Dion Hinchcliffe’s post with the above title is too useful for you to rely on my summary. All the same, here is the key point, as I see it. Hinchcliffe notes that
“business “culture… often holds back what’s possible in terms of information technology — certainly for good reasons at times — but just as often because it lacks a change agent that can successfully bridge the barriers that’s preventing the corporate culture from evolving to adapt to ideas and approaches that are genuinely beneficial.”
But, he argues, this is not a likely fate for Enterprise 2.0 technologies:
“because they appear to so easily cross organizational boundaries, can be adopted so easily, require virtually no training, are highly social, and so on, Enterprise 2.0 apps appear to have their very own “change agent” by their fundamental nature.”
Perhaps any truly viral technology is so because it is a change agent as well as a productivity tool. Certainly this is true of mobile phones, and one can see that the entire music industry must change because of the iPod and rss.
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 3:28 pm
OK … culture change. Companies spend tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars on becoming learning organizations, or working on culture change, or getting into sutained and expensive leadership and management development programs. I know I (and a range of others) have argued in the past that using social software and social computing could accomplish much that the more traditional (and arguably more expensive) consulting diagnose-prescribe-implement-and-then-coach initiatives aim at accomplishing.
But there are reasons that most of us have seen and understand as to why that latest attitude or climate survey sits on the shelf or get a spim treatment from the internal communications people. The executives and senior managers whose ostensible have responsibility for addressing the cultursl issues often have a very hard time with this. I am not, I don’t believe, making this up. I believe that a cursory glsance over many management books and articles over the last twenty to thirty years would bear out my assertion, though yes, clearly, some companies take up the challenge and do a good job at this.
But to think that the ease-of-use, scope and reach of E2.0 technologies will also adopt the characteristics of and act as change agents is a stretch, I think. yes, they will by definition introduce change, change which cannot be ignored .. but I think that their introduction and use also sharpens substantially the game for execs and senior managers. Lack of understanding, apprehension, fear of losing control, exposure of inadequacies and general wartiness will also be catalyzed, and are likely to create significant issues for “managing” the change9s) that have been introduced.
As social computing moves deeper, wider and more pervasively into the corporate sphere, look for a field I call eOD to emerge and gain in importance. Most management science and art over the past 50 years has been aimed at predictability and control, although the need for thre kinds of changes we are discussing here have been identified for sometime as the business / organizational world and its complexity have accelerated. E2.0 technologies and the accompanying dynamics will by and large exacerbate the need.
Just an opinion ….
2 tmandel // May 21, 2007 at 6:49 pm
eOD — that’s an interesting idea, Jon.
There are people who do something like this; I think first of all of Lisa Kimball of http://www.groupjazz.com, but there are others as well.
I hope you’ll blog about the notion of eOD.
3 Jon Husband // May 21, 2007 at 7:21 pm
Lisa is an old friend of mine. I was for quite a while (still am, I suppose) an OD practitioner, after a more mainstream HR / org effectiveness consulting career.
I have blogged a fair bit about eOD over the past year .. not always mentioning it by “name”, but often enough the term has crept in.
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