OK .. so it looks like the Web, hyperlinks and ’social’ platforms for interaction are here to stay (unless electricity grids fail or corporations and governments completely take over the Web).

For the past couple of years at least there have been increasingly numerous and strident calls for fundamental make-overs of both management and leadership.  People everywhere are clicking into the fact that yesteryear’s models and ways are less and less effective .. and yet we all labor on whilst yelling “change .. change, or die .. etc.”

World-renowned organizational effectiveness guru Gary Hamel set out the fundamental challenge(s) in his 2007 book “The Future of Management“.  Others, such as John Hagel and John Seeley Brown’s “The Power of Pull“, have weighed in with equally sharp and challenging premises and theories.  All of these pieces signal an urgent need to innovate and adapt to a new set of conditions .. conditions which are rapidly on their way to becoming ubiquitous and/or expected by the generations entering or approaching their chapter-of-life in the workplace.

It sometimes feels like this is only the next round or wave of coming to terms with rumblings and dynamics that began back in the ’60’s and ’80’s.  After all, we began hearing about the critical need for empowerment, continuous learning, flexibility, agility and resilience at least two decades ago.  Most of the pioneering work in these areas came from the soft-and-squishy (or seen to be that way) world of Organizational Development (OD), from people like Eric Trist, Fred Emery, Bill Passmore, Marv Weisbord, Peter Block, Charles Handy, Meg Wheatley and many many others.

As the years have passed since these pioneers first addressed the human issues in organizational structures and processes derived from engineering and efficiency principles, various elements of their thinking and practices have inexorably found their way into managing processes and people.  I suggest that this is entirely understandable as the increasing frequency and intensity of complicated and complex organizational activities have grown over time, and along with the evolution of peoples’ expectations about work and meaning in a modern era.

My premise is that management innovation is available  from that world of organizational development, as it’s principles and dynamics are closely aligned to Hamel’s suggestion that “activities will still need to be coordinated, individual efforts aligned, objectives decided upon, knowledge disseminated, and resources allocated, but increasingly this work will be distributed out to the periphery“.

The New Context Demands New Principles

What was yesterday called Enterprise 2.0 and today is called “Social Business” can be seen as the emergent stage of the intersection of significant advances in information technology, management science applied to business process, the analysis and control of operational activities AND the interaction and participation of people with information, opinions and knowledge to share.

These forces and factors are converging in today’s workplaces, wherein a continuous flow of information is the rule rather than the exception.  Thus, it’s essential to cast a critical eye on the fundamental assumptions of work design and how work is managed. The core assumptions embodied in widely-used methodologies today still present work as  ”static sets of tasks and knowledge arranged in specific constellations on an organization chart” (see all major job evaluation methodologies for more detail).

It’s getting clearer and clearer today that the capabilities and dynamics of what started in the consumer realm as social software … those funny things called blogs, and wikis, and widgets stitched together into and by web services … are finding (and have found) their ways into the workplace.

That they have migrated to the workplace makes sense.  People have always  (at work) been creating and building up “... knowledge through exchanging information, talking and arguing and pointing out other ideas and sources of information and ways to do things.” Such services and tools and the reasons for which people use them are the means by which general human activity (purposeful and otherwise) translates to the online environment.

So, as stated at the outset, it seems clear that we’re situated in a more interactive, less static environment.  Whether we like it or not, we are  passing from an era in which things were assumed to be controllable (able to be deconstructed and then assembled into a clear, linear, always replicable and thus static form) to an era characterized by a continuous  flow of information.  Because it feeds the conduct of organizations large and small, it is a flow that necessarily demands to be interpreted and shaped into useful inputs and outputs.

The methodologies still in use today generally did not foresee working with networked information flows, and thus the way work is designed and managed does not really address how it could or should be managed.

We need to revisit the fundamental principles of work design AND the basic rules used to configure hierarchical organizations in which the primary assumption is that knowledge is put to use in a vertical chain of decision-making.

Both Horizontal and Vertical

Horizontal flows of information and peoples’ engagement have already been put to work in a range of early Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business experiments.  But let’s be honest .. how these will work, or not, is to date less than clear.  There’s an enormous amount of inertia and habit to overcome, all whilst confronting continuously turbulent conditions seasoned with healthy helpings of ambiguity .. about economics, governance and peoples’ collective capabilities to adapt.

Hierarchy is not disappearing from the organizational landscape .. nor should it. It’s an useful construct for clarifying decision-making and accountability, and I believe it will come to co-exist with the core dynamics of networked people and information …

“a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results”

.. which, incidentally, is a fundamental aspect of all the ‘democratization’ (it’s probably too early to yet call it that, but let’s do so for the time being) we are witnessing in the recent uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East.  Would that our western governments and organizations watch and learn as they embark on the renewal of leadership and management in the 21st Century.

The implications are huge, will demand significant effort and responsibility on the part of all individuals, and may lead to very different ways of working and being in and of the world.

But clearly, we must evolve … what we have been doing looks less and less likely to be as effective as necessary in the rapidly-approaching future.

I have been covering and reporting and analyzing the business technology scene for more than 25 years now.

And every couple of years or so, a new technology “revolution” would spring up. Not the stale, overhyped prior revolution that had just passed — but a new, exciting revolution.This time, things would be different. This new revolution would change the way we thought about technology. This revolution would change the business. This revolution would bring the power of information technology to the masses. A revolution unlike any other revolution that ever came before it.  The most incredible, unbelievable, paradigm-shifting revolution ever.  Yada, yada.  Promises, promises.  Here are a few revolutions:

• In the late 1980s, it was client/server computing — sticking a PC in front of a larger computer.
• In the late 1990s. it was Web computing — sticking a browser in front of a network.
• In the late 1990s, it was dot-coms — sticking a browser in front of a store.
• In the early 2000s decade, it was Web services and XML — sticking standardized code in front of an application.
• In the late 2000s decade, it was cloud — sticking a cloud in front of everything.
• And lots of revolutions in between — usually sticking something in front of something else.

Note on the above list: some would call these techniques “putting lipstick on a pig.”

And when I would come home for dinner at night, or saw friends over the weekend, nobody would ask me what I was up to, and eyes would glaze over if I attempted to tell them. I wouldn’t even attempt to begin to explain to people what I had been writing about all day long. What’s so revolutionary about speeding up a purchase order process or building a rules engine that reduced exception reporting?  What’s revolutionary about displaying 3270 “green-screen” code within a terminal emulation window? (Good stuff every business should pursue — but not something that will make you the life of the party.)

Then, one day a couple of years ago, I came home — and found my daughters (tween and teen) actively participating in the revolution.  The social networking revolution.  An information-technology revolution had finally hit home, and in a big way.  Unlike the decades of vendor pronouncements about revolution, this one was real.  The old order was being driven out — by employees and children of employees.

I knew this time, it was different. So, my daughters may someday ask me: “What did you do in the Social Networking Revolution, Daddy”*? I will tell them about the writings my colleagues and I did here at the FastForward site. And where the revolution took us.

Social media was more than a platform or a new mode of computing — it was a new way of connecting, of doing business, of leading nations, of working, of making friends and renewing friendships.  But, for purposes of this site, first commissioned in December 2006, the theme was to explore to unfolding new world of Enterprise 2.0 in work and business settings.  Consider where the social revolution has taken us in just a few short years:

Personal outsourcing: For the first time, employees all up and down the line have access to information they need to do their jobs better, advance companies, and advance their careers.  John Schmidt so accurately described it as “personal outsourcing.” Unlike the traditional model for outsourcing — firms contracting out functions or processes to an outside firm — “individuals are starting to outsource their problem-solving and their own professional development,” he says. “They’re leveraging things like wikis, blogs, other collaboration events to collaborate in real-time with other individuals.” IT professionals go to Google, Wikipedia, and other online sources of support, Schmidt says. “They write out their question in their blog and look for their community to respond and help them. …they extended their network of peers to outside the four walls of their company. …they’re taking their problems and their professional challenges to the world.”

Economic revitalization and opportunity: Social networking and E2.0 provides a vast new array of tools for seeking out new markets, as well as managing through the tough times. Companies have means to better leverage the knowledge coursing through their corporate veins to turn around distressed lines of business. Employees have tools to ride through tough times, by staying well-connected with their professional networks and potential employers — even after they have been laid off. They no longer have to be powerless victims of recessions. (I called it the LIFT phenomenon — LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.) Employers have a resource to identify key talent to build their organizations.

Improving the quality — and joy — and therefore productivity — of work: The 9-to-5 rut had been withering on the vine for a number of years, and social networking is putting the final stakes in the industrialized, command-and-control model of management.  Productivity is not something that occurs in a cubicle between 9 and 5, it’s something that comes in “bursts.” Social networks and E2.0 give everyone the flexibility and connectivity to respond to those bursts. In the process, the lines between work and personal life have not only just blurred — they’ve disappeared completely. Some Gloomy Guses say that’s not a good thing, and that employers will exploit it. I say it’s a real good thing.  People should be proud of their work, and have the passion raging within them to want to pursue it, think about it, and embed it into their lives.  Good riddance, 9 to 5.

Return on investment: A hotly debated topic. But the ROI is there. McKinsey & Company, for one, did countless studies the past few years that proved it. A couple of years back for example, they published the results of a survey of nearly 1,700 executives from around the world which paints a highly positive picture of the business returns being seen from E2.0 deployments. 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.”

It’s been close to five years that we have been covering the revolution — a real revolution — at this site. And it’s only just begun.

(*By the way, the title of this post is a paraphrase of the 1966 movie “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” in which a bunch of soldiers in World War II hosted a street festival in an Italian town.  One could say social networking is a global festival of sorts.)

As we’ve been discussing here at this site for some time, there are tangible business benefits being realized from adoption of social media platforms as part of a comprehensive Enterprise 2.0 strategy.

However, this is a message that is not getting through to small businesses.

Hiscox, an insurance company. recently surveyed US small business leaders on their social media usage and found that many weren’t using these important channels to promote their businesses and products.  Only 12% of businesses described social media promotion as a must and nearly 50% of respondents aren’t using social media at all.

For those that did use social media for their business,  19% use Facebook, 15% use LinkedIn, and 4% use Twitter.

Traditional modes dominate small business communication. Nearly two in five respondents said word-of-mouth was the main way they got business, and another 42% cited word-of-mouth in combination with other marketing promotions.

When all respondents were asked about how they felt about using social media for their business:  12% describe it as a must, they do it all the time; 24% do it when they have the time; and 14% indicated they don’t know enough about it.

News has just broken that the people of Iceland have just produced a draft of a new constitution – developed collaboratively via social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

The Althing, Iceland's Social Media-Savvy Parliament. Photo: Wikimedia

Iceland had its share of financial debacles in recent years, and, as a result, decided it needed to re-invent its government to incorporate a better system of checks and balances. However, the new constitution isn’t being written by a group of men holed up in a room somewhere — it’s an open process involving the latest social networking tools and technology.

A 25-member Constitution Council drafted the new constitution by engaging Iceland’s 318,000 citizens through social media sites, which helped keep everyone up to date on the document’s progress, as well as solicit feedback. The Constitutional Council posted daily interviews with delegates, and meetings were broadcast live on the council’s webpage and on Facebook. There were also schedules for all meetings, all minutes from meetings of groups, the Board and the Council as well as the Council’s work procedures. The webpage also has regular news from the Council’s work as well as a weekly newsletter.

If social networking tools can help transform a nation, imagine what it can do for a company.

We’ve been talking at this blogsite about the potential of Social customer relationship management (CRM), in which typical CRM – an internally generated and maintained collection of knowledge about customers and their interactions with a company – is enhanced with information streaming in from the virtual communities that now are part of many customers’ experiences.

As part of my work with Insurance Networking News, I had the opportunity to talk with insurance executives and analysts about the viability of Social CRM within this industry, which relies intensely on trust and the goodwill of customers. Frankly, it was difficult to identify insurance companies that had Social CRM programs that they were willing to talk about at this early stage.

I spoke with Craig Beattie, analyst with Celent, who observes that much of the push toward Social CRM is currently coming from the vendor side: “Insurers aren’t really thinking about this yet. The kinds of offerings you get from vendors tend to focus on views of the customer, with all their emails, phone calls and policies, and alongside that, Facebook entries or tweets that might be relevant – a blending with public data, to get some idea of the kind of conversations people might be having. We haven’t seen insurers employ it yet for underwriting purposes, pricing purposes, or getting along better with clients.”

Current survey data shows Social CRM to still be in its infancy – though its likely uptake may be fast and furious over the next few years. A  recent survey of 3,342 marketing directors by MarketingSherpa found that six percent of companies already had functioning Social CRM efforts underway, but a whopping 56 percent were planning such initiatives in the near future. Gartner, in the meantime, predicts 30 percent of companies will extend their social networking efforts to Social CRM processes within the next two years.

One company that is leading the way on this front is Farmers Insurance, which began its Social CRM effort in earnest last fall. I spoke with Marc Zeitlin, vice president of eBusiness at Farmers Insurance, about the effort, which involves the sharing of information, via Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn among its network of 15,000 agents, enables the company to better compete against direct-to-consumer insurers. And the effort is delivering along many fronts, according to Zeitlin: “We’re driving growth and new business, as well as customer retention. We also gain product knowledge and service. We’re able to determine whether there’s a need in the market that we’re not meeting.”

Ultimately, Social CRM will lose its cachet, simply becoming a part of normal CRM.  But until then, the industry has just begun to explore the possibilities this new dimension of data provides.

Just a few years ago, engagement with social communities was an experiment that some bold individuals in bold organizations were conducting to boldly go where no one has gone before. Now, social or virtual communities are the fabric of day-to-day business. It is transforming the way information is disseminated outside and inside organizations as they connect with customers, partners, and industry players. But for some industries, it is disrupting or  destroying — or if you look at it another way — enriching information gathering.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the news business.

The question is then: Is the news business a victim or a beneficiary of the social media explosion?

That’s the question I and co-author Dr. Bill Gibbs of Duquesne University recently took up in a chapter in a new book on the implications of social networking, titled Handbook of Research on Methods and Techniques for Studying Virtual Communities: Paradigms and Phenomena.

The book, compiled and edited by Ben Kei Daniel of University of Saskatchewan, explores how over the last decade, virtual communities have evolved from massive experimental, educational, technological, business, and social environments to normal, day-to-day operations for a variety of organizations.

Chapters cover studies on various types of virtual communities, and in our chapter, we explore how global online communities now include hundreds of millions of members, able to communicate almost instantaneously.

Increasingly, traditional news organizations are finding they are being outpaced in coverage of world events by cadres of “citizen journalists” reporting in real time via social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. While there are valid concerns about the credibility of information being posted on social networking sites, there’s no question that contextual reports are being delivered much faster to global audiences than traditional outlets. In addition, recipients have a wide array of choices from which they can acquire this information.

The news providers that are on top of the game now offer interactive sources that engage people, enable them to build community, and to participate in the news. At the same time, the digital interfaces through which people access the news are continuously evolving, diverse, and oftentimes visually complex.

In the chapter, Bill and I explore trends and developments in news-oriented virtual communities. We review several data collection and analysis techniques such as content analysis, usability testing and eye-tracking and propose that these techniques and associated tools can aid the study of news communities. We examine the implications these techniques have for better understanding human behavior in virtual communities as well as for improving the design of these environments.

The book has an additional 43 chapters as well, intended as a guidebook for executives and corporate leaders concerned with the management of expertise, social capital, competence knowledge, and information and organizational development in different types of virtual communities and environments.

Is corporate social media ethical? Is there a “Tom Sawyer syndrome” at work in which people are suckered into doing work thinking that it’s something to be enjoyed?

Those are the provocative questions raised by Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, at the recent South by Southwest Interactive confab. His argument: a key value proposition of social networking is crowdsourcing, in which an actively engaged community contributes new ideas for innovation, or even does some piecework, for little or no compensation. As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Zittrain argues that these may be morally questionable ventures.

On these pages at FastForward, we have explored some of the opportunities social networking provides for businesses to improve customer interactions, including reliance on influencers to solve customer problems, as well as crowdsourcing. In the former case, a company essentially can be spared hundreds of thousands of dollars in customer service costs as proponents on the network take care of sticky problems with products or services.

As one observer recently summed up the economics of crowdsourcing:

“Penny-pinching companies are hiring specialists to plumb the vast resources of the Web in search of cheap expert help,” he writes. Crowdsourcing “is gaining momentum among businesses, non-profits and individuals who are getting work done at a fraction of the normal cost.”

Still, Zittrain argued that many social networked arrangements amount to digital sweatshops and opportunities to exploit distressed labor. As he was paraphrased as saying at SWSX:

“Fees paid for crowdsourced tasks are usually so meager that they could not possibly earn participants a living wage, Mr. Zittrain argued. He is familiar with one group drawn to the services: poor graduate students seeking spending money. In many cases, companies have persuaded people to complete simple tasks for no pay at all, instead offering recognition within the volunteer community or points in the guise of a game. Mr. Zittrain called it ‘a wonderful Tom Sawyer syndrome.’”

However, many crowdsourcing arrangements do have compensation at the end, since many are positioned as competitions. Corporations such as GE and federal agencies including NASA position their crowdsourcing efforts as such, with a cash prize at the end as incentive for the selected innovation.  As such, these activities may be as morally questionable as an essay contest.

A counterpoint raised at SWSX was that unlike digital sweatshops, efforts by participants are entirely voluntary, and end-users can log off at any time. In many cases, the work provides benefit to society.

Along these lines, consider the work of Digitalkoot (Digital Volunteers), which has marshalled more than 25,000 volunteers from across Europe and the globe have been partaking in the digitization of historical collections at the National Library of Finland. The Digitalkoot program enlists online volunteers, via crowdsourcing, to help digitize millions of pages of archive material. The project is catching all the text that optical character recognition technology misses, and therefore requires manual patching. Through two online games, volunteers complete small portions of work, or microtasks, to help correctly digitize historical content. The national library reports that the volunteers have already completed more than two million individual tasks, totaling 1,700 hours of work.

Also, while the idea of crowdsourcing labor sounds scary, it also is a huge opportunity for many workers as well. Drake Bennett, writing in the Boston Globe, observed that crowdsouring has opened up greater opportunities for workers and companies across parts of the globe. For example, txteagle, which distributes work to mobile cell-phone users across the globe to handle image, audio and text-based tasks. txteagle is now one of Kenya’s largest employers, employing a 10,000-strong workforce is a network of freelancers.

In a previous post, we pondered the lack of social CRM in evidence, asking whether all CRM should be social anyway. In a new post, Umberto Milletti talks about the issues getting in the way of social CRM.

Milletti says marketing and customer service have actually been effectively engaging in social media, but sales has been missing the boat. Kind of ironic, since sales is the most social activity there is in the business.

• Salespeople are not techno-geeks: They see technology as a tool, nothing more, nothing less.
• Salespeople need to understand what’s in it for them: They know time is money, and don’t want to invest valuable time to learn technologies they don’t fully see a return on.
• Social media tools have not been integrated into the sales workflow.
• Salespeople rely on their employer for training on new sales processes and tools to support them.

A recent article in Knowledge@Wharton asks if business-centric social networking is a “revolution” or a “ruse.”  Since we’re inclined here at this site to pick the revolutionary option, it’s worth examining why some experts at UPenn’s Wharton School may be skeptical about its power to transform business.

First, there’s the still-uncertain ROI aspect. As Shawndra Hill, a Wharton operations and information management professor, put it: “Social networking in the enterprise sector is relatively new, and better tools can enable people to communicate across an organization. But before this really takes off, there needs to be some proof that these things are useful.”  Kartik Hosanagar, Wharton professor of operations and information management, echos this sentiment: “I’m a little skeptical about usage, but I’m even more skeptical about benefits to corporations. Companies may use it, but I don’t think it will provide the productivity benefits vendors claim they will provide.”

Ultimately, the success of social networking in enterprises will not be employees and managers adopting sites such as Facebook and Twitter as a separate activity. Kendall Whitehouse, director of new media at Wharton, predicts that ultimately, social networking will simply be pervasive within enterprise software and processes. “Today, social networking is being thought of as a separate thing,” he says. “We’ll see that fade over time, and it will become just part of the way we interact.”