As I said earlier, enterprise collaboration communities are hardly a matter of “build it and they will come.” Adoption is a process: a mostly pleasantly surprising process, sure, but a sometimes lengthy one, too. In order to minimize the struggle of adopting any new technology or process, here are six best practices for implementation:
1) Get buy-in and early participation of the top-level personnel in the organization in order to increase adoption rates.
2) Secure the support and participation of the IT department in the beginning. Not only will they be most aware of the resource requirements of the community and be able to help strategize the roll-out, but their expertise will probably help drive adoption throughout the company.
3) Start small with the roll-out. Identify a key area within the organization that will benefit from participating in the community, and help them use the collaboration software to find a solution and/or solve their problem. Let this serve as an example to the rest of the organization, and watch the people the community helped become your evangelists!
4) Identify super users, power users, and community evangelists and empower them to being populating the community spaces with content—documents, discussions, polls, wikis, etc—driving adoption among their peers.
5) Hold training sessions. Helping people learn a new approach to collaboration and encouraging them to change behaviors that have served them well enough up until now is a difficult and often discouraging undertaking. Not everyone will immediately understand how to use the community or how it applies to the jobs they need to accomplish. The community tools are often simpler than the ones they use already, but people expect a level of complexity and sometimes over-complicate the process.
6) Be prepared to grant employees a certain level of autonomy, as far as creating documents, blogs, discussions, groups, and spaces go. It can be an unnerving prospect, giving so many people carte blanche permission to create content, but trusting participants will serve the organization in the end. Remember, you still have administrators who can monitor and delete inappropriate or outdated content (like groups that have been idle for months with no activity), and the participants cannot work anonymously, so you can identify where all content originates.

Written by: Courtney Steen, Brad Warren, and David Lee

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