The blogospherical (not to say circular) conversation continues about Tom Davenport’s post questioning the impact of Enterprise 2.0, Andrew McAfee’s response, and the ensuing opining by moi and others here and elsewhere.
Jon Husband agrees with both Tom and Andrew. He also concurs with others who have weighed in that Enterprise 2.0 will have long-term effects in organizational change; don’t look for any near-term changes. I like Jon, but really the nice thing about predicting long-term effects is that the prediction comes with zero expectations, and the bad thing is that it has no value at all. I’m sure Jon would agree.
To me, there is something very wrong about this so-called debate, which is being conducted in an exchange of abstractions and palliatives. Here are the three leading - or should I say misleading - abstractions:
- Enterprise 2.0 technologies pose an explicit challenge to the hierarchies of organizations
- Believing that widespread adoption of E2.0 is inevitable is “techno-determinism and -utopianism” (Andrew McAfee’s phrase)
- A big change like Enterprise 2.0 can only happen if it is sponsored by “management” as a “strategic” move executed from the top down.
Each of these abstractions is wildly incorrect and ahistorical. I’ll address each of them in a subsequent post.
Right now, I want to move from the abstract to the concrete and offer an example of how an Enterprise 2.0 technology would make a typical piece of enterprise work easier and in doing so would relieve an organizational hierarchy of a task it’s not good at.
Lets say I am in senior management at Enormabus, Inc., and I have a meeting with an important prospect in Paris to discuss a potential order for our new ThogWheel product. Lets say that I live in Pleasanton CA and for whatever reason I can’t bring an engineer with me to the Paris meeting. Thogwheel is complicated, though, and I’d really like to have a sales engineer with me who fully understands it, one from the Paris region or at least close enough to fly in for the meeting. How do I find that person?
Assuming that I navigate the explicit hierarchy of our organization, I’ll climb the local communications ladder until I find someone at a level high enough that she has a peer in Paris. Through my contact, I’ll get to that person in Paris, who will then navigate the French office hierarchy downward from report to report until the right person is found and put in touch with me.
Notice that this methodology is quite brittle; one person on vacation or otherwise unreachable breaks the tree, and I have to start over on a new path up/down the hierarchy. Note also that for many in the chain it is low-priority “busy work” to move my request along. Success is questionable unless the hierarchy of power is explicitly deployed to make this happen.
Now, what if instead we had Enterprise 2.0 social bookmarking/tagging software integrated with our Enterprise search at Enormabus. Software like that provided by Connectbeam (disclosure: I have a stake in Connectbeam), Cogenz, Lotus Connections, and others. By navigating tags and user profiles, On my own, I would quickly find a sales engineer in or near Paris who is familiar with Thogwheel. The effort might take from 5-15 minutes. The net savings in effort is high, the redundancy and resilience of the system is high, no or little coordination is required, and there is no need to deploy relations of power to make it happen.
Ceteris paribus, this kind of capability is available across the Enterprise 2.0 technology stack. It’s simple, inexpensive, and in most cases you can just start using it without anyone’s help. Do you really think something is going to stop this from happening?You don’t have to be a techno-determinist or a techno-utopian to know which way the wind blows.
This is the same kind of transformation as occurred 25 years ago when to get a financial model I had to navigate a bunch of formalisms, get my request to the MIS department (you remember them, don’t you?) and into their queue, and wait six months. Then I found the IBM PC and Lotus 123. End of story. End of MIS department!
Tom Mandel is a pioneer in social software and social computing. He works with organizations as a strategic guide to the future, helping you innovate, grow, become more profitable, and develop better ways to work.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Jon Husband // May 21, 2007 at 12:26 pm
the prediction comes with zero expectations, and the bad thing is that it has no value at all
damning with faint praise indeed, Tom
I think I am going to rely on the old saw of context, and note that (I believe) I have written more granular, specific and substantive pieces over the past five years (both pre and post the term E2.0) about the continuing tensions between the horizontal distribution, exchange, and use of information in workplace settings, and did not feel the need to publish a theory-in-whole to explain why I agreed with both.
So, in turn .. the navigation of the hierarchy you describe is (I think) pretty arcane and formal and I doubt that this is a typical case in 2007. I like the process you describe using tags and profiles, and I will be glad to point you to at least two posts I remember writing sometime in the past two or three years describing the use of tag -based org charts, along with skills and competency profiles and calendar optimization software to locate the potential members of teams or resources for project X or project Y.
To continue with concrete notions … I suspect that until the generally standard methods of work design and organizational design are changed in fundamental ways so as not to rely on formal and pretty rigid hierarchies of knowledge and experience as the dominant factor in the structure of departments or even whole companies (with the caveat of not all types of work are the same, and so as Dave Snowden would say, don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater because in some areas a formal hierarchy-of-knowledge basis for the organizational structure is the most appropriate) there will be continuing tension between the dynamics that E2.0 technologies may generate and the dynamics generated and sustained by the nature of the work, the organizational politics and the organization’s policies and culture.
BTW, how do you know that you like me ? Maybe you won’t if we ever meet.
2 tmandel // May 21, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Jon — first of all, I *do* know you! I read your writing, and what I meant by “like you” is that I like your writing. Moreover — and who knows, some might say even more importantly — we are connected on Twitter! Should we some day meet face to face, I have every expectation of continuing to like you.
I seem to have given offense, but I didn’t mean to. The ‘zero value’ of long term predictions is not particular to what you write, Jon, it’s in the nature of the thing. Obviously, there is no *present* value to a long-term prediction, and by the time the long term has come around to either prove or disprove what was predicted it has surely been forgotten.
Hence, a positive long term prediction is not much more than a form of optimism about something, and a negative one little more than pessimism.
We all practice this kind of optimism or pessimism, we all predict the future by extrapolating from the present, and we are all therefore in the same boat. If you felt singled out, that’s my bad — I should have written more clearly.
Now, to your specific comments:
yes, my illustration of hierarchical dependency at cross-purposes w/ the flow of work requirements was arcane — typically, we’d use not the hierarchy but some informal relationship we had outside of the hierarchy. “I bet Danielle would know someone in Paris,” we’d say (or something like that) and pick up the phone and call.
But, I was trying to illustrate the difference between navigating a hierarchy and a social network or even folksonomy. I.e. we have little help from existing *IT technologies* in cutting through the hierarchy.
3 Jon Husband // May 21, 2007 at 5:15 pm
<i> seem to have given offense, but I didn’t mean </i>
You didn’t really, but I would point out to you that any explication or assertion that starts with "I like "X", <b>but</b>" makes one wonder about what comes after the "but" … no ?
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