by Tom Mandel
May 8, 2007 at 1:01 pm
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0
The blogospherical (not to say circular) conversation continues about Tom Davenport’s post questioning the impact of Enterprise 2.0, Andrew McAfee’s response, and the ensuing opining by moi and others here and elsewhere.
Jon Husband agrees with both Tom and Andrew. He also concurs with others who have weighed in that Enterprise 2.0 will have long-term effects in organizational change; don’t look for any near-term changes. I like Jon, but really the nice thing about predicting long-term effects is that the prediction comes with zero expectations, and the bad thing is that it has no value at all. I’m sure Jon would agree.
To me, there is something very wrong about this so-called debate, which is being conducted in an exchange of abstractions and palliatives. Here are the three leading - or should I say misleading - abstractions:
- Enterprise 2.0 technologies pose an explicit challenge to the hierarchies of organizations
- Believing that widespread adoption of E2.0 is inevitable is “techno-determinism and -utopianism” (Andrew McAfee’s phrase)
- A big change like Enterprise 2.0 can only happen if it is sponsored by “management” as a “strategic” move executed from the top down.
Each of these abstractions is wildly incorrect and ahistorical. I’ll address each of them in a subsequent post.
Right now, I want to move from the abstract to the concrete and offer an example of how an Enterprise 2.0 technology would make a typical piece of enterprise work easier and in doing so would relieve an organizational hierarchy of a task it’s not good at.
Lets say I am in senior management at Enormabus, Inc., and I have a meeting with an important prospect in Paris to discuss a potential order for our new ThogWheel product. Lets say that I live in Pleasanton CA and for whatever reason I can’t bring an engineer with me to the Paris meeting. Thogwheel is complicated, though, and I’d really like to have a sales engineer with me who fully understands it, one from the Paris region or at least close enough to fly in for the meeting. How do I find that person?
Assuming that I navigate the explicit hierarchy of our organization, I’ll climb the local communications ladder until I find someone at a level high enough that she has a peer in Paris. Through my contact, I’ll get to that person in Paris, who will then navigate the French office hierarchy downward from report to report until the right person is found and put in touch with me.
Notice that this methodology is quite brittle; one person on vacation or otherwise unreachable breaks the tree, and I have to start over on a new path up/down the hierarchy. Note also that for many in the chain it is low-priority “busy work” to move my request along. Success is questionable unless the hierarchy of power is explicitly deployed to make this happen.
Now, what if instead we had Enterprise 2.0 social bookmarking/tagging software integrated with our Enterprise search at Enormabus. Software like that provided by Connectbeam (disclosure: I have a stake in Connectbeam), Cogenz, Lotus Connections, and others. By navigating tags and user profiles, On my own, I would quickly find a sales engineer in or near Paris who is familiar with Thogwheel. The effort might take from 5-15 minutes. The net savings in effort is high, the redundancy and resilience of the system is high, no or little coordination is required, and there is no need to deploy relations of power to make it happen.
Ceteris paribus, this kind of capability is available across the Enterprise 2.0 technology stack. It’s simple, inexpensive, and in most cases you can just start using it without anyone’s help. Do you really think something is going to stop this from happening? You don’t have to be a techno-determinist or a techno-utopian to know which way the wind blows.
This is the same kind of transformation as occurred 25 years ago when to get a financial model I had to navigate a bunch of formalisms, get my request to the MIS department (you remember them, don’t you?) and into their queue, and wait six months. Then I found the IBM PC and Lotus 123. End of story. End of MIS department!
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Tom, of course I agree (I have a stake in Cogenz) (!) - there’s a lot of talk about whether Enterprise 2.0 will make an impact whether it be in the short or long term. In terms of the academic debate, action speaks louder than words: as you say, the barriers to implementing an enterprise bookmarking system are low and clients are already seeing the benefits in return for a modest investment.
I like your case study: always good to articulate an example lto help cut through educating the purchaser! I still think pinpointing the Enteprise 2.0 purchaser is our greatest challenge…. they exist in every enterprise but called different things in each!
Did I miss something here? The scenario offered was inside of an organization and was specific to resources. In my 2.0 world there’s a ‘box’ in the corporate portal called a ‘People Finder’ (since finding other resources is likely a high-priority activity in any organization) and just by typing a dropdown appears with likely candidates and their relevancy to what you’re typing. I just moved your 5-15 minute scenario into one of seconds.
That’s 2.0 thinking.
Hi Paula — that’s great, no problem. Are you referring to a specific existing application called “People Finder”, btw? Or, is this an idea of something you’d like to see or like to have?
If the latter, how would I be letting it know what kind of person I’m looking for? How would it know about those people in the organization?
I mean, it can certainly be done, but it’s not a solution just to say that!
I was specifically noting a ‘function’ I specified and was delivered as a key Enterprise 2.0 component for a client. Moving toward labeling functions based on what they are/do we called it “People Finder”.
In this particular case it was only designed for names, but it could have just as easily been taken further so that with the ‘flip’ of a switch it could be set up to recognize the entry of an ‘attribute’, so that as typing ensues, the entries are matched against key attribute fields and corresponding attributes are displayed in a dropdown. When an appropriate attribute is identified then a results set of employees might be returned. Given that this results set might be larger than a ‘name’ set, the results could be a more indepth search results ‘page’ which allowed for additional attribute filtering until a reasonable set of results could be individually examined for appropriate candidates.
In 2.0 thinking its all about focusing on the data, the function and the interface and drawing the shortest distance between them all.
Well, we’ll have to find another context to talk this through, if we think it’s worth doing. It’s too complicated to go through here.
My key point, however, was that tags and a folksonomy of interests will allow a person to quickly find people around the enterprise who have the knowledge they need and interests that complement theirs. This facilitates professional social networking, etc. My point, in other words, was that an Enterprise 2.0 technology allows an individual to cross all hierarchies to do quickly what otherwise would be difficult to do by traversing the hierarchies. Paula thinks she has something even faster — so much the better.
Tom,
I find myself agreeing with both your assessment of the power of these technologies as well as some of the folks who argue against the proposed ‘revolutionary’ nature of these tools.
Businesses by and large don’t buy things designed to completely revolutionize and “break down” their organizations. However, organizations do buy tools which can make their employees more effective in discovering new product innovations, bringing products to market more quickly, resolving customer issues more efficiently, increasing the consistency and power of their brand, or any other number of key daily profit drivers.
It is the degree to which social software tools truly offer a new way to enable these types of daily business value which will determine whether they succeed or fail in the long term. Any ‘revolutions’, ‘organization hierarchy breakdowns’, or other seismic shifts will be purely by-products IMO.
Disclosure: I work for IBM/Lotus but these views are my own, not necessarily of my employer.
the prediction comes with zero expectations, and the bad thing is that it has no value at all
damning with faint praise indeed, Tom
I think I am going to rely on the old saw of context, and note that (I believe) I have written more granular, specific and substantive pieces over the past five years (both pre and post the term E2.0) about the continuing tensions between the horizontal distribution, exchange, and use of information in workplace settings and the formal hierarchical structure of jobs (knowledge, scope, responsibilities) and the attendant reporting relationships, and I did not feel the need to publish a theory-in-whole to explain why I agreed with both. Why ? because I have written a lot about that over the past five years or so … many different examples have chronicled both near-term changes and patterns that suggest that the long-term changes are likely (but not certain0 to be larger than what has been experienced to date (as a generality, of course 
So, in turn .. the navigation of the hierarchy you describe is (I think) pretty arcane and formal and I doubt that this is a typical case in 2007. I like the process you describe using tags and profiles, and I will be glad to point you to at least two posts I remember writing sometime in the past two or three years describing the use of tag -based org charts, along with skills and competency profiles and calendar optimization software to locate the potential members of teams or resources for project X or project Y.
To continue with concrete notions … I suspect that until the generally standard methods of work design and organizational design are changed in fundamental ways so as not to rely on formal and pretty rigid hierarchies of knowledge and experience as the dominant factor in the structure of departments or even whole companies (with the caveat of not all types of work are the same, and so as Dave Snowden would say, don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater because in some areas a formal hierarchy-of-knowledge basis for the organizational structure is the most appropriate) there will be continuing tension between the dynamics that E2.0 technologies may generate and the dynamics generated and sustained by the nature of the work, the organizational politics and the organization’s policies and culture.
.. and yes, I am *pessimistic* about substantive and widespread short-term changes, as there is (just my opinion) an enormous pack of methodology, protocol, practice and culture behind work design, recruitment, talent management, etc. that is likely to keep vertical arrangements of power, control and status in place for some time to come.
And generally these arrangements mitigate against the full-blown effectiveness of what have been identified as the dynamics and processes of E2.0.
See my response to Jon’s first comment at http://www.socialcomputing.org/archives/12#comments.
I’ve been at pains to stress that the tools of E2.0 can only change the way people get work done. Influence on corporate organization, hierarchies, etc. can only be emergent. No one can know what kinds of changes, if any, these will be.
See, for example, http://fastforwardblog.com/2007/05/03/tom-tom-beating-the-drum-for-e-20/
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