By Oscar Berg, Future Office Evangelist
April 07, 2010 - 4:53 PM
This time of year ten years ago, one of the big American management consulting firms identified a window of opportunity to launch student community websites in Europe. They advised our future customer that it was “now or never.” So they helped them hire a bunch of people and open offices in Sweden, UK, France, and Germany. Then, of course, they needed someone to help them design, build, and launch the community websites. That was when I and my company got into the picture.
I had just been managing the rollout of new country sites for Scania, a leading manufacturer of heavy trucks, buses, coaches, and industrial and marine engines. We developed the websites together with the Dutch company Tridion (later purchased by SDL) on their DialogServer WCM platform. The project was a success, and I decided to move on to a new employer and a new challenge.
And what a challenge it was. The day before my first work day at my new company, a Sunday, I helped prepare the sales pitch. The next day, I got to do the presentation for the customer. We won the pitch, and I got a bottle of 12 year old single malt Whiskey by the Sales Manager for my contribution.
Together with a dozen of my new colleagues, I spent the entire spring and summer in a badly ventilated project room at our Stockholm office building a multi-lingual community platform. We designed and built features such as instant messaging, an online dating service, chat and discussion forums, movie and music reviews which could be rated and commented on by the community, a service for searching and applying for scholarships, and a job search engine that aggregated job ads from a number of online recruiting sites. We were especially proud of the job search engine which used XML for the integration with the online recruiting sites.
The first of the student community websites, the Swedish, was launched immediately after the summer in 2000 as the schools started, just one week behind schedule. Later that fall, sites where launched in the UK, France, and Germany.
The users did come to the sites, but not by the numbers that the management consulting firm had calculated. In addition, several competing student community websites were launched at pretty much the same time. Then came the dot-com bubble burst, and the rest is history.
The main lesson that I learnt from the dot-com era wasn't the obvious ones such as that you should start small, or that you need a sustainable business model. No, it was that people in general were not ready for the kind of online lifestyle that we had in mind when building those platforms. We built those platforms and features for people like ourselves - pioneers who were obsessed and enamored with the new technologies - and not for the average person.
Today, the situation is very different from back then. Most people are very comfortable with using the Web for both private and professional purposes, and they willingly expose things about themselves that they wouldn't have dared to think about exposing ten years earlier (I have a pending invite on Facebook from my mother-in-law, but for privacy reasons I have chosen not to accept it - I don't want to be THAT open)
Over the years, my passion for creating solutions that help people communicate, share, and collaborate with each other has led me to Enterprise 2.0, a field where all my professional interests such as knowledge management, content management, collaboration, Web development, and usability intersect. To me, it’s all about understanding the principles, practices, and tools that make communication, sharing, and collaboration happen so naturally on the social web find and try to find out how they can help us achieve the same thing in a business context. If we succeed with this, I am convinced that it will help enterprises become more innovative, adaptable, efficient, and effective at what they do.
I believe that we - from a technical and user experience perspective - did many things right already ten years ago. But we failed in understanding the maturity and the mindsets, attitudes, and behaviors of the people in our target group.
If we are to succeed with Enterprise 2.0, we must make sure to avoid a "build it and they will come" approach that does not consider the maturity and the mindsets, attitudes, and behaviors of the people. Even if many people have changed how they look at and use the Web since the turn of the century, when they are at work their mindsets, attitudes, and behaviors are under heavy influence of the corporate culture and things such incentive models, internal competition, status, and habits. The same people who blog about their family life and share personal information with friends and acquaintances on Facebook on a daily basis might not be so keen on using blogs and other tools to share everything they know with their colleagues.
My professional passion is, and has always been, to create solutions that simplify and enrich peoples' lives. Over the years, I've learnt that it has more to do with understanding people than understanding technology. I will do my best to share my experiences and observations via this blog, and I have great expectations that we will all learn and grow our understanding together.
Rate Post
You need to log in to rate blog posts.
Click here to login.
This post and comment(s) reflect the personal perspectives of community members, and not necessarily those of their employers or of AIIM International
