Enterprise 2.0 can work, provided it captures and exploits the differential in people’s understanding of the same objectives or tasks.

Yes.

I’m not sure I’d use the phrase “capture and exploit”, though that might be the precise term to use … I’d probably say something like “makes visible and actionable”.

Early on, we made the grievous error of allowing two organisations to convince us that their “step-by-step” process had to be implemented in our software. Six months later each of them told us to undo that change.

Enterprise 2.0 can work, provided it captures and exploits the differential in people’s understanding of the same objectives or tasks. It is quite difficult to make “analysis, interpretation, conversation, negotiation, persuasion, exploration” have an influence on measurable outcomes. But that is the precise framework we need Enterprise 2.0 vendors to create.

Here I meant “shovel, pick, wrench or soldering machine” metaphorically .. we do things now with computers, to information, like “dig, pick, manipulate, tighten up, stitch or bolt together, and weld or solder or seam (integrate)”.

I wouldn’t be surprised whatsoever, as Handy has been one of the key (if not the main) inspirations in my professional life ever since his early book Understanding Organizations, which was a constant companion of mine during my career with Hay Management Consultants

What I have always found interesting (in a quirky sense, because it’s one of the dryest subjects I know) is the deep penetration of Taylorism into the design (and now unconscious assumptions about) of how work “works” and should be thought of and designed. There’s a deep aridity (or complete lack of acknowledgment) in Taylorism about connections, interconnections and interactivity, flows of information, as its core purpose is to separate and sequence for the purposes of predictability, replicability and ever-more kaizen-ish control.

Most people think of “jobs” as reasonably stable sets of tasks around a given objectives-driven focus … but looked at with different, more network-conscious assumptions the design of jobs, work and the most effective organizational structures for work would likely be quite different .. for example, I think most “knowledge” inbteracts with other useful “knowledge” more horizontally than it does vertically (or differently than org charts suggest – as we already know from the growing body of knowledge about SNA).

Some work … much of it encoded in ERP and CRM systems) are still more or less step-by-step tasks with information at the end of the shovel, pick, wrench or soldering machine. The other “work” much of us do … analysis, interpretation, conversation, negotiation, persuasion, exploration … has very little to do with supervisable separable sequentiable optimizable tasks.

The reference to “we tend to overestimate the impacts in the short term…’ reminds me of some of the writing of Charles Handy (’the elepohant and the flea’). We should not lose signt fo the fact that society has succeeded in taking on board significant change previously e.g. arrival of telephone