Number 1 issue when trying to build an enterprise 2.0 apps: early stage user involvement
I don’t think people in larger organizations (maybe people in general) are use to the development processes of anything that could be considered ‘2.0’ so when they are participating in the early stages you need to be sensitive to that.
The system my team is building is essentially an enterprise 2.0 application for the higher education business of co-operative education. It is like some odd form of dating. It can seem like students are pimping their skills to the highest bidder (employer) but it’s not just about money. For students money can talk but so does being able to find a place to live for four months, having a job that isn’t just mindless work, nice office, helping their career afterwards, etc.
Oversimplifying the explanation of the project: Our goal is to create a web based application that does everything from building a resume to a job posting to applying to jobs and setting up interviews. We are designing it as a self-service collaborative environment that will eventually place the university staff in a position of oversight instead of direct service provision. This has to hook in with other university business applications.
When trying to be agile and include the user in our early stage development we have run into the fact that people that are use to business applications are not use to seeing a rough application. They treat it like it is production quality at the earliest of stages and in turn can bog down development. What happens is an overload of feedback and emotion which just takes the steam out of the user advocate and front-end team.
To add to the fun, we are an internal team so a loud backlash has political implications. We can actually get frozen in time until something at least is close to production level in the stakeholders eye. The result can be a big time sink but it may be a necessary evil of building an enterprise 2.0 application.
If you have an internal team that is replacing a Peoplesoft-like ‘take what you get’ mantra in enterprise application development you will need to account for the reality that end-users in business are use to that. In the past if they saw ‘early stage’ they didn’t see much difference once it hit production. I think it is unlikely that business users in general have been involved in truly early stage development.