How can you hope to 'pilot' anything that includes scale as one of its critical success factors?
Here's Michael Idinopulos from SocialText:
"Traditional IT enables individuals to carry out well-defined, highly standardized transactions.
But Enterprise 2.0 tools are different from traditional IT systems. Traditional IT enables transactions; Enterprise 2.0 enables interactions.
When we use Enterprise 2.0, we're not transacting with a system; we're interacting with other people. And as Metcalf's Law famously states, the more people there are in that network, the more interactions each individual can have with his or her peers, and the more value that individual derives from participation in the network.
When organizations really embrace Enterprise 2.0, however, they almost always play in multiple sections of the Value Matrix, launching solutions like collaborative intranets, ideation portals, private extranets, Those solutions, almost by definition, require scale.
Scale is the oxygen that feeds collaboration."Cognitive dissonance and the lobster trap
This is exactly what I was trying to say in an earlier post on how Free Trials are Too Expensive - you can't hope to trial anything until it's at scale. And by the time you've scaled it, there are huge sunk costs. Anybody taking part in a trial is subject to Staw's Escalation Bias - the more effort you put into something, the more likely you are to show a potentially irrational commitment to it. Social Media is particularly susceptible to this due to the nature of its lobster trap and the flipside of Metcalfe's Law, enclosure.
This affects everybody...
So, in a way, it's kind of ironic it's one of the people who are offering the free trials that's saying it.
Michael Idinopulos' argument is, at the very least, entirely plausible. But, if anything, it doesn't go far enough. It's not only Enterprise 2.0 users who will have to get used to this. But vendors too. (You'll notice that one of the potential implications of his post is that customers are failing to appreciate the benefits of SocialText because they're not 'doing it right'. This may well be true. I helped a non-profit migrate their content onto SocialText last year and the main reason it 'worked' was the lack of pilot. They just got on with it and accepted it as the new reality. The free licence they receive might have had an influence, though.)
If True THEN #trials="toast"
If the vendors are noticing that the 'trials' don't work then they're going to have to get more creative in the way that they offer them. (My only-slightly-flip suggestion is to employ some serious game designers. I'd love to see teams wargaming using rival Social Media platforms. If most software sales presentations are awful, then you can just imagine what a hash users make of it.)
And they're going to have to work much much harder so leaving is as easy as signing up (sic).
[Image taken from @michaelido's excellent blog post. You may also want to see this post on the Social Software Value Matrix. You'll also want to see Michael's very human comment on pilots ReadWrite Web.]
