Driving Adoption
Creating a collaboration infrastructure is a challenge for most companies, with cultural and political issues to be addressed before any of these benefits can be realized. Some organizations simply won't gain from introducing such tools, others will need to resist the urge to deploy them in the same top-down way they know so well. Social software is also disruptive - it changes the role of knowledge management from command and control to facilitate and aggregate. This requires a little different way of thinking and possible different internal team structures.
Give it a name
To start with, instead of using the term cyn.in or collaboration system, best practice recommendations are to give it a non-intimidating, friendly Name. It is a nice way to focus on what your real goals are with introducing cyn.in into your work life instead of the specific technology solution. The small effort on branding the site works as a viral term for introducing cyn.in to new users and use it in their daily work.
Don't Rush it - Move Swiftly and with Purpose
One of the biggest mistakes an organization can make is to ignore the new generation of collaboration and its value, but an equally dangerous mistake is to rush into things and forget to give people time to adjust to the new ways of working with these tools. It takes time to gather content that's spread around in disparate places and gradually move it to a collaboration suite and simultaneously shift existing practices like collaboration over email to cyn.in-based collaboration.
Be patient when you introduce cyn.in to your organization. Some of the payoff won't be immediately apparent because it takes time for people to change the way they work, so it's more important at the beginning to focus on getting broad support and organic growth from all across the organization. Once people see that cyn.in collaboration actually replaces less effective uses of other forms of communication, such as trying to collaboratively edit a document via email, and gets things done faster, growth will follow.
Using cyn.in doesn't mean you have to abandon the tools you're using already. Trying to replace everything too quickly with cyn.in might lead to its downfall. It takes time for people to finds the best uses for cyn.in. Find ways to blend it with what you currently do.
Be Open Minded
Most often the tools that organizations select can spur or damper thinking. cyn.in allows for informal, unstructured collaboration where innovation thrives. It does away with the rigid structure in a lot of other collaboration and knowledge management tools and lets people use it as they see fit. There's room for greater innovation and its very likely that its success will have much to with the people's enthusiasm for it. Create an atmosphere where they are comfortable asserting their opinions and concerns. You’ll be surprised how the quietest employees will speak up when given such an opportunity.
Listen
cyn.in has a free-form structure - so it can be used for projects, meetings, documentation, events along with personal profiles. These pages are a gold mine for people's ideas, opinions and progress on their work. You can be better informed about your people and projects than ever before and you can offer feedback which shows you are listening and taking them seriously. Profile pages can be useful as a standard place to find contact information, people's biographies and can be a great place to know what they are working on.
Unleash the Early Adopters
Add cyn.in into your environment and you'll probably only have to ask others to use it once (maybe twice). After getting the hang of it and finding that it becomes essential to their work, users become the new coordinators themselves. Often they'll do your asking for you by asking their peers to participate too!
cyn.in has the best probability of success when it gains grassroots support, and people respond well when they see peers actively using and evangelizing it. If users find a new way of doing something, embrace it with an open mind. It may just be an incredibly valuable improvement. By letting people lead the growth and feel a genuine sense of ownership over their work, you lay the foundation for cyn.in to become a successful collaboration tool.
Encourage Sharing
One of the notions that comes up in organizations is that some of the people are afraid to share their knowledge in a collaboration system. And they are afraid because they think that if they share what they know, they will be no longer valuable to the organization and will just be an expendable resource. On the contrary, the more a person shares, the more valuable they become to their organization. Why? Because their value to the others in organization is now better known. A person can be an expert in the organization and they might know they are an expert. But if others don't know they are an expert, they are more vulnerable in the end. But if they share information, others are going aware of their expertise and more likely to come to them for more information and tell other colleagues that this person is an expert. That spreads knowledge of the value all across the organization.
So, if somebody is afraid of sharing, its natural. Suggest them to take a little bit of their knowledge say 5% or a few pages. Put that up on cyn.in and see what happens.
Inevitably, as they start to contribute that knowledge, more and more people will go to cyn.in to get access to that knowledge. As a result, more people will start contacting them to contribute and work with them on their projects. As the volume of the interaction goes up, they will switch from disliking and fearing cyn.in to acutally needing it. Why? Because they will need to add their basic knowledge on cyn.in to lower the volume of email for suggestions and that will free up their time to wok on deeper and more involved projects. Eventually, they will have most of their knowledge on the wiki and people will be able to get access to that knowledge without having to go to that person. This way they solidfy their vaule to their organization.
