Managing organisational cultural change is a well known challenge and was a common theme from the Boston conference case studies. Without the support of the management and employees Enterprise 2.0 technology projects can fail disastrously. Euen Semple , an independent business advisor on social computing with grounded experience of cultural change, recently posted a list on why he thinks most companies will fail at Enterprise 2.0. The CIA  (USA Central Intelligence Agency) case study at the conference strongly highlighted how they overcame these challenges.

Tony Byrne  felt that the CIA "shared many good nuggets about overcoming institutional and cultural resistance" and describes in detail the CIA's historical culture of collaboration. Don Burke from the CIA said at the conference "implementing social software is more of a cultural challenge than a technical one" and recommended "to start small and simple" to "get people who are uncomfortable with the tools to quickly make and edit and publish". Starting small and simple was echoed by the Lockheed Martin case with Lockheed's Shawn Dahlen saying "Think big, start small, move fast." and their Enterprise 2.0 project tagline "Express, Discover, Connect". C.G Lynch  from CIO magazine has a more detailed account of the CIA cultural challenges.  

In contrast Tom Davenport 's Harvard University blog post critically examines the CIA's cultural challenge quoting that the "middle management isn't comfortable" with their Enterprise 2.0 wiki, Intellipedia. Heather Havenstein of Computerworld says that "For any company moving to embrace Enterprise 2.0, some resistance to the tools that first gained traction within the consumer space is often inevitable."  

Another case study at conference from Simon Revell of Pfizer , a global pharma, said that "We had to challenge the culture". Pfizer took a strong and creative marketing approach to promoting the value of Enterprise 2.0 to help employees with their everyday work. Revell went onto say "We had to get them through the fear barrier."  to overcome resistance of cultural change. This case is analysed by Paul McDougall  from InformationWeek.

At the final case study discussion panel with the presenters from CIA, Pfizer, Sony and Wachovia, Andrew McAfee was "a bit surprised that none of them identified management as a real impediment. the panellists hadn't seen managers in their organizations actively trying to impede Enterprise 2.0."  The initial responses from the panelists highlighted the users as the biggest barriers to faster and deeper adoption of Enterprise 2.0. However, in McAfee's blog post he he goes on to question the reasons for this response indicating that organisational management hierarchies can hinder adoption.

A new organisational management approach that encourages greater organisational collaboration has been termed Management 2.0. Jon Husband  has produced a good blog post on business management innovation.  The thought leader Gary Hamel of Harvard University has also produced a book on the future of Managment  referring to the change in management that is needed. Enterprise 2.0 is bringing existing management methods and organisational culture into focus and the conference cases studies have illustrated how some of these changes can be overcome.

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