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  • Culture ChangePosted on: 06-03-09 | By: John JainschiggFor something like "socializing the new office layout," the best thing to do is set up a big screen in a conference room, invite everyone in, and let them watch you pilot your avatar around the premises. That's totally painless and can be visually very impressive. If your stakeholder group is global, it's also very easy for your designer to stream realtime web video from inside the 3D environment to your users, who then just show up at a web page using a standard browser and dial into a conference call. Meanwhile, the Wiki Tree system has a 'web part' that lets you socialize around diagrams, photos and other collateral. So you can use the system quite deeply without people needing to engage directly with the virtual world. That simplifies things radically for folks who don't mind engaging with the design process, but have problems with 3D. As to the larger question, getting folks to embrace new technology is hard. Depending on the change you want to make, it can be very helpful when leaders help you sell it -- particularly if they're the kind of hands-on leaders who get involved in using the tools to do actual work. Ultimately, though, technological culture-change tends to proceed from the bottom of an organization, because that's typically where the work gets done and better tools really matter. So -- if I was trying to sell wikis, I would start by selling them to two groups: 1) The administrators, the secretaries, the project managers and to other folks doing the mass of the document-related labor, and to the folks that supervise them. And 2) To key people in middle- and upper-middle ranks whose sleeves are always rolled up, because they're who'll propagate a good new idea among their peers.
  • So how do you actually make this work in a real business?Posted on: 06-03-09 | By: MadisonViewHow do you get your employees to embrace these ideas? I can barely get my workers to use our corporate Wiki. Am I doing something wrong?