Man. Aint that the truth.

This quote is from a recent blog post by one of my favorite Enterprise 2.0 authors, Paula Thorton.  It literally jumped off of the screen, landed in my mint julep, and was ported directly into the underwhelming organ I refer to as my brain. I can count on one hand (finger?) the number of business applications I consider great experiences. As such, it has been stewing there for the past little bit and I have been trying to figure out why. Not necessarily why it has been stewing (that part is easy – I am simple), but why the statement is true.

I have also been stewing on a rallying cry I continue to hear while waging the undying E2 adoption battle. People seem to be transfixed on the idea that things (technologies) “must be easy to use” in order to opt for a change. I hear this in bunches and have sort of reduced it to ‘a technology must be relatively easier to use in order to induce change”.  For argument’s sake I mean change in the most binary of senses.  As in stop using SharePoint and start using Confluence. Forget all the other stuff like organizational transformation or culture shift or <insert change buzzword here>.

So when these two stews came together, I asked myself the following question:

• Does a great experience with a business application imply that it is easy to use? Moreover, should it be?

In attempting to answer this question I thought about experiences I consider “great”. What are the attributes of an experience, professional or otherwise, that inevitably make it great? After sifting through my collective experience of persistent mediocrity, it boiled down to a couple things. They usually entail some sort of hard work, possibly even pain, and a sense of accomplishment. For example, I hiked up Mount Washington with Brother Nash this past winter. In one day with temperatures well below freezing, we covered 8 miles, gained and lost a mile of altitude, and carried a sweet ice axe. Hard work? Yup. Sense of accomplishment? For sheezy. Great experience? Check. Another example is my obsession with CrossFit. Most weekdays, the fine folks at Primal Fitness DC are kind enough to hand back my ass after a seriously proper kicking up and down New York Avenue.  From Fights Gone Bad to dancing with the clown, there is definitely both pain and a sense of accomplishment. Mark another in the “great” column. Finally, the time I spent working in the Middle East was definitely a great experience. We accomplished many things and well…the reason why life might be a bit hard in Baghdad is pretty self-evident.

So how does this translate to business applications? The only app I really consider a great experience is our wiki. I have never really thought about it until now, but why is that? Why do I think it’s great? For the longest time, I thought it was because it was easy to use. But the more I think about it, while the tool itself may be easy, the experience is anything but. It is hard. It is sometimes painful. And frankly, it should be.

When we write professional content (like deliverables) in wiki form, we are forced to expand our minds beyond typical expectations. We must increase our understanding of context, look for the bigger picture, and understand where the content we are producing fits into it. What does this link to?  Where else are people writing about this? What are they saying? Am I wrong? Are they wrong? What should this link to?

I would posit that none of these questions existed so blatantly until I had a tool that exposed them to me. I worked away in my little silo of knowledge (more of a shed really) and never had to consider the bigger picture. Maybe there was some other eRoom with similar content, but I sure didn’t have access to it. Even if I could link my document to the other, what did that do? It didn’t help the search engine. It didn’t provide trackback for the other author. It would also usually break if either doc was moved or renamed. Now those were the easy days. So why bother?

Well…I didnt. And most people still don’t. Even though there is a clear option to  produce a great experience, people are still slogging through version control nightmares fueled by email attachments and track changes. Why? Because it is easier??? No. Ease of use is often a foil for thought laziness. Email attachments are easy. But they don’t precipitate a great experience. Why bother to expand your perspective when the siren of a paperclip icon (or a folder upload) calls so sweetly? Silo shmilo…I have Facebooking to get to!

My great experiences with business applications (or anything for that matter) always require some level of hard work. Authoring in the wiki provides for a great experience, but when the content is at its most powerful, it is in no way easier to produce. It forces me to think beyond what I usually think about. Isn’t that what organizations want out of their employees? Isn’t that what employees want from their jobs? Challenging assignments? Big thinking? I know it’s what I want.  And yes, it can be hard. But, just like the feeling you get from a correct choice in the Big Mac vs. spaghetti squash conundrum…it is great.

“Hi there, welcome to Friday’s! Can I start you off with our new Buffalo Mac and Cheese Stick Potato Skin Egg Roll Salad?”

“Uhhh, no thanks. Although I have been in the market for a shiny new a stent, would you mind bringing me some hummus instead?”

“I’m sorry sir, we don’t serve anything like that here. ”

“(Sigh)…Fine…I’ll have the Sesame Jack Chicken Tostada Pot Sticker Mini Burgers”

But I had a conversation last night that blew my mind. I went to a restaurant named Cinco De Mayo and the following ensued.

“Hello. What do you want to eat?”

“I would like the Chicken Fajitas and hummus as a starter”

“Fine. You pay cash?”

Now this is what I am talking about! Yes sir, I would like hummus as a starter. I want it for desert too. Hell, I wanna toss it in a glass with some Knob Creek and have myself a Hummus Julep. That’s the taste of freedom is what that is. Yeah I know you think I am some picky American, but it’s _on the menu man_. What would you do? I think you would get the hummus.

So what does this have to do with Enterprise 2.0?

I saw a comment in Clearstep today that made me think of this experience. In response to a discussion entitled “Building the Business Case for Enterprise 2.0″, Nial Cook replied with:

My advice: don’t bother trying.
For social software to work, you need to deliver value to the individual before you try and deliver value to the organization. So build an employee case instead. Start by explaining the value that will be delivered to the employee, to other employees as a result of each additional persons’ participation, and then – and only then – the resulting benefits to the business as a whole.

I couldn’t agree more. One of the biggest battles I see beginning to rage is the push to have E2 implementations matter to “Corporate”. To me that doesn’t make any sense. Sure, they need to understand the benefits, but they should also understand that their benefits are byproducts of user benefits. These things work because of users. Not a mandate from Corporate. So focus on defining their value, and their value alone. Conversely, try convincing a normal user of the individual benefits of your latest ERP implementation. It’s sort of hard…

So as Jay and I deploy our various communities and wikis, it’s about getting hummus with your fajitas. It doesn’t make any sense really, but it’s what I want. Answer the questions in this order…What is valuable to the users? And then secondly, how is that valuable to “Corporate”? If you start the other way around, your implementation may need a stent as wel.