Participants are looking for information on new technologies, passing road blocks that are limiting us from using new technologies, facing generations using new tools – but faculty are not.
Feels like sales forces are the drive of early adopters. They need just-in-time information often about the products they need. Also within the education industry, field support, etc.
How do you allow staff to take time out to learn? How to get mgrs to understand this need to learn?
We’re at this point in time where wikis, open source products are all becoming more stable, more structured and there for more used. Mobile products are still getting there. More roadblocks about having to learn in a new way. More so a large human/cultural issue about using a new tool. What is it that people are doing that we then need to figure out the best “new” way of how to do it? (all without the testing, piloting, etc because by the time you get to it the technology is old). Now the tools of today are easy to use, turn on, and get using it. This is all quite simple compared to 10 or even 5 years ago.
Why are some industries/areas embracing new technologies and others are not? 1, 9, 90 rule one creates, one reads, 90 don’t quite get it.
Using blogs – if you have a question, comment, etc call a phone number and then it gets posted to a blog. The phone then becomes a bridge using the tool of blogging. Use old technologies and connect them to the new technologies. But how do we get the large groups to do it? Get over the fascination of the technology and use the business need to drive the use of the technology.
Most change happens one bite at a time. Perhaps we need to do it gradually. Send them to the website instead of answering the question. Or watch the trends of what people want to do, now try to figure out how you can bring them in.
Fail-forward-faster. Web 2.0 stuff is really cheap. Sometimes it’s too cheap because it might get cut next year. Allow for some choice and individuality, but point everything back to one place. There are personal needs, business needs. Know your people where are they, what are they doing, how are they doing. Then decide on the tools that fit that best.
Try using Sharepoint to introduce elements of web 2.0 types of tools. Go with what your people know. Try sending more through emails as people are much more familiar with reading and scanning through emails and doing so quickly.
You need to learn how to feed information into these tools rather than waiting for people to find them. Let people go out and talk stuff up before you even turn it on and let it be used. Perhaps you always need to be ahead of the time, have the need ready, wait for them to ask for it.
Ie: NetMeeting years ago had little buy in, and now we’re looking at gotomeeting, etc as tools we can’t live with. FAIL – mandatory blogging…mandatory anything not good. Leaving it as – you should all be doing this, is very scary to your people. You want people to learn, but not tell them how to learn can sometimes scare them away as well.
Collaboration is incredibly powerful. The fact that millenials are so use to this is exciting.
Try putting web 2.0 questions into your interviews. Do they blog, do they use wikis, do they edit them….if so would they do it at work as well. You create buy in as you hire.