by Jim McGee
July 19, 2007 at 2:17 pm
· Filed under Barriers, Enterprise 2.0
I was not able to attend last month’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. I wanted to pick up on something Andrew McAfee had to say during his keynote there, however. Here’s his set up:
I found myself in an uncomfortable position at the end of my short keynote speech during the Enterprise 2.0 conference yesterday. I got through my prepared material and still had about five minutes left in the alloted time. So I had to ad lib.
The idea that occurred to me (from no identifiable source) was to make Enterprise 2.0 personal. I compared where my thinking was a year ago to where it was today, and tried to convey how big a shift had taken place.
[Speaking From the Heart, and off the Top of My Head ]
He goes on to share some of his observations about blogs, social networks, and how organizations are taking up the mix of technologies that fall under the Enterprise 2.0 rubric. For example:
I used to believe that blogs were primarily vehicles for blaring opinions, and that bloggers generally proved Kierkegaard’s great quote that “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” I now get a large percentage of my daily food for thought from blogs, and write one myself. It’s proved to be an unparalled vehicle for getting ideas out into the world, getting useful feedback on them, and meeting people who are interested in the same things I am.
[Speaking From the Heart, and off the Top of My Head ]
What struck me was the particular importance of hands on knowledge in appreciating the importance of these technologies. The organizational value of these technologies is in how they change the possibilities for productivity and effectiveness of the managerial and executive core. You need to work with them in a substantive way to appreciate what they can do for you. That makes them different from so many other applications of technology in the organization. McAfee has made that investment and has become an effective spokesperson for them. How do we get others in similar positions to invest in the necessary learning?
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I belive, and have domne so for quite a while, that we collectively are on our way to the “mass customization of work”, notably in areas of knowledge work that are not constrained by the demands of a highly structured integrated enterprise system
Individual learning styles, competency models, blends of individual and team objectives, relative degrees of empowerment, work thatinvolves a web of customers, suppliers and colleagues where collaboration and adaptation to each other are vital … all lend themselves to the personalization aspects inherent in “mass customization” … and I think that blogs and blog-like derivatives are an important element of this trend (the one I see … I may be the only one that sees that, and I may very well be wrong, but my interpretation is that McAfee may be saying something similar).
Ironic that Joseph Pine, who now focuses on “experiences” was responsible for the concepts of “mass customization”. Here’s the flaw: it’s still a ‘push’ not a ‘draw’. Indeed, the difference between the ‘pull’ that so many want to speak of, is that it is ‘individual’. “Draw” is a collective connectedness from whence emergence is fostered. The mass (size) of the sector for which the customization matters is not relevant — the long tail is not about the masses.
Underneath these observations is another one, I think, about a shift in the locus of control and responsibility from the organization to the individual. This is threatening to those who currently exercise control in organizations and I think it is also threatening to many who have chosen to give up control in organizations for a sense of security.
Hi, Paula. In the context of knowledge work and the way(s) people carry it out in the ncreasingly informatted and perosnalized knowledge workplace, I am afraid I don’t quite understand the point you are making.
I may be interepreting either loosely or incorrectly here, but I am not sure the long tail applies to the workplace per se .. and it is a “mass” but from the other direction if you will.
Jim .. yours is an important point, and I think has real implications for some of the core assumptions about the role and tasks of middle and senior management.
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