I read a blog post a few weeks ago from Nick Milton, Director and Founder of Konco, LTD., a Knowledge Management services company based in the UK.  His blog post was about BP's Knowledge Management program, and how they were traveling to various sites, spreading the news about Knowledge Management at BP in the late 1990's. 

He relayed a story about how they were trying to engage the BP Columbia unit because they had heard they were doing some really good things with the Open Text Livelink product in exchanging and building knowledge.  The group told them they didn't have time to contribute because they were too busy and didn't see this as a priority for them.  The bottom line was it would cost them time and resources to share this information and they didn't see the benefit for them in making this investment.

It was the age old question of What's in it for me or WIIFM as we called it at a previous employer of mine.  We were posed this question during the implementations of various IT initiatives, but in particular when it came time to ask people to participate in our Enterprise Content Management (ECM) program.  They wanted to know why they should make an investment of their time and resources for this program.

Users may ask the WIIFM question at several points in the process of implementing ECM technologies.  They may ask why should I share my files in a repository that is used and seen by other departments?  We are fine sharing within our own departmental drives, sending via email or other means the information that another department may need to see.  Why should I change my behavior?  It is easy and it works.

This may be an easier WIIFM question to answer in most cases.  It is easy to demonstrate how the same security could be present in an ECM system, with other departments only having access to those areas they need to and not the entire departmental shared file area.  It is also fairly easy to demonstrate that collaboration via email isn't very efficient and does nothing to help team members who may join the team later or may have been left off the original distribution list. 

Users may ask the WIIFM question when being requested to enter metadata when adding files to a repository.  While inheritance of attributes or metadata based on the folder the content is being added to and other identifying information such as where they sit in the organization is possible, users may be requested to enter some metadata because it couldn't be derived via another automated means.  Requiring additional metadata that isn't related to their particular function is a hard sell in some cases because like the BP story from above, they really don't care that another department may be able to more easily locate content because of a particular piece of metadata.  Why should they invest their time in entering metadata that may not benefit them?

The answer to the WIIFM question in this example is usually compelling use cases on how the overall organization benefited from being able to locate information via previously entered metadata.  It could be a story about how a particular piece of content was located via metadata and saved the company a lot of time in recreating it.  Or some content that saved them in pending litigation because it helped prove the organization's case.

Users need solid examples or stories to help them understand the answer to the WIIFM question when asked to jump on the ECM bandwagon.  Besides the basic human nature of questioning anything new or different in their work environment, they need to fully understand how they are to participate in this new way of working.  And they want to know why they should change their way of working by understanding what's in it for me.  They will hopefully be more willing to contribute by knowing they are part of the overall goal and not wait until an event that forces them to participate, like in the BP Columbia example.