During the
E20Summit in Frankfurt we talked a lot around the
pilot as a way to get Enterprise 2.0-tools up and running.
Oliver Marks discussed (and please correct me if I got that wrong) that the pilot was in some cases a waste of time or the wrong way to start a big social business project.
I beg to differ. The pilot project is in my humble opinion a fantastic way of flying under the radar and to prepare the organization for the social way of working. I want to make the transition as easy as possible and I'm calling it "hybrid
SaaS". Just another buzzword? Surely, but let me fill you in on the details.
Let’s say you want to
try and set up some wikis and blogs inside your sales department. Well then host it in the
cloud and start working on your pilot project. Six months later the board of executives start wondering why your sales department are selling more and seem to work in a more efficient way than the rest of the company.
Should you then abandon all the work that already has gone into the wikis and blogs? Retorical question for sure, but of course you shouldn’t. The hybrid SaaS model is one where you easily download the entire application and database from the cloud and host it inside the firewall (and if you want it the other way around and upload your hosted application to the cloud that's fine as well).
Everybody will be smiling; the IT-guys will have total control, you and your sales department won’t lose anything of the great collaborative information and the management will see that more departments work in a new, efficient way. Thereby money will be made and time will be saved, people.