They will be a LOT cheaper, of course

Ross Dawson discusses a Gartner report on social software, looking at some particular forecasts for the next three to five years out:

20% of businesses using social media instead of e-mail by 2014

50% of businesses using activity streams, such as micro-blogging, by 2012

20% of businesses will use social network analysis by 2015

70-95% of IT dominated social media initiatives will fail through to 2012

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(UPDATE: For additional clarity, Ross Dawson pinged me on Twitter to point out that “Actually that’s 95% of *IT-driven* social software initiatives – many will succeed but not those that come from IT perspective” … that’s as opposed to IT-dominated; small but oh-so-important point)

I’ve highlighted the last point because it’s time to look at social media and social computing as a connecting force in the enterprise. (This still applies in light of Ross’ clarification, but in my opinion the larger issue still stands.  He may well differ.)

For me, yesterday and today have been a stream of pretty intense conversations (via email and Twitter .. maybe soon to include Google Buzz and/or Wave ?) about the bluring-of-the-boundaries between Learning / Training & Development, KM, work design & HR, OD (organizational development), strategic decisions by the IT department, and probably core elements of leadership and management development.

The lines are blurring are between these more-or-les silo’ed organizational domains, just as they are between marketing and training and between learning and working. The connectivity enabled by social computing gives us an opportunity to identify overlapping areas and redundancies in organizational human performance support.  A unified support function, focused on really serving workers and helping them grow, could significantly reduce the 77% of CLO Magazine survey respondents who feel that people in their organization are not growing fast enough to keep up with the business.

Every department in the enterprise is part of the problem:

IT: for locking down computers and treating all employees like children, closing off a wealth of information, knowledge and connections outside the artificial firewall.

Communications: for forcing employees to use approved messages that do not even sound human.

Training: for separating learning from work.

HR: for forcing people into standardized  jobs and competency models that do not reflect the person.

It’s time for all departments to become part of the solution.

Myself and a network of interested friends and colleagues (I consider anyone with whom I exchange on the purposeful issues I pay attention to and work on a “colleague”) have  been discussing the blurring of lines between traditional organizational departments.  I believe that the general consensus is that any organizational change, especially using social computing, needs to look at the whole of the organization and not just the parts.

Organizational culture, or its DNA, is an emergent property of the various components working, hopefully, in concert. Enabling only one department to initiate the change to a more cooperative and networked organization, may be a recipe for failure (70-95% of the time).

Of course, as always we’ll see what happens as the future unfolds.

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