These days there are incessant debates about the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 platforms, tools and practices.

We’ve been here before … we just did not have the infrastructure or the tools, nor the awareness or skill levels of large numbers of people.

As information technology first began its relentless march into the daily lives of people in the areas of work (mainframes, early integrated systems, desktops computers in the workplace) and general information-seeking (early days of websites and the Web), thinkers and organizational development conultants began paying attention to the intersection of technology and sociology.  Many of the grandfathers and grandmothers of the field of organizational development will find the material on socio-technical systems familiar, and perhaps refreshing in the context of networked workplaces.

The material outlined below comes from a comprehensive Wikipedia entry on Socio-technical Systems, and I have edited it for the purposes of this blog post.

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Sociotechnical systems (or STS) in organizational development is an approach to complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces. The term also refers to the interaction between society’s complex infrastructures and human behaviour.

In this sense, society itself, and most of its substructures, are complex sociotechnical systems. The term sociotechnical systems was coined in the 1960s by Eric Trist and Fred Emery, who were working as consultants at the Tavistock Institute in London.

Sociotechnical systems theory is theory about the social aspects of people and society and technical aspects of machines and technology. Sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organisation. Sociotechnical theory therefore is about joint optimization, with a shared emphasis on achievement of both excellence in technical performance and quality in people’s work lives.

Sociotechnical theory, as distinct from sociotechnical systems, proposes a number of different ways of achieving joint optimisation. They are usually based on designing different kinds of organisation, ones in which the relationships between socio and technical elements lead to the emergence of productivity and wellbeing.

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It’s too intensive an experience to go into the deep details of STS here, but let me draw out a few of the core elements of socio-technical systems theory and principles.  It should be self-evident that they are central to the examination and adoption of collaborative social computing in todays modern organizations

Sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organization. Sociotechnical theory is founded on two main principles:

- One is that the interaction of social and technical factors creates the conditions for successful (or unsuccessful) organizational performance. This interaction is comprised partly of linear ‘cause and effect’ relationships (the relationships that are normally ‘designed’) and partly from ‘non-linear’, complex, even unpredictable relationships (the good or bad relationships that are often unexpected).
- The corollary of this, and the second of the two main principles, is that optimisation of each aspect alone (socio or technical) tends to increase not only the quantity of unpredictable, ‘un-designed’ relationships, but those relationships that are injurious to the system’s performance.

Therefore sociotechnical theory is about joint optimisation.

Principles of Socio-technical Systems Theory

Some of the central principles of sociotechnical theory were elaborated in a seminal paper by Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth in 1951.

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The key to responsible autonomy seems to be to design an organization possessing the characteristics of small groups whilst preventing the ‘silo-thinking’ and ‘stovepipe’ neologisms of contemporary management theory. In order to preserve “…intact the loyalties on which the small group [depend]…the system as a whole [needs to contain] its bad in a way that [does] not destroy its good”.

In practice this requires groups to be responsible for their own internal regulation and supervision, with the primary task of relating the group to the wider system falling explicitly to a group leader. This principle, therefore, describes a strategy for removing more traditional command hierarchies.

Adaptability

“…the organisation tries to deal with the external complexity by ‘reducing’ the internal control and coordination needs. …This option might be called the strategy of ‘simple organisations and complex jobs’”.

Many type of organisations are clearly motivated by the appealing ‘industrial age’, rational principles of ‘factory production’, a particular approach to dealing with complexity: “In the factory a comparatively high degree of control can be exercised over the complex and moving ‘figure’ of a production sequence, since it is possible to maintain the ‘ground’ in a comparatively passive and constant state”

In Classic organisations problems with the moving ‘figure’ and moving ‘ground’ often become magnified through a much larger social space, one in which there is a far greater extent of hierarchical task interdependence. For this reason, the semi-autonomous group, and its ability to make a much more fine grained response to the ‘ground’ situation, can be regarded as ‘agile’.

Added to which, local problems that do arise need not propagate throughout the entire system (to affect the workload and quality of work of many others) because a complex organization doing simple tasks has been replaced by a simpler organization doing more complex tasks. The agility and internal regulation of the group allows problems to be solved locally without propagation through a larger social space, thus increasing tempo.

Whole tasks

Another concept in sociotechnical theory is the ‘whole task’. A whole task “has the advantage of placing responsibility for the task squarely on the shoulders of a single, small, face-to-face group which experiences the entire cycle of operations within the compass of its membership.”  The sociotechnical embodiment of this principle is the notion of minimal critical specification. This principle states that, “While it may be necessary to be quite precise about what has to be done, it is rarely necessary to be precise about how it is done”

The key factor in minimally critically specifying tasks is the responsible autonomy of the group to decide, based on local conditions, how best to undertake the task in a flexible adaptive manner.

This principle is isomorphic with ideas like Effects Based Operations (EBO). EBO asks the question of what goal is it that we want to achieve, what objective is it that we need to reach rather than what tasks have to be undertaken, when and how. The EBO concept enables the managers to “…manipulate and decompose high level effects. They must then assign lesser effects as objectives for subordinates to achieve. The intention is that subordinates’ actions will cumulatively achieve the overall effects desired”

Meaningfulness of tasks

Effects Based Operations and the notion of a ‘whole task’, combined with adaptability and responsible autonomy, have additional advantages for those at work in the organization. This is because “for each participant the task has total significance and dynamic closure” as well as the requirement to deploy a multiplicity of skills and to have the responsible autonomy in order to select when and how to do so.

This is clearly hinting at a relaxation of the myriad control mechanisms found in the more classically designed organizations.

In classic organisations the ‘wholeness’ of a task is often diminished by multiple group integration and spatiotemporal disintegration.

The group based form of organization design proposed by sociotechnical theory combined with new technological possibilities (such as the internet) provide a response to this often forgotten issue, one that contributes significantly to joint optimisation.

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I’ve done a significant amount of editing above (by chopping out significant-but-complicated-and-jargon-laden parts of the extract from Wikipedia).  Suffice it for now to say that socio-technical systems theory and principles anticipated the dynamic tension between the (potential) every-which-wayness of hyperlinked human activity and the need for concentration on setting and achieving meaningful objectives that drive organizational performance.

It seems clear to me that as organizations explore and take action regarding the implementation of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities, knowledge work will need to be designed differently .. away from the linear ’cause-and-effect’ and sequential thinking evident in today’s job descriptions and organizational charts, towards adaptability, autonomy, whole tasks and individuals taking responsibility for the effectiveness of the networks in which they are engaged that address the organization’s objectives.

The socio-technical systems approach involves complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces, as a subset or mirror of the interaction between society’s complex infrastructures and human behavior.

The elements of the approach brought to a specific organization are:

Job enrichment – giving the employee a wider and higher level scope of responsibilitiy with increased decision making authority. This is the opposite of job enlargement, which simply would not involve greater authority. Instead, it will only have an increased number of duties.

Job enlargement – increasing the scope and reach of a job’s duties and responsibilities. This argues against over-specialisation and the division of labour whereby work is divided into small units, each of which is performed repetitively by an individual worker.

Job rotation - an approach to employee and management development.  A schedule of varying assignments gives people a breadth of exposure to large parts of or the entire operation.

Motivation – stimulating and enhancing  the initiation, direction, intensity and persistence of positive and constructive behaviors, or more simply increasing the desire and willingness to do something.

Process improvement – actions taken to identify, analyze and improve existing processes within an organization to meet new goals and objectives. ‘Process’ in a networked environment is an emerging area of study, as the linear BPR that has dominated the past two decades will be impacted, sometimes dramatically, by the dynamics of purposeful network activity.

Task analysis – how tasks are accomplished -  information which can  be used for many purposes, such as personnel selection and training, tool or equipment design, procedure design and automation.  Again, the notion of ‘tasks’ will sometimes (often ?) see dramatic impact as networked activity around an objectives increases.

Work design – the application of sociotechnical systems principles and techniques to the humanization of work. The aims of work design to improved job satisfaction, to improved through-put, to improved quality and to reduced employee problems, e.g., grievances, absenteeism.

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Many thinkers and consultants in the Enterprise 2.0 space are recognizing and discussing the need to re-design knowledge work and the small and large structural elements of organizations, due to the growing pervasiveness of today’s information-flow infrastructure.

The principles and elements of socio-technical systems theory, and offshoots like Emery and Trist’s Participative Work Design (on which I have written before), are in my opinion very useful and practical sources for thinking through and implementing some of the changes … in mental models and in practices … that I believe will be necessary to obtain the latent potential available in purposeful social computing aimed at an organization’s objectives for better and more responsive performance.

I’ll be glad to learn what you think.

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I bet that many organizations are also having the same internal conversations and being as frustrated as he is.

Looking at where the death threats are is a more productive area of discussion.

For public media Death lurks here – We have to have a much wider based and much larger public that thinks that we are not merely important but VITAL to them. If we don’t we wont make it.

“Wider based” means that we have to break out of our current demographic – of on TV being over 50, mainly white middle class and well educated – on radio of being over 40 and the same.

The challenge of doing this has been the restrictions of our “Air”. We have only 24 hours and one place on the dial.

So to change programming enough to bring in a very different demographic is to piss off the existing foundation with no real chance of adding the new. Example, the CBC have quite good show on the Native Canadian world – my bet is that most of the traditional audience switch off immediately and that First Nation’s people are not going to be tempted to become enthusiastic listeners of the CBC based on one program. This type of programming is lose lose. For NPR it was a new hip morning show called Bryant Park. What station in its right mind will drop Morning Edition for a new entrant aimed away from its main audience?

So long as Public Radio and TV have a secure foundation on their Air – they cannot expand their audience.

Also loyalty and more important financial and voting support merely based on liking content is no longer enough. When I came to Canada in 1972, I was used to the BBC and became a fanatic PBS watcher. There was no other source of good content then. Now there is tons of great content elsewhere. The old tie to content is much weaker.

So how then can Public Media avoid DEATH? How can it expand its reach to a much wider and diverse public? How can it deepen the connection beyond the relatively weak one of content?

An answer is appearing in the work of 70 plus stations working in the 32 worst hit markets in the US where the Economy is destroying the middle and lower classes. In this project – called Facing the Mortgage Crisis – stations are working with each other to pull together/convene groups of community support into a platform that can help people cope with this the greatest crisis to hit most Americans since the 30’s.

This is where the DEATH threat can be answered and this is where Social Media and the whole 2.0 perspective is invaluable.

Here stations are helping people who do not and will NEVER watch our mainstream Air. BUT they do interact with our specialty Web Sites that are focused on this issue and hence on them. More we do a lot face to face. Sometime at the station and many times in libraries and other places of trust such as churches. More, we give the community partners a face and a voice too.

It is the 2.0 web that is at the heart of this ability to offer something meaningful to people who will not connect to our traditional content on our traditional air. Ironically, as the crisis affects all, many of the white middle class are now in the same boat. They too use our 2.0 world as a new resource. In time a common crisis, as in war, brings all together. All people share a common fear and grief. All wonder what to do and how to keep going? All worry about their kids.

I predict that something great can emerge from our web – but it is not about getting more people to watch Nova or listen to All Things Considered.

So what then was my CIO’s Death fear?

I offered up this to chew on. They are in the mutual fund business. Their funds are sold by brokers who do not work for them.

Trust in Brokers, in the market and even in the idea of getting rich by punting in the markets has been weakened. Fund managers still tout their ability to realize performance that can only be achieved by taking huge risk.

What would happen to their business if we had a 1933? After the crash in 1929, the market recovered as it is today. But like today, the market came back independent of how people lived and how the economy at the human level existed. It was a second bubble. The market crashed again and the great depression hit full force. Employment did no rebound until 1941. Stock prices and activity in the market did not return until 1954.

What if we have another 1933 in 2010? Would such a collapse end all faith in the current financial system? What is the risk of that happening – 10% – 30 % – 50% – 60%  – whatever the risk is substantive and worth planning for.

My idea of his DEATH threat was that if they did not do something to show that they could be trusted, that if we had a 1933, they would disappear as did most people like them in 1933.

So how could they become legitimately trusted? How could they hold onto to a public that had lost trust in the system? My advice was this.

Most people are fiscally illiterate. Most know nothing about household economics in the Greek sense of the basics of the human financial life cycle. People know nothing about how to save and why, borrowing, cash flow, how mortgages work, compound interest. Most know nothing about the value of and how risk works. Why you can take risks early but not late in life etc. If they did most would not be in the trouble that they are in now. Most think that it is normal and to be expected that they can get Maddof returns year after year not seeing that such returns imply impossible risk.

The entire fund business is like the food business – we have been trained to seek something that is not sustainable – double digit returns for ever and cheap food forever. Can we train people to be more real? I think not but people can train each other.

Most people now are waking up to the fact that they don’t know enough about money and how it affects their life. They are hungry to learn more. To take control over their financial lives, just as many today are using the web to take control over their health.

What if this firm was to set up a foundation to act as the Trusted Place on the web where people could teach each other all these things?

Here is where all the rules of 2.0 would come into play. The web, interactivity, social groups, partners – the whole gamut of 2.0 is here. By learning how to do this here, the old firm will also then see with new eyes what else they can do back in the mainstream.

I asked in closing what would this mean in terms of the brand and the industry if they were to do this? What if they did a really authentic job of providing the trusted space where people could help each other take back their financial power?

He could see in a heart beat that this would change the relationship – just as I am seeing signs that FTMC is changing the relationship with Public radio and TV.  At first the two worlds of the “Academy” and their traditional business would be separate. But over time there would be some kind of convergence. For who of us knows as much as we should and who of us does not have something to offer?

In time the very nature of the business would change too as will in the end mainstream TV and Radio – but this way the change would be shaped by the active participation of millions of people formerly known and “audience” or “Clients” who right now don’t even have a name.

For what is the label for a person who is part of the ecology that is the new wider enterprise?

So what do you think? Can you radically change your foundation offering without killing the golden goose? Think GM or the Newspapers – all their cash flow came from the old – but DEATH was waiting for sure. How could they have found another part of life where they could have added real value and so attached a much bigger group of people to them?

I am sure that there is an answer. Do you have one?

From a read of the announcement, it appears that collectively we are still on the path towards social computing becoming a fixture in the knowledge-based workplace … hardly a surprise.

I (and many others) have said here, and elsewhere, that the ubiquitous presence of the Web, the growing ease-of-use of tools and services, and the growing understanding of productivity in a networked era, are leading inexorably to a fundamental re-think of the way(s) knowledge work is carried out and the type(s) of organizational culture necessary to support that productivity.

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Across all categories, the use of Web 2.0 technologies by employees for internal purposes has increased from 53% in 2007 to 65% of respondents in 2009.

The largest components of growth have come from using Web 2.0 to develop new products / services internally, to manage internal knowledge and to reinforce the company culture via tools such as internal social networking applications.

The companies who have embedded these tools in their day-to-day activities and processes have seen the largest impact by improving communication across silos to reduce duplicate work and leverage experts in other areas.

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The report notes that enterprise use of Web 2.0 technologies to connect and interact with business partners and suppliers has slowed down or stagnated … again, not much of a surprise given the often transactional nature of those relationships and the fact that electronic connections between those parties have existed in one form or another for quite some time now.

The final statement of this most recent McKinsey report offers, in my opinion, some clear writing on a big wall … “expertise in the use of Web 2.0 technologies is becoming a required skill for all enterprises.”

When will your organization adopt, or grow its capabilities and culture with respect to, collaboration platforms and Enterprise 2.0 expertise and dynamics ?

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The momentum we see in the growth of Web 2.0 technologies implies we will see higher penetration in 2010 for using these technologies for employees to collaborate and to facilitate interactions with customers.

To drive increased usage for managing interactions with suppliers and partners, companies will need to find ways use these technologies to augment the formal relationships between business entities and not substitute formal interactions with more ad hoc ones.

Nonetheless, it is clear that expertise in the use of Web 2.0 technologies is becoming a required skill for all enterprises.

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Further to my post a couple of months back about the ROII (Return on Investment in Interaction), I noticed AppGap blog colleague Patti Anklam’s guest post on Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge blog wherein she riffs of a blog post titled "Enterprise 2.0 – Skip the Pilot".

Notwithstanding Michael Idinipulos’ claim to be committing heresy, in the past I have read any number of E2.0 pundits’ suggestions that value will be realized more quickly and more steadily when social computing is introduced to an organzation as "the way things get done around here" when it comes to dealing with and responding the need to beuild useful knowedge from information flows … rather than in small controlled pilots.

Michael adds his voice to that chorus.

Patti picks up on that point and adds to it the notion that the ROII may come from harvesting the output from increased numbers of people, increased numbers of interactions and increased diversity (of perspectives).  These metrics are not as hard as past metrics used to measure work and effectiveness, but given that a number of well-known voices have coalesced around the same observable network dynamics, we can expect that they will come to be reference points regarding the effectiveness of adopting E2.0 tools and services.

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Piloting Social Media

A good blog by Michael Indinopulis, "Enterprise 2.0: Skip the Pilot" introduces a nice complex notion. His actual premise is that piloting (the sense that we pilot collaboration software, something I’ve done quite a bit of) is based on using small control groups. We introduce the software carefully, exposing it to only a few people, learn from them what the strengths and weaknesses are, work up required training, make the change management plan, and so on.

But social media is different from traditional software. As he says, "Traditional IT enables transactions; Enterprise 2.0 enables interactions." And interaction is fundamentally different from transactions, which are bounded and constrained. We can’t understand the power of interactions until there are many of them, going out in multiple directions, increasing exponentially.

And there is no value to any individual until there are sufficient interactions bouncing around out there. The solution, therefore, to a moribund social media pilot is not to shut it down and reconsider, but to "Make it bigger. Open it up. Invite more people. Tell them to invite even more people. That’s the only way you’re going to find out the real behavior and the real value."

One of my early lessons about increasing knowledge flow in organizations was the answer to the question, "How do you stimulate knowledge flow in a network?" Possibilities:

Increase the number of people

Increase the number of interactions

Increase the diversity

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Close to seven out of ten respondents (69%) report that their companies “have gained measurable business benefits [italics mine], including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues.”

This is probably the most significant set of survey findings I have seen yet that document actual benefits being seen from Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 deployments. There has been quite a stir in the blogosphere lately about the lack of actual results being seen from these new methodologies (check out Dennis Howlett’s latest post on the topic, along with my colleague Paula Thornton’s observations).

What kinds of benefits, exactly, does McKinsey see coming out of Web 2.0 sites? In the survey, half of respondents report that Web 2.0 technologies have fostered in-company interactions across geographic borders, 45 percent cite interactions across functions, and 39 percent across business units.

The measurable benefits cited span both knowledge management and simple cost-cutting:

Increasing speed of access to knowledge            68%

Reducing communication costs                           54%

Increasing effectiveness of marketing                  52%

Increasing speed of access to internal experts     43%

Increasing customer satisfaction                          43%

Decreasing travel costs                                       40%

Increasing employee satisfaction                          35%

With the growing availability of services over the network, you can see how there will be increased velocity of knowledge and improved communications. It would be interesting to see how employee satisfaction, cited by more than a third, is measured.

Interestingly, the highest-rated Web 2.0 technologies/services in terms of business benefits delivery among companies are video sharing and blogging.

The top-rated technologies in terms of internal use include the following:

Video sharing         48%

Blogs                     47%

RSS                        42%

Social networking    42%

For external use, such as connecting with partners and suppliers, the following technologies delivered the most benefits:

Blogs                        51%

Video sharing           50%

Social networking      49%

RSS                          45%

The more the technologies are used, the more benefits seen, the survey also shows. As McKinsey puts it:

“Web 2.0 delivers benefits by multiplying the opportunities for collaboration and by allowing knowledge to spread more effectively…. Among respondents who report seeing benefits within their companies, many cite blogs, RSS, and social networks as important means of exchanging knowledge. These networks often help companies coalesce affinity groups internally. Finally, respondents report using Web videos more frequently since the previous survey; technology improvements have made videos easier to produce and disseminate within organizations.”

McKinsey also observes that more than half of the companies in the survey plan to increase their investments in Web 2.0 technologies, while another quarter don’t expect their level of spending to change. The study also suggests that the turbulent economy may have increased interest in Web 2.0 technologies.

Of course, there are still about a third of respondents that absolutely have not yet seen any business benefits from Web 2.0. What is not clear is whether employees at these companies are using Web 2.0 under the radar, and thus progress cannot yet be measured.

Thanks to Paul Thomas, guest-blogging at the Cognitive Edge, a networked organization focused on applying complexity theory in practical ways to complex issues and organizational problems.

(Dr Thomas is founder of the complexity theory think-tank organization DNA Wales, Head of Leadership at the Business School, University of Glamorgan and is also the BBC Wales ‘Business Doctor’. Paul works with private and public sector organisations of all sizes, including multi-nationals, trying to show them there is another way to run the workplace.)

The title is lifted from the Cognitive Edge blog (extract below).

I have not yet read the Macleod Report (I’ve skimmed through it) ) but it seems that the Cognitive Edge blog post lays out yet-another-argument for coming to terms (or grips, or whatever) with the probability that it (social computing) will become the main way of carrying out the bulk of non–routine knowledge work.

Oh .. and of course I don’t think that all management concepts and activities should be dropped holus-bolus.  I do, however, think, that managers everywhere should start really trying to understand the new social dynamics and methods of constructing pertinent knowledge that are now available, and making thoughtful and sensible decisions about why and how people get engaged with getting things done on purpose.

I know, I know .. it sounds like heresy to not constantly "tinker" in order to improve processes, efficiency and effectiveness.  After all, we’re all familiar with concepts like continuous improvement, orthodox performance management schemes, Six Sigma, reengineering, etc. 

However, how many of us have often wondered about whether or not people have an orientation towards doing things better, easier, faster, cheaper, if we find ways to honour their desire to do good work, to be respected, to make meaningful contribution, to be heard … 

Maybe (in some or many instances) there’s too much structure, too many goals, overly rigid mindsets and worldviews … not enough questions, not enough debate, too few mistakes (how many discoveries or innovations are preceded by mistakes?), not enough "failing faster to learn faster", not enough acknowledgement of the deep motivations of people to serve others and do more useful and meaningful work, etc. ?

There’s a reason why the word "unleashed" gets used so often in books, articles and conversations about organizational effectiveness .. and I don’t think it means turning a horde of web-bots loose onto the organization’s processes.  It has something to do with people and their motivation and guidance.

Anyone else ever wonder ?

I think that’s what this report from the UK government suggests.  But I will have to go beyond skim-reading it to confirm that guess.

What do you think ?

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MacLeod Review says people potential should be ‘unleashed’

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The MacLeod Review of employee engagement, commissioned by the Department for Business, has said workers need to be properly involved in the future of their firms.

Author David MacLeod said he wanted to see people’s potential “unleashed” and said engagement was a key to innovation and competitiveness. Apparently the report’s authors were told during their research that “trust works two ways” and that not trusting staff had a negative impact. They were also told it was people, not machines, which made the difference to a business.

Responding to the report employment relations Minister Lord Young said: “Workers know better than anyone how the firm they work for can improve, innovate and succeed.”

If this all sounds familiar, that’s no surprise.There’s nothing radical, or even new, about this report.

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Of course people are the key to a company’s success. Of course the best people to ask for a solution to a company’s problems are those within it and on the frontline. And it stands to reason that if you haven’t got everyone in the organisation fully behind what you’re trying to achieve, you’ve got less chance of achieving it.

The Government says it accepts the report’s recommendations and now there’ll be an action plan to deliver them.

Now that the message is becoming more mainstream, maybe those who run our organisations will forget their management tools, and constant ‘tinkering’ with the system and finally wake up to the fact that this is the only way to make them fitter for the future.

Let’s hope they don’t just pay it lip-service, and they actually do it.

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Ben Foster from Allstate made two great comments:

Enterprises and practitioners are often guilty of using Social Media as a cure chasing a disease.

We’re moving past the experimentation stage…

There were many more great insights shared as these companies find their own ’success’ around these technologies. There was something between what was shared that scared me — a repeat of the evolution of IT: fostering isolationism — reinventing silos. One panelist even mentioned the word “silos” but I believe his meaning was in transcending organizational (or other) silos via open conversation. While conversations may be more ‘open’, they’re only as ‘open’ as the application or format by which they’re bound.

This is an old issue — one I posed to Bill Gates circa 1990 (when he was the ‘guest speaker’ for nearly every event in Seattle, and common folk had direct access to him). I asked him, “When are you going to separate the files you create from the applications that create them?” His response, “I don’t understand your question.” He didn’t wait for me to explain either. The main issue: the things applications create are ‘locked into’ the format of the application that creates them.

Blogs and wikis provide specific formats to content. There are behavioral format clues that differentiate a blog from a wiki, but under the covers it’s all content. Content elements have value beyond the formats and applications that hold them hostage  — they’re enterprise assets that can be repurposed in other formats. The specific format of content (.pdf .doc .html) is really only relevant for consumption — to associate the ‘viewing’ of the content with an application that can display it. The semantics of the content itself doesn’t really care about the format (don’t hold me to that when I’m telling you how to create semantically-relevant formats), just ask your favorite search engine — it’s all words to them.

The significance and potential power of a format-agnostic architecture is evidenced in the recent demos of Google Wave. What we don’t have are the corresponding ‘drivers ed car crash movies’ to illustrate the disastrous end to conversations that are locked and isolated in disparate tools and formats.

Sadly, the significance of a well-architected application platform was something that was understood by the designers of Ventura Publisher, which applied format to the content via SGML — text, graphics, etc. were all managed in their raw form, and ‘assembled’ into the desired presentation format — in 1986. These were some of the same people from Xerox PARC who created the original graphical UI elements that Microsoft and Apple later fought over in court.

Consider a simple ‘hostage’ example (one that I’ve been aghast as many UX designers have missed the significance of), a UI with the labels “Blog” and “Wiki” as two separate options for navigation. If I’m looking for something (pick anything), which one should I look at to find what I’m looking for? You may suggest that I use the search feature (conveniently bypassing the original design issue altogether). This would have to assume that search constantly indexes all the conversations in real time — the results are typically grim, adoption fails.

Clearly, Microsoft contributed to ‘isolationism’ again with SharePoint — everything all neatly packaged in individual projects, with no ability to ‘watch’ for redundancies or facilitate cross-fertilization of conversations (ignoring for a moment that ‘conversations’ weren’t really supported anyway). And as David Armano pointed out in a Harvard Business Press post today, it all requires a healthy dose of seeding, feeding and weeding along the way (the continuous wetware element that IT rarely accounts for).

Sure, 2.0 technologies can increase transparency across organizations, but that’s all lost as you move across ‘closed’ solutions or formats, with no architectural layer to synthesize it all. One silo is simply replaced by another.

To capitalize on the potential of Enterprise 2.0, there has to be a total architecture that considers the full lifecycle and use of content, as it is leveraged for action (the part KM missed).

1. Each year, over 50% of the people in attendance were new to the field and often were there because they’d ‘inherited’ responsibility for a data warehousing initiative, but knew nothing about the industry or the practices.
2. Because of #1, the majority of the attendees were under tremendous pressure to perform. They were looking for recipes — checklists that they could take home and just start working on.

This appears to be indicative of all emerging disciplines/practices. But for Enterprise 2.0, unlike Data Warehousing, the predominant focus is NOT technology. And yet, from where does the funding or focus from such initiatives typically come? This is a much larger issue — one related to obsolete organizational design practices. The reason IT is the most obvious choice for sponsorship is that it is the only organization not vertically challenged — it delivers (or should) only horizontal services to an enterprise — crossing all other departments. Indeed, IT is one of the few organizations that takes on the battle to find common threads across organizations to weave the horizontal lines of the tapestry that holds the business together.

And yet, the approaches needed for E2.0 initiatives are the antithesis of typical IT practices.

1. There are no rules; there are no requirements
   An optimal E2.0 initiative evolves organically (hold that thought for further clarification). E2.0 initiatives are the canary for Business 2.0 — if they die, the business will as well (either absorbed by the larger market or re-emerging anew after an identity meltdown).
2. The goal is not Binary Code
   This is the realm for Design Thinking, not Analytical Thinking (previously noted: end of piece). As Roger Martin alludes to in The Design of Business (starting pg 6) this is an era to shift away from the locked down binary code of repeatability (optimal for machinery) and become more comfortable with the ’squishy’ realm of the heuristic (optimal for capitalizing on human wetware). It doesn’t mean that we abandon the right side of the continuum — mystery…heuristic…algorithm…binary code — but that we shift to the left.
3. Controls are Nooses of Death
   This is the realm of ‘middles’: neither chaos or order, but a powerful, constantly changing space called complexity (think practice of ’science’ not ‘lots of pieces’). IT is still focused on increasing controls to improve results — increasing compliance, embracing defined practices of Project Management, etc. If you’re building a spaceship and lives are at stake, these practices are a must. If you’re running a company in today’s turbulent marketplace, everything that is locked down and fixed prevents the real human capital of the organization from adapting to constantly changing circumstances. There is never an ideal process or system and there will always be exceptions. IT cannot respond fast enough to these changes. That means the flexibility has to be built into the systems. This is not to suggest that controls are abandoned — it simply means that all of the existing controls have to be questioned and likely changed for greater human oversight throughout the organization (managed via a distributed social governance model, not a hierarchy).
4. It’s not about a Blog or a Wiki
   A true sign of a E2.0 initiative destined for failure is one that focuses on the technologies. Certainly there are a variety of technologies that enhance and help to enable E2.0, but even as technologies, they are absolutely ineffective when implemented with a typical IT approach: install them. Blogs, Wikis, Mashups, and other Social Computing mechanisms are elements of a flexible infrastructure. As a solution they have to be architected. This will prove problematic for most IT groups for the same reason that SOA has failed — IT hires ‘drafters’ not ‘architects’. In company after company, the majority of people I’ve met who hold ‘architect’ titles know nothing about real design: they can draft solutions, but not architect them (the problem starts with the job descriptions — check out some postings).

So what IS Enterprise 2.0 focused on? People: tapping the human potential, helping to change the way business gets done by optimizing it not to the systems but to the people. Not shaping the people (via training and documentation) to the systems and the business, but changing the systems and the business to optimize the potential of the people.

Enterprise 2.0 is a mindset, framed by the orders of nature: enabling endless possibilities, organizing simple things in simple ways.

Enterprise 2.0 is about facilitating orderly chaos:

• Minimizing Structure, Optimizing Connections
• Tapping Existing Kinetic Energy
• Celebrating Flaw-Finding and Fixing
• Supporting Rapid Change

How do you get there?

• Truly Utilize Resources
  It’s not a destination — it’s a journey. You’re already on the path: embrace where you stand. First assess whether or not existing resources have access to one another: the people element. Finding people has to be the first priority. Determine the typical scenarios for problem solving and recognize that departments or hierarchies do not hold the answers to business problems/issues: people do. Warning: classic ‘expertise locator’ technologies will likely not be the right answer here.
• Shorten Distances
  Simplify all aspects of ‘doing’ business. Repeatedly ask: What can we stop doing? Leverage what’s working (from the perspective of all individuals impacted, not just those with ‘management’ responsibility to execute) — bypass the rest. From an IT perspective, being successful here the concept of software as we know it goes away. The desktop becomes a collection of functions that can be assembled into sequential processes, but are not locked into place. Existing applications can be tapped, bypassing inefficient UIs and raising the most relevant activities and functions to the ‘top’ (omnipresence). Even two years ago Dion Hinchcliffe introduced the concept of situational software.

• Embrace Organic
  Organic is not chaotic. A palm frond is distinct from a maple leaf. Nature has order, but that order is under rapid cycles of repeated construction and destruction. The question becomes one of determining what structure is necessary to support a specific, unique pattern (purpose), yet does not prevent the ability to adapt to constantly changing conditions — not only to survive, but flourish.
• Shift Focus
  Particularly for IT, the focus shifts from code (developers) to UI (designers). Coders are trained to make things binary; good designers are comfortable with the ’squishiness’ of heuristics. That doesn’t mean developers go away; it means that there should be a 1-to1 ratio of developers and designers. They’re two totally different kinds of mindsets — and while there are unique individuals who can do both, it’s rare that 1) you can find them or 2) you know what to look for and adequately assess. Besides, there’s an important phase of working through the natural ‘dissonance’ that will occur between these two mindsets. This can be lost when resolved in the mind of a single person (or it will just increase work-induced-schizophrenia, ala. stress). The fallacy of paired programming is not in the number, but in the resources and their focus. Pairs should be made up of two different perspectives.
• Shift Thinking
  Design Thinking requires a different approach: it focuses on trying out multiple possibilities (fail fast) to test an algoritm — a problem statement. Don’t think problem=flaw, but problem=mathematical equation. Different algorithms solve different problems. Many solutions fail because they either 1) started with the wrong question (the solution is the answer to the question) or 2) did not adapt to change the question (the problem statement) as more was learned along the way. Our current definition and funding of projects is a key contributor to this fatal flaw.
• Shift Culture
  A company that has been optimized for ‘machine’ design (command and control), will have a culture that reinforces such behaviors. Such a culture will undermine E2.0 potential. It will seek to eliminate the efforts as a ‘foreign body’. A different culture is not a prerequisite, it’s a corequisite. It should evolve as enabled by the other changes. Such cultures have to move from ‘rules’ to ‘guidelines’; from ‘fixed processes’ to ‘governance models’; from binary to heuristic (obvious exceptions will be for those industries and/or business artifacts subject to legislation).

A primary challenge is that we’re so used to operating in ‘binary’ that we attempt to turn everything into linear processes. This is not a linear solution space (in reality, neither is business — we’ve only artificially forced it to be so). Most of these things are codependent — they rely on small changes from the other dimensions to accommodate their own change. This is ‘informed change’ not ‘command and control change’. How is this possible? Social computing — facilitating conversations and exchange of business artifacts that are: transparent, persistent and accessible.

Now we can start the technology discussion…

Enterprise 2.0: A Great Concept Often Taken Backwards

Although 2.0 memes are everywhere, hardly any of them have generated as much controversy as Enterprise 2.0 (a.k.a. E2.0). Introduced by Andrew McAfee in 2006 and later expanded by others, the term seemed to be a slam dunk for a while. Forward-looking and fresh, it was (and still is) about application of social software and corresponding approaches in business. However, somewhere along the way something didn’t go quite right. Today, almost three years after the term’s introduction, there is more confusion about it than there was two years ago. Heated terminology discussions keep going on. Key players are on the quest to find and articulate ROI. And most curiously of all, many business decision makers who decide to dive into the E2.0 sea, often come back more confused than they were before taking that dive.

AIIM’s year-old survey, which found that 74% of surveyed organizations had no idea what E2.0 meant or how it could be meaningfully applied, likely would’ve come back with a similar numbers today. This time around, it also would’ve included people who looked at E2.0 tools only to get puzzled. If you work in or sell to enterprise IT you know what I’m talking about. More likely than not, you have your own example of “now what?” story. As in “So we’ve deployed internal blogs and wikis. Now what?” All of a sudden, software that seems to work so well for millions of people on the internet, fails to make any noticeable difference when used internally. All these stories have the same root cause: as of today, E2.0 is still primarily a vendor space, dominated by ISVs selling software to businesses who haven’t really asked for it. It is simply not a demand-driven market. By contrast, just think of CRM or payroll software. You don’t need to convince businesses they need that.

This is why E2.0 ROI discussion keeps going on like a never-ending story. A thirsty person doesn’t care about the ROI of buying a bottle of water – and even paying a premium for it. But try selling to him a cute new gadget – and you better have some very good supporting arguments on why it’s a smart way to invest a single cent. As enterprise customers look for cutting costs and streamlining processes, ISVs along with internal E2.0 champions often offer them what seems to be a miracle pill. It promises to make their workforces way more productive, their executives much more informed, and their customers happier. And, given the loud buzz around social, many companies do give it a try. Some like it. But some end up with a loud huh? Worse, some end up with an outraged response from the people who think it’s a wrong way to spend money (like an Oregon county’s chair who recently posted a 70K per year social media coordinator position). Why? Because, in a Benjamin Button fashion, many customers – often encouraged by enthusiastic sellers – think about E2.0 backwards, starting with tools instead of concentrating on specific business problems.

It Takes More than Social Software to Become an E2.0 Company

No one (okay, almost no one) expects that buying a word processor can turn him into a great writer. Yet somehow it’s almost widely assumed that deploying tools labeled E2.0 would turn an organization into an E2.0 business. Which couldn’t be further from the truth. Despite all the buzz, E2.0 is first of all a set of principles, not software bits. It is more about business practices and human behaviors than about features. Software with strong social computing capabilities makes it much easier to establish and maintain these practices, but it doesn’t create them on its own, nor does it sustain them.

Social technologies have enormous potential, but to make E2.0 more than a hotly debated buzzword, many players in the space have to shift focus from cool capabilities to critical business functions. This applies to how E2.0 software is developed, how it is positioned, and how it is used. Despite catchphrases like “Facebook for the enterprise”, the much discussed consumerization of IT does not mean emulation of consumer experiences within the firewall. It means taking the concepts behind the amazing transformation of consumer space, and leveraging them to address real business needs. All businesses have to deal with things like customer support, supply chain management, R&D and product distribution. Who makes all these things happen? People. Now, what E2.0 is all about? In essence, it’s about people connections, just like any of its 2.0 siblings. And with the right focus, any business function can benefit from better connections.

There are enough success stories to support this claim. Marketing has already added social media to the must-have part of its portfolio. Customer support organizations have been experimenting with social tools – some quite successfully. Many R&D departments have already discovered that capturing knowledge in wikis can be more powerful than using traditional strict-workflow content management systems. Enterprises around the globe have been finding that Facebook-like employee profiles speed up internal communications. But we’ve just scratched the surface. Real gold is not in the technologies of today. It’s not even in applying the best of breed E2.0 tools correctly. It’s in solutions of tomorrow, designed to solve hard business problems through people-connecting technologies.

Now, there’s one little caveat with everything I’ve just described. Implemented right, social business software and practices have a potential to transform many business functions almost beyond recognition. In other words, they can be quite threatening to organizations that are built around existing processes and tools, and are not willing to evolve. But that’s the topic of another post…

Yuri is a new contributor to the FASTforward Blog – more about him here. This is the first post in the “Connected Enterprise” series. Topics to come: adoption, corporate walled gardens, and more.