You Need a Champion
Tuesday: July 31, 2007 7:45 PM
Over the years, our organization has deployed almost 35 knowledge stores including the Metadata Repository that won us several industry awards. One of the secrets was always having a champion involved in the project. This person may have been a repository champion but it was far more important to have a producer or consumer champion. In the Enterprise 2.0 world this would be someone who champions the technology. When we rolled out the Social Software to the IT community, we ensured that we had 40-50 blog entries that people could see and mimic. This is a far more powerful message to send someone when they think the application set is already being used. On that first day we had about 47% of the invited participants registered and viewed the inventory of blog entries. We saw much of the same in the wiki environment where we seeded over 200 pages of solid content. The way we did that was to locate people that already blogged or was willing to put a little time into the environment. I created the Enterprise 2.0 weblog and posted about 38 entries prior to going live. In addition, I took ownership of the wiki page for Enterprise 2.0 and loaded several links, documents, presentations, and other content to set the bar for the type of information we wanted to see. To succeed, find some champions.
Over the years, our organization has deployed almost 35 knowledge stores including the Metadata Repository that won us several industry awards. One of the secrets was always having a champion involved in the project. This person may have been a repository champion but it was far more important to have a producer or consumer champion. In the Enterprise 2.0 world this would be someone who champions the technology. When we rolled out the Social Software to the IT community, we ensured that we had 40-50 blog entries that people could see and mimic. This is a far more powerful message to send someone when they think the application set is already being used. On that first day we had about 47% of the invited participants registered and viewed the inventory of blog entries. We saw much of the same in the wiki environment where we seeded over 200 pages of solid content. The way we did that was to locate people that already blogged or was willing to put a little time into the environment. I created the Enterprise 2.0 weblog and posted about 38 entries prior to going live. In addition, I took ownership of the wiki page for Enterprise 2.0 and loaded several links, documents, presentations, and other content to set the bar for the type of information we wanted to see. To succeed, find some champions.
