by Jevon MacDonald
February 14, 2007 at 12:17 pm
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0
A lot of the conversations I have been having lately, and a lot of the posts I am seeing in the Enterprise 2.0 world, seem to be focusing on the search for some sort of answer. The Killer App, Mass Adoption, Search at the Center, Re-engineering large organizations…
The problem as it seems to me is quite different.
Up until now, we have been building systems, intranets, databases, CRM tools, etc. with the presumption that we are capturing some sort of Answer. That there is one small bit of fact that will always stay the same.
The most difficult reality is that nothing stays the same. The smart answer today is a stupid idea within weeks. Of the best thinkers we have today, very few of them will make any real difference in the future.
How will a new breed of enterprise tools allow for this?
- Search must focus on returning context more than answers.
- Ideas must be allowed to fail, and success must be acknowledged.
- Adoption is impossible, people take ownership
- The best result must be found, not determined.
- People have an innate need to create, they do not have an innate need to find, or be shown.
- My network beats your hierarchy 10-to-1 every time
What other changes do we need to respect in new enterprise software and platforms? What real needs do we now have a chance to address?
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As far as tools are concerned:
Architectures will be fully component-based so that enterprises can assemble their own collection and apply their own business rules and interfaces.
As to the rest of business and initiatives:
The answers are in the questions.
‘Design Thinking’ (abductive reasoning) overtakes inductive and deductive reasoning in business practices.
ROI is determined only after research or other evidences initiate discovery of design possiblities through ‘why not’ discoveries. And ROI has to be will be measured and adapted for the next estimate.
Current IT methods will be obliterated and replaced with more adaptive models.
The cultural diversity of IT will be overtaken by intellectual diversity — heavier business specialization will superceed other skills, but this will also include fields such as ethnography, psychology, economics.
Enterprise 2.0 is a matter of management attitude.
Getting the Web 2.0 inside is about knowledge enablement of business processes.
Instead of pushing tools to collaborators, managers should pull knowledge driven behavior from them, this way creating the necessary context that will inspire innovative application design.
Inside the enterprise, communities means collaborators teams of specific processes. User produced content means all the information objects stored across disparate sources of structured and unstructured content. Collaboration means collective case based problem solving using shared information. Information categorization by users means automated extraction of exploration dimensions from information items. Web mashups means the final user ability to build and maintain interfaces blending views from disparate information sources both structured and unstructured as well internal or external to the organization.
I think Enterprise Search technology has a key role in the value chain of the information management process in the Enterprise 2.0 by delivering findability, fine grained contextualization and multi-perspective exploration, the later being the main factor for superior problem solving.
On the other hand, we have to surpass some difficulties related to information confidentiality and security as well to the cultural lock-in that perpetuates the information siloes and privileged power hierarchies.
In my optimistic view, soon business leaders will realize the cost of not knowing: the lack of innovation and poor competitiveness.
Soon people will realize that there is no gain in privileged information, an asset of fast decreasing value in time, and will discover what they would gain more knowledge by sharing information, and by doing so, will be better rewarded.
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