by Joe McKendrick
March 27, 2007 at 8:52 pm
· Filed under Barriers, Enterprise 2.0
Two of information technology’s greatest thinkers — Harvard’s Andrew McAfee and Babson’s Tom Davenport, have agreed to disagree over the scale of the impact of Enterprise 2.0.
Davenport, author of Competing on Analytics and a vocal proponent of the power of IT to transform business, doesn’t think E2.0 will rise to the occasion. He just published an article in Harvard Business Review questioning the value of Enterprise 2.0 to business. He even considers E2.0 to be the “next small thing,” rather than “the next big thing,” as Andrew McAfee believes (and as we proclaim with such persistence at this blogsite.)
Davenport questions whether E2.0 technologies and services “will empower employees, decentralize decisions, free up knowledge, and generally make for better places to work,” as McAfee and many of us here at this blogsite believe.
Davenport explains his skepticism:
“Such a utopian vision can hardly be achieved through new technology alone. The absence of participative technologies in the past is not the only reason that organizations and expertise are hierarchical. Enterprise 2.0 software and the Internet won’t make organizational hierarchy and politics go away. They won’t make the ideas of the front-line worker in corporations as influential as those of the CEO.”
McAfee responded that he “couldn’t agree more” with Davenport, arguing that he, too, argues against the “techno-determinism and -utopianism that I’ve sensed in some E2.0 enthusiasts.” Rather, McAfee predicts “spotty deployment of E2.0 technologies, not broad or deep adoption. My pessimism comes from exactly the factors that Tom describes.”
McAfee, however, admits he is far more optimistic about E2.0, putting it this way:
“My optimism, and my interest in the component technologies of E2.0, comes not (solely) from my inherent geekiness, but from the fact that these technologies really are something new under the sun. They’re not extensions or enhancements to previous generations of corporate tools for collaboration and knowledge management; instead, they’re radical departures from them.”
He also agreed that E2.0 in and of itself won’t “turn our existing hierarchical, political, and busy companies into egalitarian gestalts of knowledge creation and continuous bottom-up innovation.” However, what E2.0 will do, McAfee believes, is open more doors, giving “managers who want more lateralism, egalitarianism, crowdsourcing, idea percolation, self-organization, collective intelligence, etc. a new and unprecedented opportunity to obtain them.”
McAfee also observes that many managers truly want to break down the hierarchies that hold their organizations back, and that market forces will ultimately make E2.0 attractive to many businesses. “If Enterprise 2.0 technologies and mindsets do in fact help some companies get ahead by creating and disseminating more knowledge, innovating more, reacting faster, etc. then interest will grow, and so might new approaches.”
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I see Tom Davenport’s point about the absence of participative technologies not causing organizations and expertise to be hierarchical — and I have seen more than a few tech firms fail as a result of denying that reality.
That said, I think as people who have grown up relying on participatory technologies — using everything from IM to MySpace to Twitter to manage personal and professional lives — assume managerial roles, those technologies and approaches will follow into the corporate culture.
Great post. Thanks. Good example of the baggage that blogs drag into the enterprise. I greatly respect Tom but he has seen blogs in the past as the “tools for individuals to express their somewhat random musings.” (Thinking for a Living. p. 108) and I think this might still color some of his perspective. On the other hand he is open to change as he concludes the same HBS article cited above with this thought. I will write some more on this next week.
‘I freely admit, however, to one key uncertainty. It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens when the young bucks and buckettes of today’s wired world hit the adult work force. Will they freely submit to such structured information environments as those provided by SAP and Oracle, content and knowledge management systems, and communication by email? Or will they overthrow the computational and communicational status quo with MySpace, MyBlog, and MyWiki?.”
Technology can play a part in changing how humans think and behave in an organization. But, by putting too much trust in new technologies we will only fool ourselves. We have to look at ourselves first. Technology is at best a mirror reflecting our behaviours and forcing us to think about them. Then it is ip to us to learn something from what we see.
That said, I think as people who have grown up relying on participatory technologies — using everything from IM to MySpace to Twitter to manage personal and professional lives — assume managerial roles, those technologies and approaches will follow into the corporate culture.
This will be hard to stop, stem or deny, in my opinion.
Not to mention that effective (and still hierarchical when appropriate / necessary) leadership and management could be using the dynamics promised by E2.0 to grow and sustain healthy, adapative, resilient and learning-oriented organizational cultures - something many organizations already spend a lot of money trying to accomplish.
Warren Bennis once said “Much of hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust”. It takes a lot of work on the part of leaders and senior managers - listening, championing, changing course when wrong, communicating effectively and consistently - to sustain effective organizations where knowledge-based work is mission-critical.
Why is it, for example, that coaching in organizations has caught on quickly and widely ? Why are emotional intelligence and social intelligence now important issues to organizations. There are some pernicious aspects to traditional top-down hierarchy that E2.0 - intelligently conceived and designed and applied for appropriate purpose - can help to mitigate.
eOD anyone ? Why ignore what can be put to good use ?
From the The Visionary’s Handbook (Nine Paradoxes that will Shape the Future of your Business) by Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor:
The key to a false vision is that, in the face of knowing for sure that the world is going to change, a company or an organisation or an individual aspires to stay the same. The key to a true vision is that, in the face of knowing for sure that the world is going to change, a company or an organisation or an individual aspires to change with it and stay the same simultaneously . And the reality of a true vision is that, unlike a false one, pursuing it is such difficult work.
My full pennies worth here
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