"Same old, same old" & Enterprise 2.0 Durability

When asked "How are things?" a college friend used to reply "Same old, same old" as a way of saying "Nothing has changed, nothing's gone wrong, things are fine." This was always good to hear.

Culture change, behavior change and IT adoption all have to come together for Enterprise 2.0 (or any IT) success. These, and IT failures are all reasons that the majority of IT projects fail.

So when I got these "same old, same old" updates from Customers via two separate e-mails in early August, a smile crossed my face:

"BTW - our region uses Traction daily and we are happy with it - even though we probably only use a quarter of its functionality."

This came in from a Managing Director for a Global Technology Service Company's EMEA Business Unit. They began using Traction over 1 year ago to promote awareness of sales and general market activity across their region.

"Things are going well, no big changes in how we use the tool"

This came in from a CI Director at a Human Resources firm. They began using Traction 2.5 years ago to track competitor activities. They started by importing about 3,000 pages (from e-mail) and building on top of that base, likely at a rate of 1,000 per year.

In both cases, Traction was deployed for a simple purpose which satisfied a straight-forward business process and need. That things haven't changed since Day 1 is a testament to a well thought out content structure and human process for adding to it and interacting with it.

Forgetting the stories of viral adoption and massive deployment that tend to capture our imagination and excitement around Enterprise 2.0, we lose sight of the smaller scale successes which fulfill a straightforward business process and stand the test of time. These focused and discreet cases may just be an important norm around which to seek best practices and set realistic adoption goals that result in positive, consistent business value.

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