Dion Hinchcliffe on “Enterprise 2.0 as a corporate culture catalyst”
by Tom Mandel
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.”
It seems to me that this is a very interesting rejoinder to the charge of ‘techno-determinism’ made against folks who see Enterprise 2.0 as an inevitable next step.
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.
