Enterprise Web 2.0 in a consulting firm - P 1

In this post and the next two posts, I will share with you my experience with one of the key Australian IT company. I will be talking about implementing what so called social media or Web 2.0 technologies within this particular company. I hope you find this small series of post interesting to read, and please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any comment or question or even if you want to have my postal address to send me a gift : )

W11 is an employee working in an IT consultancy company called X11. It is a mid-tie size company located in several Australian cities and each branch handle its regional clients’ consultancy works independently. In X11, there are 500 consultants and a small management presence about 4 executives, 4 middle managers and few admin staffs. The organisational structure of the company is flat and that mean 500 consultants does not belong to a specific business unit, and they just get allocated for consultancy work and organised with a regional manger help.
 
W11 and all of the consultants in X11 work in clients’ sites to provide advice and help them implementing IT projects and this require consultants to spend most of the time at clients sites and even having their office there. So, rarely consultants work from X11 site due to the X11 business model as a consultancy company which do most of its work externally. The few occasions consultants could work internally and in a collaborative fashion with other colleagues (mostly from business development) is when there is tendering process and X11 want to develop a business proposal. This type of collaborating work is limited within X11 and they use web 2.0 technologies like Google Docs for real-time collaboration and Docs sharing.
 
X11 has three main web 2.0 technologies including wiki, yammer and SharePoint. With regard to the wiki, it is not used at all within X11 and not working. It died in very early stage because of the poor enthusiasm about it from management as well as from employees. W11 himself and few other consultants tried to figure out how they could benefit form using the wiki which already implemented in X11 before they buy the company, but it was very difficult to pick up, understand the concept behind and how it can be used in work place as well as it is not easy to use. So they couldn’t see its alignment with the X11 business model. However I can see that it is as technology that could be used to build the X11 Knowledge in a collaborative and dynamic way as the company business is based on experience and the knowledge of its consultants. An important reason cause the death of the wiki is that because X11 did not invest in the wiki and it was existed in X11 by chance, senior management did not push it a bit or even show interest in it.