Old world new world the journey to enterprise 2.0

December 10th, 2009

Andrew McAfee is a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at MIT and recently wrote an article in the Financial Times, I would like to quote Andrew from the article but I can’t,

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. You may share using our article tools. Please don’t cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.

So I can share the article using lots and lots of tools but…. where is fair use in this? Anyway, I digress…

So I shall paraphrase, McAfee, says that E2.0 tools dramatically increase productivity inside organisations. Increases were measured from 20% to as much as 35%. He says we should be cautious about such claims however, they cannot be ignored. That people friendly organisation McKinsey produced these reports…

McAfee, says that this is because these “tools” support informal networks…. I think what he is saying is that this is all about as Howard Rheingold would say, amplifying human talents for cooperation.

My unease, with the article is that the word people is never mentioned. And where I to read this as a an eager novice in this area, I would wonder what informal networks were? Is that computers that wear chino’s? And that technology saves the day!

Euan Semple writes of his own experience of being head of knowledge management at the BBC

First we caused the twin evils of poor communication and inability to learn from each other through our systematisation and bureaucratisation of the world of work. We devalued relationships and trust as twin pillars of human endeavour. Then we made it worse by sticking plaster on the wound, adding layers of “professional” intervention on top in the form of “internal communicators” and “knowledge managers” in our attempts to make things better. We buried the people trying to do things under increasingly collusive layers of “grown ups” pretending that this is the way things have to be.

And he goes on

The inevitable rise of networked communications in organisations is deeply challenging to many of those currently in managerial positions. I see it in their eyes on a daily basis. I feel sorry for them. But anyone standing in the way of this happening in their organisation has to be off their rocker.

DoooooH - Where's my E2.0 Marge?

Euan says, that most companies who try to do Enterprise 2.0 will fail, and it will be for these reasons in no particular order:

1. They think it is about technology.

2. They aren’t prepared to deal with the friction that allowing their staff to connect generates.

3. They will assimilate it into business as usual.

4. They will try to do it in a way that “maximizes business effectiveness” without realizing that it calls for a radical shift in what is seen as effective.

5. They will grind down their early adopters until they give up.

6. They will get fleeced by the IT industry for over engineered, under delivering solutions, think that Enterprise 2.0 failed to live up to its promise and move on to the next fad.

7. Lack of patience

8. It is not companies who do Enterprise 2.0 it is individuals.

Its about people stupid and technologies of cooperation

Although referencing E2.0 in the above Euan prefers the term Social Business, and in fact in case you don’t know, Business is a social science, not that you would believe that in the way MBA’s are taught.

Euan expands upon this theme/meme

Stowe Boyd wrote today about his discomfort with the phrase Enterprise 2.0 and his preference for “social business” as a way of describing the changes we are seeing currently. While I understand Andrew McAfee’s thinking when he came up with the phrase I’m with Stowe – it’s too narrow, too corporate and too managerial!

I am with Euan and Stowe on this, we are witnesses to a structural and transformational change in society, what many describe as the toxic tail end of our industrial, mass consumer, mass media era. The tragic legacy of the last 150 years is that humanity has been thin sliced and deconstructed almost to the point of destruction. Human beings have become little more than individual units of capitalism – pawns of economists and unfettered capitalism. As Carl Jung wrote, “I” needs “We” to truly be “I” – it is managing the complexity and paradox of these two that enables Social Business to tick along at a fair old pace. Managerial everything is proven to be as dysfunctional and the obsession with measuring everything. Just look at the deep Do-Da the UK is in as it has turned the National Health Service to become not focused on being effective but efficient. This is the ultimate example of the tyranny of numbers wielded against and over people. As social philosopher Richard Sennett argues, we want to, “recover something of the spirit of the Enlightenment on terms appropriate to our time”. The tools of the revolution are digital communication technologies, but the drivers are about human connection and human identity.

Want to change stuff effectively? Management steps out of the way and allows people to work it out for themselves.

And if we take the advice of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, If you want to build a ship, don’t divide the work and give orders; teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. I think you get a sense of what Enterprise 2.0 is really all about.

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