If you need to "adopt" it, it's probably not enterprise 2.0

Mark presented on a conference call today for The Working Group. A very cool social network focusing on enterprise 2.0 solutions and how they can help companies become more productive from the inside out.

I find it interesting that the dialogue around enterprise 2.0 is still so focused on adoption. Companies are talking about how you go about finding teams with enough pain to adopt an entirely new solution and how do you encourage and assist with that adoption?

In my mind, enterprise 2.0 - much like web 2.0 - should not be focused on how we can force the enterprise to ‘adopt’ new solutions because these solutions are in their best interest. If a solution works for a team inside a company, they will use it. It is our job as software developers to ensure that the learning curve (if we want to be true to the web 2.0 moniker) is nominal.

One key comment was that people will use an inferior tool - if its easier - primarily because they don’t have to “adopt” the solution. That is absolutely true. But the answer, however, is not to sell the benefits to corporate IT in a more compelling way so IT can push solutions on the business users. The real answer is to offer real benefits to the end user. Much like Salesforce.com became the CRM tool of choice by providing a simple, clean usable application for sales teams. Often, Salesforce was used under the radar with a corporate mandated CRM solution already in place.

The company that nails this space will be the one which is instantly adopted and utilized, oftentimes without the knowledge of corporate IT.