Enterprise 2.0: It's not about the tech, it's about the [teach/people/connections/network*]

*Delete as appropriate.

I spend most of my week flitting mentally between two very different organisations. One, East Lothian Council's Education and Children's Services, works in a nurturing fashion (by and large), where there are regular but unobtrusive traditional face-to-face meetings bolstered by a growing and healthy online community of bloggers, podcasters and wikiers. The second, Learning and Teaching Scotland, is arguably more top-down in its methods and meeting-oriented. Blogs are used by some individuals, but traditional means of communication are the overwhelming norm.

There isn't one that's better than the other, though. Both have their merits, both produce amazing results in tight timelines. Yet flitting between them is also one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do in my working life.

The reason for the difficulty comes down to culture and the way people interact. In one place interaction takes place at designated times and places (through the dreaded meeting request) or serendipitously over a sandwich and coffee. In the other, interaction takes place at all times of day and night, serendipitously when someone talks about something I'm interested in and I'm alerted through my watchlist, and face-to-face when when time and space permit. [The portally aggregatory thingy will be getting a drastic much-needed reconstruction this summer].

The latter is the closest Scottish education (the Scottish Public Service?) comes to Enterprise 2.0. So what's the recipe that's worked for one and less so for the other (so far)?

The technology has, for the past year, been a major focus for Dave and me in East Lothian. Getting it right, usable and working in a relatively smooth fashion has been a real struggle at times and has, at times, overwhelmed our minds and our vocabulary. Sometimes, it must have seemed to colleagues that all we could ever care about were the pixels and bytes. But we've now got over 800 bloggers on nearly 700 blogs and counting... The transparency and impact on student, parent and teacher morale is palpable. We have a managed to introduce an interactive (Web 2.0) element to our working practices that involves at least 5.5% of our students and staff contributing actively (probably closer to 10% or more when we take those students who blog on the teacher-administered class blog) and a huge percentage more reading and leaving comments. So much for the 1% rule of interaction with new media. We even beat Wikipedia on that front.

But, as I've said time and time again, it's not about the tech. A lot of this is down to holding hands, taking people through it initially face-to-face, in training sessions, over coffee, in their classrooms, with the kids there, on the bus home, in the pub. The ultimate recipe for success has not lain in dictum from the boss - on the contrary, a growing number of our managers have attempted to lead from behind as much as possible and provide the cultural framework for people to feel (more) at ease taking up these new ways of communicating. They have, if you like, given permission not to ask for permission.

So it's quite interesting seeing the blog posts coming out of the Enterprise 2.0 conference at the moment:

• Enterprise 2.0: David Weinberger - Rattling Business' Foundations
• I'm cutting Enterprise 2.0 from my vocabulary
• The great thing about Enterprise 2.0 is how little it matters
• Enterprise 2.0: Marthin De Beer - How Video and Other Web 2.0 Technologies Are Changing the Enterprise
• Enterprise 2.0: Jeffrey Stamps and Jessica Lipnack - Collaborating in the Transparent Enterprise

Notice a recurring theme? It's about people, culture, knowing how to get in there (and that involves having your hand (physically) held). You need someone who's been there, done it and has the confidence to know that even when things crash, don't work, get you into trouble, that it's all worth it in the end, to make your work and learning more fruitful and richer than it ever could have been without the technology. It's not about imposing something new, it's about inviting natural change.

Thankfully, in East Lothian, we've got at least a few hundred (not including the kids) who can do that bit...