This is something we and other Enterprise 2.0-enthusiasts have been going on and on about for a few years now – technology is not the matter, culture is. Oliver Marks at Collaboration 2.0makes the same point again, but from another angle, in his excellent blog post, “Understanding Enterprise 2.0 Tolerances & Scale”.
Coming back from two Enterprise 2.0 conferences, one in the US and one in Europe (that we also attended) he can see a quite obvious difference that has absolutely nothing to do with technology but greatly impacts the use of Enterprise 2.0-tools:
“The European Enterprise 2.0 scene is a Ginger Rodgers to the USA’s Fred Astaire: Europeans are doing everything the US is doing but backwards and in high heels, or rather also in multiple languages and cultures. Although English is the lingua franca of international business online, providing compelling reasons to persuade participation in European online collaboration can be culturally more challenging than in the English speaking US and UK.”
And though it might come as a surprise to Marks, this has been the case in Europe since the start of the Internet. We live in Sweden; how many web pages in Spain have I visited lately? Answer: none. I don’t read Spanish. Google Translate is not enough, obviously. I know that it exists and it works quite well – I still don’t visit Spanish sites. And this notion is of course even more obvious when it comes to Enterprise 2.0; I’m not only supposed to read what people in other cultures write – I’m also supposed to interact. This is the major threshold of today in Europe.
But these cultural differences are not the only ones. Marks also points out that the same terms and prerequisites apply regarding Enterprise 2.0, no matter if the business is a huge corporation or a small one-man firm:
“We’re at an interesting intersection in the collaboration world where projects both large and small tend to be discussed with the same terms. This can be very confusing to the lay person since it’s hard to know what sort of scale is being described.”
Both these cultural differences matter more than mere technology. And Oliver Marks points it out very clearly, I highly recommend reading his article.