March 17, 2006

anybody?

6 Comments

David asks me via e-mail:

Do you know any orga­ni­sa­tion that has tur­ned its back on imple­men­ting social soft­ware sys­tems inter­nally — blogs, wikis, IM, etc?? I know there are a lot, but I need to find one that has done it cons­ciously and can arti­cu­late its reasons.

Hmmmm… Apple? That’s about all I can think of off the top of my head. Though Lord knows what their rea­sons are, besi­des con­trol issues.
Any help on this would be most appre­cia­ted. Please feel free to leave something in the com­ments, Thanks.

6 Responses to “anybody?”

  1. David Tebbutt says:
    March 17, 2006 at 10:49 am

    You’re right about “con­trol.” I sus­pect the main barrier is going to be “cul­ture” which decom­po­ses into “com­mand and con­trol” and “trust” and pro­bably other stuff as well.
    Thanks for the post.

  2. Scott Smith says:
    March 17, 2006 at 11:29 am

    Con­trol. We intro­du­ced wiki to our lead pro­gram­mer seve­ral years ago. He was skep­ti­cal. A month later, he had over a 100 docu­ments pos­ted. Just last week he said he’d quit if we lost the wiki — he can’t ima­gine losing all those brain-dumps.
    That same pro­gram­mer wan­ted to spread the wiki-love to the rest of the office. He did a great pre­sen­ta­tion for the boss. No-go. As soon as the boss rea­li­zed anyone on his staff can update or create a page, he didn’t want it. We’re a law firm, but I’m not sure if that mat­ters.
    The boss also killed an intra­net that allo­wed users some rights to update pages.
    In two weeks, I’m going to try to get blogs inside the firm. Once more into the breach…

  3. David Tebbutt says:
    March 17, 2006 at 3:47 pm

    That’s inte­res­ting. Unless the firm already has one of those for­mal records/document mana­ge­ment sys­tems, I would have thought wikis would be good — by case or pro­ject with care­ful authen­ti­ca­tion con­trols.
    The cul­ture in your orga­ni­sa­tion must be ‘inte­res­ting’. :-)

  4. Jon Plummer says:
    March 17, 2006 at 4:22 pm

    Half­way = no way: a medi­cal device co I am fami­lir with has imple­men­ted IM inter­nally, BUT they make your depart­ment pay a fee PER SEAT to start and the same amount each year PER SEAT the­reaf­ter, so the net­work effect is slow to appear. Nice.

  5. The Jamoker says:
    March 18, 2006 at 12:20 am

    Every ad agency on the planet…but, you knew that one already.

  6. Evelyn Rodriguez says:
    March 18, 2006 at 2:11 am

    The Q is about inter­nal cor­po­rate use, which is har­der to know about publicly. My good friend at Apple wri­tes: “We use wikis and IM and email dis­cus­sions exten­si­vely. I don’t know about blogs.”