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/

And generally these arrangements mitigate against the full-blown effectiveness of what have been identified as the dynamics and processes of E2.0.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

That’s 2.0 thinking.

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!