4 challenges to wiki adoption in organizations: #4 the new tools are too inexpensive
Sandy Kemsley’s fourth challenge to social media/enterprise 2.0 in organizations:
The fact that these technologies are inexpensive (or even free) and quick to implement causes them to be discounted by executives who are used to spending millions on information management systems.
This sounds so counterintuitive, but it’s a by-product of software vendors creating a skewed system where their high prices force potential customers to spend a great deal of resources (people, time, and money) deciding to use a tool. When they finally decide whether to go ahead with the tool they have no choice but to do it to justify the expense of deciding to do it!
In fact, Rob Patterson’s comment on Sandy’s post says it all:
I was speaking to a key person at a university after 4 shootings in schools in a week – I was making the case that I could work with a few students and we could have a complete emergency response system up and running in a day and it would be free – he was horrified!
Free!!! Using things like Facebook & Twitter and Google Maps – no he was already 2 years into evaluating a very expensive proprietary system that they would act on – when they had time!
Sherif mansour says:
Apr 9th, 2008
Its certinly been my experience here in the enterprise. Some users are stunned that we have only spent $4,000 on our Wiki – we use Confluence. The initial reaction we always get is that – you have introduced a new system, what about licenses, and costs, it will be more costly than you think.
I think this is generally due to history of tools in the enterprise. Generally they are very expensive.
We had one business user who was looking at spending in excess of 50k to purchase Wiki software! That user was stunned that we had only spent 4k!