Lately, we’ve been hearing some concern that Enterprise 2.0 tools run counter to the core organizational principles of the enterprise. That’d make them dangerous. Enough so that complexity-in-business guru Dave Snowden recently noted a suggestion from a corporate Knowledge Management person that employees should be required to have a license to blog – ala a driver’s license.

That sounds serious, doesn’t it? After all, organizations are hierarchical, structured around relationships of management and reporting, whereas the new tools of Enterprise 2.0 reflect the individual and unorganized state of the public Web, especially “Web 2.0.” Isn’t there a contradiction here? Are “Enterprise 2.0” and the enterprise itself on a collision course?

This idea comes naturally to anyone who fears that a fiefdom or other power domain may be breached by new social software tools. But, it’s also behind the concern expressed by some of Andy McAfee’s students that using social software tools will make them seem laggards – like they don’t have enough to do. And Nicholas Carr’s skeptical claim (a year ago – he may have a different opinion now) that the more valuable an employee’s work and time are the less likely she may be to use these new tools amounts to the same argument as well.

If you are like me, you sense that these arguments are specious, but you have a hard time putting into words what’s wrong with them. After all, we have always gotten our work done with the tools we had; did this ever before prevent us from adopting new tools? Moreover, this same objection was used against bringing personal computers into the enterprise a quarter century ago. People were too busy to use them; only gadget freaks were interested.

As to the idea that social software can be a time waster, so can any productivity tool. Ever drum a pencil up and down on your desk?

As good a counter-example as the PC is, there is an even better one sitting on your desk. A purely social technology you use day in and day out – I mean your telephone, of course. Talk about a potential time-waster! Talk about the most important business productivity instrument of the twentieth century!

Here’s what I think is wrong with these arguments – they confuse corporate organization with the way we get corporate work done. Yes, reporting and managerial relationships are inherently hierarchical. But, this organization sits on top of a work environment that is always social and often collaborative.

Perhaps we are misled by the checkered history of the term collaboration; in the last two decades we have seen a lot of “collaboration software” that wasn’t very productive. And, too, perhaps we have the idea that “social” means something like “socializing”, so that we are forced to argue for social software by saying that, hey, lunch can be productive too!

It’s information itself that is social — embedded, that is, in the active social relations of the people who create and use it. Access to that “sociality” of information is what turns it into useful, human knowledge – in business as in daily life. Recently, a Sean Park post reminded me of The Social Life of Information, by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid that is essential reading for anyone interested in Enterprise 2.0.