Susan, at our firm, a few things have come to light:
"Stakeholder Alignment" - Call this what you will, but corporate services departments in large organizations (legal, IT, HR) can be terrified of social software. Years of an ECM-centric mindset have caused them to focus on governance and compliance, and not think that much about what's possible when employees are effectively engaged with something like E2.0. We hear this from both our internal and external clients. Existing investments in platforms like Vignette, Documentum and Portals further fuel their fears – having spent millions on ECM or records management tools, IT is not predisposed to fund E2.0 initiatives. They might even go so far as to block E2.0 at the firewall. Legal often exhibits the same trepidation - empowering employees in this way has to be sold delicately, slowly and with a focus on stakeholders who exhibit a better responsiveness to change. Finding those kindred souls in IT and legal should be part of any E2.0 adoption initiative.
Achieving this alignment is important - the corporate bureaucracy controls a few things any prospective E2.0 evangelists should want to get their hands on - most importantly, SSO. We piloted the deployment of an Enterprise 2.0 tool to BearingPoint's users - adoption didn't skyrocket until employees were able to login with their existing network credentials. Extending the SSO goodness out the cloud via tools like Crowd and standards like OpenID, etc. should be a logical next step for IT departments, and a key enabler for E2.0 take-up in firms. But, someone needs to convince them that operating in this fashion is valuable, and they need to have their fears allied (the way E2.0 can transform IT from a purveyor of applications to a utility model is not something that has been analyzed fully).
"Word and Outlook Are My World" - Word and Outlook are the corporate operating system for the vast majority of knowledge workers. We are working hard to help change to something more online content creation-centric. Again, people need to carefully sold on the benefits. When we hold presentations with the goal of explaining to users that Word is the past and Clearspace, Confluence, Zoho, or Google Docs is the future, they often smile politely, but have trouble seeing how things might be. Selling them on the E2.0 ethos of knowledge reuse, search not store, and folksonimies takes a lot of convincing. Management can play an important role here - the costs of search lost IP can be quantified - Word and SharePoint don't do much to help decrease them, but E2.0 holds promise here - E2.0 evangelists should work to sell management on the value associated with online content creation.
These two are common amongst larger enterprises. Another might be how E2.0 can clash with organizational power structures, decision making, resource allocation, etc. We will see this frequently as organizations start to deploy enterprise social networking tools.
