Lessons from “Why Software Sucks” about terminology.

Recently, many in the E2.0 space have been discussing client adoption of Enterprise 2.0  (by this I mean both the tools and the behaviors that make the tools useful) and the apparent need to overcome culture.  I’m referring to few recent blogs by Barry Camson, Sameer Patel, Susan Scrupski, Paula Thornton, Hutch Carpenter, Steve Radick, and many others on the topic of e.20 adoption and culture.  It’s an important discussion. But I don’t like some of the terminology.  So let me take a tangent from the topic and pick at the terms.

I’ll start with “adoption” — and I’ll state boldly: Clients do not want to adopt Enterprise 2.0. They want to succeed with their business goals — which may tangentially include adopting Enterprise 2.0 practices and tools.  Their real goals are typically to make money or to save money.  Most other soft goals — like improve employee satisfaction, be more productive, modernize the intranet — are too squishy to get funded these days.  Vendors, however, clearly want clients to adopt their software — especially software that is sold by per-user licenses.  Of course they map their tools to the client’s goals. However: “adoption” is the language of vendors — not clients.

Note:  adoption is better than deployment. I vividly recall a conversation I had with the internal collaboration manager at P&G who told me her aversion to the word “deployment” since it conjures images of warfare.  And thus they did not deploy collaboration technology, they made it available.  (I quoted her in full in a report I wrote about the topic.)  Moreover, to the extent you use the word “adoption”, Paula Thornton argues that the phrase “driving adoption” misses the mark too. And I agree.

I remembered the wise words of a wise man I once worked with – David S. Platt.  David is a quirky guy with a super sharp wit.  He teaches at Harvard and does quite a bit of consulting at many large companies.  If you are a .NET development shop — you’ll want to meet him, he’s really good.  He’s written a couple of books, mostly technical stuff that .NET developers would care about.  He also wrote a very funny and insightful book called “Why Software Sucks, and what you can do about it“.

Although Dave’s rants and musings are focused on software development, he approaches his advice conceptually.  He’s often remarked

People don’t buy drills because they want to be drill-owners, they buy drills because they want holes.  If they could buy a box of holes, they would.

I have seen these words attributed to many different people, so I don’t know who was first to say it — but it’s a gem.  Dave continues — “Your customers don’t want to use your software, they want to have used it.”  Here take a listen, he’s funny:

And as this relates to Enterprise 2.0 — Clients do not want to adopt Enterprise 2.0.  They want the benefit of adoption.  They don’t want the journey, they want the destination.  Some might argue that they should want the journey, since it itself is valuable.  OK.  If you think this way, great, but then you are missing my point.

True, there are some in the client-world who do want to see adoption: e.g. those who directly benefit from the initiative or who have been assigned to manage it.  So my statement is not unequivocal.  Rather it’s intended to remind us of our perspective on the topic.

Let me tap into another David Platt lesson here about projecting your value system onto the client (and I’ll talk about the word “culture” in a different post).  In his book, David reminds software developers that their clients are typically not like them (software developers).  And that developers might be very eager to trade usability for functionality, but that most end-users are not.  He illustrates this by asking people to estimate the percentage of cars with standard-transmissions that are sold in the US.  Here’s a clip:

As this applies to the Enterprise 2.0 crowd:  We have to be careful to avoid falling victim to known behavioral biases such as the availability bias and the representativeness bias.  Those of us who are passionate about things like Enterprise 2.0 must understand that most clients are not.  And that’s perfectly OK.  They don’t have to be.  I think the goal state for “Enterprise 2.0″ is to eventually go away and just become “the way we do business these days”.  That’s a measure to true success.

I like Dave, I enjoyed his book, I recommend it.  I learned much from it (when I was developing software), and still refer to it and remind myself to be aware of other perspectives.

To draw another lesson:  Some people seek to convert others to their religious beliefs.  While explicitly not endorsing or commenting on the practice from a religious or societal perspective, let me share that we can learn from them about culture change and adoption.  After all, it’s their gig.

When these folks come to the door and hand me pamphlets, they don’t say that they have come to increase their adoption of their faith.  Instead, they offer things like eternal life, grace, forgiveness, and all sorts of other wonderful concepts that address [what they imagine are] my personal goals. I’m sure that back in the home offices, they measure pamphlet count and demographics.

They make a clear distinction between the language of the changer and the changee.  When they come to my door to attempt to change me, they speak in the language of the changee (addressing [what they think are] my spiritual goals).  So I usually listen to the pitch to understand their approach to attempted culture change.

Conclusion: our conversations about E2.0 client adoption and culture are very important.  And at the same time we have to note our use of words.  I’m glad to see that this thoughtfulness is taking place — as more people in the E2.0 marketplace are discussing these issues and adding much to the conversation.  I hope this post adds a bit and stirs some more thoughts.

Share/Save

Tagged as: adoption, collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, expert, vendor, workplace