Harvard Business Publishing

Of course Tom, Enterprises won't change overnight.

But what we are beginning to see in our customers' organizations is a new way to work, where Web 2.0 technologies bring forth concensus in the decision process.

We also see more direct touch with field reps, so that gathering grassroot or distributed information is easier. Some marketing directors ask sales guys about feedback on what is needed for new service offerings, some HR managers rapidly get best practices, etc.

This may not be enough to change the way organizations work, but it certainly is a new way to take decisions and move forward.

I think your question misses the point. I don't think that the purpose of "enterprise 2.0" is to make organizations more "democratic." I see social media and social networking as making organizations more agile and efficient through better communications and better sharing of expertise.

Yes, there is resistance due to politics and fear -- as there is with any change.

I say this coming from a background in IT management consulting. My view is that business justifications have to be there; the time for "web 2.0 evangelists" is long past. Based on what Professor McAfee has been saying lately, I think he agrees with that as well.

Tom, technology has never done anything on its own. So, I agree: the tools themselves won't bring about Enterprise 2.0. Tools by themselves can't even assemble a cabinet from Ikea. (On the other hand, can anything assemble a cabinet from Ikea?)

But, our tools when taken up do have an effect on how we interact. Some of the effects are direct -- e.g., wikis enable a type of asynchronous collaborative, negotiated writing not exactly like anything before them -- and some of the effects will undoubtedly be indirect. E.g., once we've used wikis productively, perhaps our attitude toward the nature of authority will change a little. Maybe not; the effects of technology on attitudes and expectations are hard to observe much less predict.

But it's reasonable to think that the technology, when taken up and used, will affect enterprises directly and indirectly...and (I suspect) in the direction E2.0 adumbrates.

Or not.

Good question, Tom. My own view is that the changes will be slower than some of the evangelists think and hope, but that they will be quite significant indeed over the next 5-10 years. The combination of better and easier to use tools with the advent of the next generation of managers and executives, along with the broader trend toward companies going to market more in networks of partnerships will lead to a much more fluid and interactive workplace. Already we see some of the big technology companies are experimenting pretty aggressively with the tools (e.g., IBM); their cultures certainly won't change overnight, but I think the direction is clear and the longer term impact will be substantial.

Agree that Enterprise 2.0 and social media tools alone will not immediately transform organizational hierarchy, however the context in which organizations operate today will push for adoption of collaboration technologies faster than in the recent past.

The scale and complexity of issues are two drivers for adoption. For instance the Department of National Security (DNS) having to sort through millions of bits of information across multiple organizations and derive meaningful patterns of threat has driven them to go from a "need to know to need to share" mentality. They readily admit the heirarchy, power, and control issues and yet are trying a "wiki" approach.

I think Don Tapscott has put forth the third big driver - economics, in Wikinomics. If there is a financial benefit to changing the business model leaders will start to pay attention.

No board members of a gigantic global corporation have 'be more democratic as their goals. And, even if they did, technology ain't the answer. We've already seen co-op forms of companies and open source models that make participatory structure possible.

And E2.0 is going to push those boundaries further, fraying them to shreds as companies try to mine the gray matter of employees, partners, suppliers to get at creative ideas, insights, unspoken expectations that drive commerce.

If the confusion over roles (such as citizen v. employee) can't be solved by time-of-day (at work, at home) or (personal PC vs. company's e-mail/computer) then the technology is not the issue. Anyone can have a blog, wiki or website. But can they keep their job and their outside interests from comingling? I think the eco-movement exemplifies a bottom-up trend that worries the corner office types. . . .but all made easier thanks to IT.

You can read Andrew McAfee's response to Tom Davenport's post here.

Interesting post Tom, I am sure that as enterprises go "younger", more and more Web2.0 will get into the companies.
It may be interesting to compare how "Enterprise 2.0" a company is related to the average age of the company's employees (and, probably, the number of computers...)

Tom, I strongly agree: You won't achieve anything great by technology alone. To successfully build an Enterprise 2.0 first we have to create a corporate culture that support a high degree of self-organization through open communication, feedback, sharing of knowledge, and individual reputation.

Well, most corporate cultures are still very different. More politics and less trust. And since the culture of an organization is strongly defined by the CEO and his personality, change has to start there to have an impact.

Since Web 2.0 has already a strong impact on our society businesses will have to change faster than we might think. Rising complexity and dynamics urge companies to become highly creative and fast learning organizations. A goal that seems only achievable through self-organized structures.

As an Entrepreneur I experienced what it means to develop my personality and to change the corporate culture of my company from hierarchical to more and more self-organized structures.

Actually, we had to change the culture first, without the use of any technology at all. This took us quite a while (2 years). But it was absolutely worth it as you can read here: CEOs be aware, becoming an Enterprise 2.0 means being surprised all the time..

Now that we have an Enterprise 2.0 culture, the team starts to use Enterprise 2.0 software tools in a self-organized way and with a fast pace. This is the greatest USP we can have.

Enterprise 2.0 will transform organizations but not as quick as some people think, and not by itself; it is the symbiotic impact of new ways to make the collaboration easier. Tom: excellent article and title -- and invitation to debate.

Enterprise 2.0 will change the front office but only in certain kinds of organizations. Those companies closest to the consumer market may well find themselves radically influenced by these tools. Companies with long development cycles, on the other hand, operating in the business to business market may well resist the bottom-up, asymetric information flows. At some point though, Enterprise 2.0 (or whatever its future evolution is called) cannot help but improve information-flow across the enterprise.

Robert Ouellette, Editor, Gagglescape.com

Tom,

I believe Enterprise 2.0 will be a big thing.
It will take a significant amount of time, it may not be the next one, but it will.

Like a lot of technology it will change its name as it evolve and mature.
The current E2.0 tools are in their second generation within 2 to 3 years you will have the third.
Once the increase of productivity is proven and the tools/software integrated in the enterprises process and organization, a real evolution in enterprise will begin.

Take our small company, we are part of a new type of business that have fully integrated web 2.0 technologies.

Its started with the marketing, using blogs, forums, web 2.0 sites to build up awareness.
Then we started integrating in house a Wiki, RSS Agregator, bookmarking software, web based email and groupware.
Followed by Jabber instant messaging and Asterisk Voip PBX.

What happened next was a big thing, a significant evolution in our company.
Inspired by MySQL organizational model we closed our head quarter office in Los Angeles where we had all our employees.

The company exploded in multiple small offices all over the world, Los Angeles, London, Bangalore, Paris.

Since then we have triple our profits and increased our growth.

Instant Message, wiki, voip, intranet and email make the backbone of our knowledge exchange.

All our applications are web based.
Email, groupware, CRM, helpdesk, project management, CMS, intranet, accounting, invoicing, wiki, rss agregator, bookmarks, blogs.

Those technology enabled us to reorganized the company much more efficiently.

Enterprise 2.0 contributes to the global flattening.

As companies like ours grow and take advantages of Web 2.0 technologies to increase productivity, profit and employee satisfaction new organizational charts will defined, new management rules created, knowledge sharing optimized.

That what will make Enterprise 2.0 the future big thing.

I don't see big companies doing what we did next week but I see it as a sure evolution that will affect the enterprise world overtime.

Philippe Lewicki, CEO, SQLFusion

Once businesses realize that their future employees' cognitive and social development has already been molded in highly interactive and social communication environments, they won't have to "push for adoption of collaboration technologies" as another post stated -- they simply won't have a choice. What you're calling a trend toward different leadership models has already become a communication norm for your future employees who are pushing the technology as much as the technology is pushing them.
Melinda Benton,
Umpqua Community College

Hi Tom

You have a very practical analysis there.

1. Enterprise 2.0 requires a number of unstructured data and communication to be used at Enterprise level. Its indeed an utopian dream. Guys at the C level look for authenticity, confidentiality and integrity of data/ information.
2. Political correctness is very important - doctoring information is still a full time art & science of CFOs
3. Trust issues - You can not make decisions based on Blogs and Wikis.
4. Social Media can be a good pasttime - but it is not yet technology enabled to make good economic sense.

Best, Jagan Vaman

It is interesting to read various perspectives on the transformation of Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0. The following topics, for want of a better description, appear to be common across these commentaries:

1) Web 2.0 is labour intensive - this would appear to raise two issues. a) being the reverse of automation it may result in negative productivity gains which could have flow on impacts through the economy. b) to keep labour costs down the participants would have to be low wage workers implying off-shore outsourcing. c) I suspect the knowledge that is desired is actually from the pre-web 2.0 baby-boomer's before they walk out the door and highly paid knowledge workers, neither group is likely to have the spare time to participate even if the organisation will pick-up the cost of the down time for no certain payback.

2) Web 2.0 appears to have a large popularity component - google, myspace, youtube, etc appear to rank pages based on the number of friends (links to/from other pages) and traffic volume (this second measure may skew the results because on the influence of the first factor however the opaqueness of the formulas used may make this difficult to determine). Popularity approaches may not translate into an organisational setting - just because the weekly newsletter is sent to everyone does not make it the best source of information for every question.

3) I believe some research is starting to come out that questions the level of participation in web 2.0 that is making the assertion that the vast majority of participants are voyeurs in the world of web 2.0. It would be interesting if the number of impressions against this article were compared to the number of comments. This raises many concerns for organisations - to increase volume there may be the temptation of hire dedicated content producers however this would significantly narrow the perspective provided and might be compared with a state owned newspaper. Even if a person shows a high level of personal participation in web 2.0 this may not translate to a high level at work when it becomes "work". There is also a risk of fickleness such that as the web changes there is a demand that the organisation invest and immediately follow introducing large support and training costs in addition to potentially orphaning "old" information within "non-current" technology.

To overcome the shortcomings of enterprise 2.0 and other issues, organisations are going to have leave the 1700's behind to start the journey away from a purely industrial era organisational approach. This requires cultural, structural and technological shifts in perspectives - this is not without challenges like shifting 250+ years of industrial culture.

Without value cost becomes the main competitive tool and that may introduce more changes than leaving behind the industrial era.....

Tom makes some persuasive points about how organizations might stand firm against the "Enterprise 2.0" toolsets. I'm reminded of the project management argument that one must manage not just tools (technology), but skills and processes, before change can take root. At the same time, the migration of our "young bucks and buckettes" into upper-middle and senior management is imminent, as is a concomitant convergence of their skills, the tools already available, and their control of the business processes necessary to ground an enterprise implementation of the 2.0 vision. It's an interesting time we live in.

This is an excellent piece. I believe you are dead on in your analysis of why bottoms up adoption of Enterprise 2.0 will be a slow and hard fought battle that will take years. In particular, I am impressed with your ability to distill the essense of the problem down into a single sentence: "...power differentials, lack of trust, missing incentives, unsupportive cultures, and the general busyness of employees today..."

That being said, I strongly disagree with you. :-) Specifically, I think your assumption that Enterprise 2.0 adoption can only be bottoms up is inaccurate. From my vantage point, bottoms out adoption is already showing tremendous success. (By bottoms out, I mean from individuals and departments to their partners and customers vs. to coworkers.) For that adoption model, your list of hurdles does not apply.

I wrote up a more extensive set of thoughts on the subject here:

http://2glue.typepad.com/2glue_corporate_blog/2007/04/enterprise_20_a.html

My take is that Tom is right - and wrong.

He is right because Web 2.0 tools will have the same impact on organisational cultures as email, word processing, spreadsheets & powerpoint.

And he is wrong because Web 2.0 tools will have the same impact on organisational cultures as email, word processing, spreadsheets & powerpoint (for better or worse).

So I doubt that blogs & wikis will lead to organisations becoming more democratic in the next decade (I am both a heavy Web 2.0 user & very cynical). Indeed, I suspect that the visible changes will be minor. Power & control will remain the norm in many organisations.

However to say that they will have no effect will be premature. They are already changing who we are & what we do. I live in Australia. I doubt I would chose to live here if I could not connect with some of the world's finest minds (and hey, some its biggest idiots) via email, the web, blogs, podcasts etc. That has already impacted the corporations I have worked for even if they don't know it.

I must say, I fail to understand this "debate." Tom's point looks rhetorical to me. Obviously, it's not a technology but the widespread use of a technology that leads to change of any kind.

Pretty much any technology that gives people in business more power to communicate, model, express, collaborate, or any other core business activity will "empower employees, decentralize decisions, free up knowledge, and generally make for better places to work." It would be hard to imagine any other result!

Surely, the prime example is the personal computer itself -- and there were plenty of people around to express the same kind of skepticism Tom expresses about social software.

The other rhetorical tool Tom employs is contained in this phrase: "Enterprise 2.0, or the widespread adoption of social media and participative technologies in order to transform culture and decision-making in large organizations." No, no, Tom. These technologies don't exist in order to transform organizations. They exist in order to give people powerful new tools to get their work done! The result may be a transformation akin to the one you describe (and which you also say you favor), but that's a different matter.

The tools are simple and powerful, the results will be emergent.

Oh well, I think I must cross-post this to Social Computing (www.socialcomputing.org).

I think its not a yes or no kind of answer we could look for here. The way I see it, over a period of time, knowledge sharing has become more streamlined in organizations, while at the same time, the power structures of yore have not been disturbed to a large extent. This is not to say they havent been.

I think we could see a scenario where there is knowledge-sharing and information flow at different levels. These could be levels which are functional in nature, or they could be at different levels in the hierarchy. Any which way, it would not be a complete free flow of ideas, though it would happen across levels to varying degrees, which would be determined mainly by the working culture of the organization.

But in the long run, I dont think I agree with Tom. One reason is the difference I see in the way things operate in the more traditional industries, vis a vis the Knowledge-based sectors. Power differentials are going to remain, and they will continue to impede knowledge sharing, but at the same time, they would get eroded, with the senior managers taking more and more note of the thinkings of people working for them.

I may be coming late to the debate, but I am glad to see in the prior comments some items that point in the direction of what technology enables.

The shift in organizational structures is nearly inevitable, but as so many of the writers above point out, it will take time - lots and lots of time, maybe. Politics, political correctness, power structures and so forth are challenging obstacles to overcome.

As David Weinberger (no relation AFAIK) points out above, technology tools don't create change. What creates the change is how people use them. And I don't think it's a generational issue as much as we like to believe (this can be fodder for a separate discussion) - the people driving this change in my organization are all over 45, some over 60.

What I do think is that people will use these tools to find ways to get things done, and probably for some time to come, things that circumvent or undercut the existing structure. The ways this is happening now are mostly adding to what is already in place. But I am seeing changes in my organization and others with which I'm familiar not only in people getting together to share information and work together to get something outside the organizational structure done, but also finding ways to change the way they perform their roles (e.g. a product naming excersize conducted via a trading marketplace) and the way the company and the people within in interact with those outside the company (including customers).

We've seen over the last, say 5, years, many different (and you might say utopian) visions of what the business organization might look like after the E2.0 wave is done crashing over us. While they are individually unlikely to come true, they do provide elements of how the story or scenario will play out.

The other driving force in the technology industry is the movement of (mostly business software) technology from the objective of reducing cost or time in a systems to enhancing the value or productivity of the people who make up the system. This is not limited to E2.0 technologies, but is happening across enterprise software.

So when I assert above that a shift in organization structure is inevitable, I make the assumption that both the role and the value of the people in the organization will change with the new capabilities and the associated expectation of increased value (in at least some ways). It's not clear that all of the change will be at the grass-roots level. Some will be. Some more will happen at the management/ power-structure level.

It will take time, but the combination will drive the change, and how people use the systemic (enterprise software, e.g.) and the emergent (E2.0) tools will inevitably change the organization.

(Suggestion: for an interesting perspective on how changes of this magnitude evolve, listen to this podcast: http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/tln/services/media/perez_technological_revolutions.mp3)

Wow, I think you are very, very wrong here. You are missing the point Tom. This will take time. You may want to look at technology like the phone (or the cell phone), the Internet, email, electricity, cars, airplanes and than ask yourself again; did this technology changed how companies work and people think?!
E20 are just new generation of web tools. With or w/o them companies will change the way they think and operate. Just think about Supply Chain Management and how DELL or Sony would have been affected if they had RSS and support blog groups while they had their battery problems and support issues. The GM, the VP of sales and the M Dell could have been notified once there was a big # of questions all at the same time.
Tom, you need to think this one a bit more.
Cheers,

Viewing Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport's debate at last week's Enterprise 2.0 conference and reading some of the comments on the blog has confirmed my views about the lack of clear thinking regarding E2.0 and W2.0. With all due respect to Tom Davenport who has been in IT since 197x, you got it wrong dude!

The notion that E2.0 is nothing new (as argued in the debate) and that the technology is all just a rehash of stuff that has been around for ages is RIDICULOUS!!! Ubiquitous access to information through the Internet, wireless and mobile technologies, platform independent applications, affordability and wide spread adoption of technology, the ability to share information publically, wide spread platform and application interoperability through XML, HTTP, Web Services, etc., are all contributors that have converged to create the unique "wired" society we live in today. And businesses are part of our social construct.

I concur that technology alone won't change large bureacracies market pressures will. But the technology enables the change. Without there would be no basis for change. The millions of users that are flocking to social networking platforms cannot be ignored.

Enterprises need to understand and embrace the social networking phenomenon rather than sitting back skeptically saying this is nothing new or an unachievable utopian vision. Harnessing the information (content) that is being created today, understanding what it means and where we are going, and being able to quickly take advantage of it will provide organisations' a strategic advantage.

Organisations that fail to embrace this new paradigm, at best will miss out on opportunities and at worst, be overtaken by agile organisations capable of evolving.

Web 2.0 is either the latest fad, old ideas in new packaging, or a real change in thinking..real change in thinking that business and IT executives need to facilitate!

These new and emerging core of technologies, trends, (Web 2.0) is changing how we interface with information on the WEB.

Should CIOs who understand these new applications and technologies—facilitate early adoption and greatly improve internal business processes.

Among the biggest advantages, include improved collaboration with customers, partners, and suppliers, not to mention the internal users...., should CIOs play a by introducing collaborative tools that can trim the overwhelming volume of business E-mail?

This must be embraced at least as an opportunity to close the gap and perceptions that employees have of the IT department and time to improve the "brand value" by being an innovative CIO

The three most popular (wikis, blogging, and mash-ups) with no one having to receive or send an e-mail message, and at the same time get a clear understanding of the information being acted on and the collaboration involved.

It is certainly away to unlock hidden value in the transformation process (participative..) and at the same time provide real collaborative value in domains such as sales process, where notifications on any comment or question (example in a proposal) can be alerted to a sales rep (by email or RSS) all attached to the wiki or blog page.

Well...Lets embrace this in a middle out approach by IT!

I think we err when we attribute ubiquitous transformative potential to new technologies. Web 2.0 technologies like all the others before will have significant impact in certain aspects of an organization's function than others. This might sound redundant, given that we already label these as social technologies - but this transformation will be most significant in those aspects of an organization which have a relatively higher 'social dimension'. We would therefore expect transformation in innovation, strategic decision making and other areas which deal with complexity and uncertainty which cannot be adequately mastered in conventional Information systems. We should also expect a similar impact when dealing with entities such as markets. I expect the impact of these technologies in an area such as Supply Chain Management might not be as significant.

Even in these domains where Social Technologies are likely to have transformational impact, the process of adoption and rate of change will vary. These are essentially bottoms up processes. They will therefore realign organizations around different power structures often informal. To the extent that a power structure is imposed on such an organization and is not aligned with this bottoms up structure, the organization will be dysfunctional. Trust, Culture etc are all important and as they change they will contribute to the dynamics of the organizations that adopt these technologies.

Some Asian companies have been using less social-networks oriented tools inside their own global organizations. The concept is known as communities of practice. We tend to forget easily and lose perspective of what is happening elsewhere or what practitioners have been doing effectively under less fancy or sexy names.

The power of the still developing web 2.0 tools and its applications can be easily incorporated into the business goal oriented communities of practice. The web 2.0 people networking associative pull might facilitate and enhance the power and business contributions of communities of practice.

The power of free assocation, producing your own wikis, linking up to groups of common interest, streaming media, posting personal interests (professional and personal), and many more facilitate what now is done through intranets in communities of practice. Not only morale issues can be freely debated, but also the technical and productivity problems at which these communities are focused on today.

Under the web 2.0 people can not only create and foster open innovation (to use one of the fashionable terms nowadays) but also be a part of a community (internal or external) that can more freely discuss sticky organizational issues. For example using a second-life avatar (a'k'a) people in organizations can feel more freely to express their ideas, concerns and tell reality as is, without risking being directly fingered by the hierarchy and suffer the consequences (of course there are many ways to find out who you are). Hopefully slowly permeating a culture of cooperation, forming groups of interest and focusing on using these tools as faciltators for these cultural changes and organizational goals to be reached.

Needless to say top management need to get involved in the game and understand the limitations, power and dangers of using these tools for organizational and goal reaching purposes.

Two perspectives should be given to Web 2.0 technology: the individual and the organization. For the organization two questions should be considered. Is business a democracy or is it distributed hierarchy? If you buy into the assumption that business is a democracy, then who would create policy and processes? The concept that business can function as a democracy seems chaotic and non standardized. It also goes against decades of management theory. We cannot vote on every action that is needed to be carried out in a large organization. Implying that organizations can be democratic structures goes against the management concept of distribution of power through delegation of authority and responsibility for actions.

The value of an individual to an organization is what they can do for organization and who they know. The thought that knowledge workers would fully impart what makes them valuable to their organization seems to be not in the interest of the individual.

In contrast to the individual level, my hypothesis is that social networking technology could have substantial impact to the organization. When an organization needs a capability or service that is not within their reach, Web 2.0 could help organizations work together on business opportunities that would not have been achievable by the single organization. Where the individual’s incentive is to protect what makes an individual valuable, organizations could use Web 2.0 as a super yellow pages to grow the enterprise.

Dr. Davenport

All you need to do is sit in a room full of teenagers to realize the upcoming impact of these systems. They IM/email using these systems, waiting for their friends to respond.

Email is social, you know what. When people get "accustom" to the application, it's use grows exponentially. We've seen a continued growth trend around email with the post-email college use. Today, Faceboook has grown out of a need to have a unified directory on college campuses. 2.0 systems are getting a similar type of use. I remember when IM wasn't for business circa 1998, then in just a few years the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) requires it be kept for compliance archiving.

Social bookmarking would have been here in 2000 had Microsoft not squashed Netscape (you should remember Netscape HTML bookmark sharing on unix at the biz school in Austin?)

Anyway, it's happening with our youth and they will roll the technologies forward. Call me crazy, but I think that's how it works culturally.

All the best

JK

What tom said is right. Web 2.0 will not changes
the way org run. It will happen in next 2-3 year.

KF

I agree that technology alone cannot make the transformation to an E2.0 environment occur. Besides order, which traditional management hierarchies provide, the primary obstacle is the existing financial governance model. In public corporations, and large institutions, boards manage through financial results. The main mechanism to implement and manage this process is a budget. In order for E2.0 to gain mass adoption in public companies, the allocation and management of internal capital (budgets) would have to be dramatically altered.

Hello Tom,

I totally agree that Enterprise 2.0 will not just change the way business works. Eventually it's people who have to make it work. And it's just easier to do things casually on social networks, but things change if they have to be done formally with professional relations. Then aspects such as experience, knowledge, results, recommendations etc. will also become transparent for professionals. I just don't think most professionals of 25+ years old are ready for it.

I've heard a new buzz 'Generation 2.0', but I'm not sure even they can do it. We're just humans, afraid to be vulnerable, especially professionally.

In my case I try to lead my organization to become more 'Enterprise 2.0', but of course as CEO I also encounter issues. I'm writing my lessons / experiences on my blog, feel free to check it.

Kind regards,

Ha Vo

Hello Tom,

I agree on your point that technology is not able to change or shape the organisation. That is why any Enterprise 2.0 implementation should not be about technology, but about the people who are going to work with it. Enterprise 2.0 is a concept that is still taking shape, and at the moment it is mostly used to enable social networks that are already in place.

I also believe that Enterprise 2.0 software will only work in companies where management is ready for the democratisation of information and knowledge. That is why a Enterprise 2.0 implementation trajectory should be supported by upper management, but focussed on the knowledge workers in the company.

Kind regards,

Joep van Wijk

Hi Tom,

Where most web 2.0 initiatives were start from bottom-up - most fail. Top management involvement is critical, reshaping the organizational culture into one where open communications is a habit, where learning is a daily experience, and where sharing is encouraged - there such technologies can have a strong impact.

Most think that by implementing a series of fine technologies the organization will change - it won't. Change the organization first and see what can happen.

More of such organizational changes we will see during the coming years, the external forces do literally enforce such change. However, bear in mind that a revolution takes time.

Yours truly,

Kees Lemmens

I have commented on this post before, but I could not help commenting again. I cannot agree with you more Tom.

Having just been involved with several clients who were trying to implement Social Technologies, I have just experienced how these technologies by themselves can not change a culture. Changing the culture is a massive challenge as we all know. It is particularly accentuated in the case of Social Technologies, since they impact processes which have always been social, and therefore have either been effective or not, irrespective of technologies.

There is a definition of organizing, which goes somewhat along the lines of - it is an attempt to reduce difference. They drive out variance in the interest of uniformity. These technologies support the exact opposite point of view. They are indeed about participation, but they are only interesting when they bring diversity into the conversation, problem solving and innovation.

An organization which is not ready for such openness will find ways to constrain and regulate conversation, totally defeating the efficacy of these technologies.

About the uncertainty that you mention. When the new generation enters the workforce, they will certainly be more adept and amenable to accepting these new ideas. However, they will have little influence, and it will be a while before they have substantial influence on policy and be able to change the culture enough that these technologies will deliver on their transformational potential. Entrepreneurial organizations would be another story. They do not have the baggage that the established mainstream ones have. I do not think it is an uncertainty. We can be prety sure, that if the organizations that bring these people in, do not change their culture to become more open to a new form of work, they will drive these people out. Perhaps, that is the factor, the inability to attract a new workforce which might change things.

I have commented on this post before, but I could not help commenting again. I cannot agree with you more Tom.

Having just been involved with several clients who were trying to implement Social Technologies, I have just experienced how these technologies by themselves can not change a culture. Changing the culture is a massive challenge as we all know. It is particularly accentuated in the case of Social Technologies, since they impact processes which have always been social, and therefore have either been effective or not, irrespective of technologies.

There is a definition of organizing, which goes somewhat along the lines of - it is an attempt to reduce difference. They drive out variance in the interest of uniformity. These technologies support the exact opposite point of view. They are indeed about participation, but they are only interesting when they bring diversity into the conversation, problem solving and innovation.

An organization which is not ready for such openness will find ways to constrain and regulate conversation, totally defeating the efficacy of these technologies.

About the uncertainty that you mention. When the new generation enters the workforce, they will certainly be more adept and amenable to accepting these new ideas. However, they will have little influence, and it will be a while before they have substantial influence on policy and be able to change the culture enough that these technologies will deliver on their transformational potential. Entrepreneurial organizations would be another story. They do not have the baggage that the established mainstream ones have. I do not think it is an uncertainty. We can be prety sure, that if the organizations that bring these people in, do not change their culture to become more open to a new form of work, they will drive these people out. Perhaps, that is the factor, the inability to attract a new workforce which might change things.

Tom,

Great topic of discussion and incredible input by contributors. I am in the Air Force and can see, and agree with, many of the items described in this blog.

Enterprise 2.0 is alive and growing across one of the biggest bureaucracies around, the military. It is growing faster in some areas than others. USSOCOM is adapting quickly and utilizing the advantages of chat, wiki and tagging. However, the US Air Force is fairly slow at adopting the basics of chat and collaborative software.

Leading the way is DISA for all of DoD to provide a standard system for all Services. This standardization will allow the joint environment between the military services to better interact and collaborate, including many government interagencies.

The big hurdle is the same thing that has been discussed here. This kind of paradigm shift is much easier for the new generations coming into the military as they are growing up with it. Much of the leadership may have a hard time with it, as they don't use it on a daily basis. It is not incorporated into their lives. It will have to be introduced slowly, working from the lower levels up the chain, in order to be effective and become efficient. The lower levels must show the higher levels that it works.

In my opinion, one point is crucial. Technology doesn't change anything. It is not the fix-all, wonder of the ages that will bring your company to utopia. It is a tool. Too many people are convinced that technology can save them and their company. Yes, it can, if you implement it correctly and adapt to what it can offer. How can you implement new technology, but not change your practices, and think that it will get better. Going too far can also be a detriment.

Take the US Army and Future Combat Systems (FCS). FCS is a great system of system and will provide a lot to the Army. However, it is getting a lot of push back from inside and outside the Army. It is being marketed as the next solution to the counter insurgency fight. Yes, this technology will give our soldiers an advantage on the battlefield. But, you can't stop training like you don't have FCS. What if the technology breaks (as if that never happens)? If you rely so heavily on the technology that you can't function if/when it breaks, you are increasing your risk to unacceptable levels.

As a communications officer, I am excited to see our militaries adopt more Enterprise 2.0 items. We just need to make sure we learn from our civilian counterparts on how to use it efficiently..

Great discussion. Thank you.

Maj James Simonds, USAF
Student, Army Command & General Staff College
US Army Combined Arms Center
Fort Leavenworth KS