments can find each other, again, learning as you go.

This is great for Enterprise 2.0 champions as you don't have to convince management to sign off on a big project as you would for an SAP implementation. Finance love it because it's cheap, and if it doesn't work you haven't wasted much time or money. When you want to eventually roll out corporately and get asked the pesky ROI question, you will have real world examples from within your own company as to what the payback is.

So with Enterprise 2.0, failure really is an option!