Tackling Enterprise 2.0 Resistance

[Sean Lew]

We have heard of various resistance stories when it comes to Enterprise 2.0 / collaboration initiatives. There are also many blog posts regarding this topic. Today, I would like to approach this topic from an academic perspective.

I was reading Lynne Markus paper on Power, Politics and MIS implementation and it drove a really good message on the various types of resistance and theories that could help explain some of them.

There are three key reasons why people resist changes in technology.

1) Internal factors to the person or group - where it targets reactions like “People resist all change; People with analytic cognitive styles accept systems; while intuitive thinkers resist them”
2) Application or technical factors - if its a crappy system, people will resist it.
3) Interaction factors - where the new application or system would change the balance of power in organisations and people who are threaten by it would resist it.

In the Enterprise 2.0 world, I believe that all three factors can cause resistance but I feel that the third factor is probably the most problematic factor. How can we go about managing this?



More...