Andrew Filev and Dave Nicolette both have a nice posts on the motivation - or lack - for Enterprise 2.0 and agile in the case of Dave. Slide 7 of Andrew's presentation asks an important question:
If E 2.0 is user driven by users, then why is there so much fuss about adoption problem?
The answer is corporate and IT governance. When there is non formal governance process, then adoption is a self regulated process. In the presence of corporate and IT Governance, self adaptation is unlikely and in fact undesirable.
Self adoption is "all about me or us." Governance based adoption is all about the corporation and its business governance process - not about the well being of individuals and their desires to have the latest tools. This is cold and crass.
Put your self in the seat of a major stock holder.
"The programmers have run amuck again and are adopting this crazy thing called agile. Minimumal documentation, emergent features, little or no management or the associated direct accountability, and my favorite from a recent commenter - 'Budgets, we don't need no stink'in budgets.'"
The corporate guy says, "We can't let this happen we need Governance policies."
This is an exaggeration of course, but I know it's what many developers "feel" even if they don't say it. In fact governance protects the organization from the incompetent. Now each of you may not feel you're incompetent. But there are many incompetent people out there making process and technology decisions. Our firm makes it's living in some part by cleaning up the mess from those people.
So when Andrew conjectures people are reluctant because of fear. It ain't fear - it's governance. When Andrew and then Seth Gordon (it's always good to quote a celebrity in support your point) speak about "people," they don't say which people. Keep all pronouns vague it helps avoid definitive fact based conversations - good marketing approach for products as well. GM does this with there Escalade hybrid comparison to the Mini.
It's People who run projects, it's people who run companies. The people who run companies are in fact different than the people who run projects - or write code - inside those companies.
It is a complete myth that you and I are just like Jack Welch, Steve Jobs, Rex Tillerson (CEO and Chairman of Exxon Mobil, or even Bill Gates. We're not. We may think we are. We're not.
So back to the point - yes there is one
Adoption of ANY process and technology - new or old - needs to pass through a governance process (notice the small "g").
If there is a group of individuals, then the governance can be self-governing. If the governance process sits inside GE, Lockheed-Martin, large electric utilities with nukes, AmTrak, Frontier Airlines (to name a few where I have inside experience) or any of the 10's of 1,000's of large publicly traded firms:
Governance trumps local optimizations
You may not agree. You may not like it. You may think it's silly from your personal point of view. But in those firms it's not about you. In any large firm, it's not about you. Even at places like Starbucks - voted the best place to work, or a firm I worked for that always won a "best place to work" from Fortune Magazine. Wasn't true on the ground. It's not about you. It's about the greater good of the company and that means the greater good for the shareholders.
Think that's stupid? Start your own company and fix it. I've done that once. OK, twice only once successfully.
And I'm here to tell you all was wonderful when we had 10 people all fearlessly dedicated to building our product. When we reached 50 things started to be different. When we reached 150 they were much different. When we reach 300 we went public and things were a whole lot different - welcome to Governance our CEO explained, you can stop doing all then self-governing stuff now, we have real customers and real stock holders.
