Actually, your first postulate, that management in itself is not evil may be wrong. Management is a necessary evil, and therefore companies should have only so much as is necessary.
Peter Drucker spelled this out (in The Age Of Disruption) as the tension between the desires of the individual and the organization's desire for order. "Since all organizations require large numbers of people brought together [...], they all have the problem of balancing the objectives of the institution against the needs and desires of the individual. Each organization has the task of balancing the need for order against the need for flexibility and individual scope." If the balance between these two is lost, management has failed.
Drucker also sheds some light on the other inherent balancing act in the organization, between efficiency and effectiveness:
"The efficiency approach insists that results will come automatically if things are done right, and therefore mistrusts any deviation from proper procedure. The effectiveness approach, however, points out that in any social undertaking, 80 per cent of the results are achieved by the first 20 per cent of the effort and that the remaining 80 per cent produces only 20 per cent of the results. Above all, the last 5 per cent of the results in any social activity require as much effort as the first 95 per cent.
In the first approach, efforts are seen as central; in the second, results. In the first, the hallmark of good management is order. In the second, it is vitality. The efficiency approach sees administration as desirable and as the strength of an organization. The effectiveness approach sees it as a support, a necessary evil to be confined to the minimum needed to prevent collapse. The efficiency approach wants to make mediocrity capable of producing predictable results again and again. The effectiveness approach wants to liberate creative energy. This too is a realistic view of man."
I am on the side of the effectiveness crowd, and the goal of E2.0 is to push hard in that direction. The existing pre-Web and Web 1.0 tools and management disciplines are overwhelmingly oriented toward efficiency, but I think E2.0 is about Drucker's creative energy being liberated, at along last.
itsinsider
· 2 months ago
Hey. Just did a phenomenal interview with a large, well-known, Wall Street investment bank. Ironically (Den), it was the audit and compliance global organization that drove an e20 solution to answer an age-old problem: high inefficiencies and underutilization. It's an impressive global rollout that incorporates 5 financial center locations with the firm's subject matter experts in product, trading desk, regulatory, and banking. The initiative has yielded a "huge leap forward" due to the transparency and visibility the firm has as a result of breaking down the fiefdom walls that impeded the firm's progress in years past. Greatest challenge? The people issues. It forces employees to communicate more. Additionally, the new processes expose the weak links in the firm and threaten job security/relevance. Greatest benefit? The initiative answers to the Board of Directors and provides predictable, reliable reporting that mitigates risk and ensures regulatory compliance.
claudiap
· 2 months ago
HM. I work for a big multinational company that probably employs mostly younger genX and older genY folks, with more and more genYs coming on board all the time. It is a tech company that considers itself very hip and cutting edge. Yet it is VERY hierarchical. I think this is *because* its workforce is so young, inexperienced, and in over its head. They fall back on titles and because I said so, and more often, because S/HE said so. When people don't have the confidence of knowledge and experience, they tend to rely on chains of command. Contrast with IBM, which is a long way from perfect, but has a lot more people who a) know what they're doing and b) come from type A, achievement-oriented backgrounds with cultures of excellence and therefore tend to assume everyone around them is the same.
IBM also has a globalized infrastructure, where they don't care who is working from where, when, so it doesn't matter if you're there in person. What this means is, it also matters less what your title is and whether people play golf together and whether they've worked toghether before. What matters is whether what you just said on the phone or in your email actually made any sense. So this is where ESSPs really come into play, IMO. It's not about how hip, cool, etc FB and Twitter and wikis are. And it's not even about how easy they make it to share info, although that helps. It's more about the emphasis a company puts on *getting work done* and how they deploy *whatever technology it takes* to get that done. IBM realized it had teams all over the world that needed to work together. Different languages, different cultures, different time zones. What then did it matter whether you were in a given office, or not? So why not let people work from home? This isn't about making genY happy, it's about enabling a global workforce. If you have a to take a call at 5 AM to talk with someone at India, it's actually more efficient to do it in your pajamas than to get up, get dressed and drive an hour to your office. And guess what? That's better for business continuity too. No need to worry about a blizzard at headquarters causing everyone suddenly to work from home and crashing the dial-in servers. Intranet, good document management, great IM technology...IBM's been ahead for awhile on all that because *you need to do that if you've got teams all over the world.* And if you're talking to a jr product development person in India who has a great idea, are you going to bother to check what their title is? Did you even *catch* what it was? It's not that hierarchy doesn't matter, but it does get de-emphasized. One friend at IBM has never met her boss. He's in another state.
Which isn't to say IBM is perfect. She also throws up every day because of the stress. Different issue, though. :\ So...move the conversation away from ESSPs per se, and from younger workers, per se. Just ask what's more efficient. What enables true teamwork? What wastes the least amount of time, my worrying about who you are and stroking your ego, or my having channels through which to deploy my expertise with the best possible outcome for the company? I'm not seeing how contributing to a 600-page wiki is necessarily going to help, to be honest. Sounds like just a more creative time-waster to me. But not having to worry about offending someone because you put a lower-down in the to: line of an email and a higher-up in the cc: line would be cool. Being able to make a logical argument for why a certain launch timing would be better than a dumb idea put forward by some 20-something who inexplicably is a sr product manager, and have that argument actually evaluated on its merit--that would also be cool.
That's more how I would define ent 2.0--cultures that support and reward good thinking. I've been part of a few of those companies. I know they're out there. But it seems that with all the economic shrinkage and panic, there's been a narrowing of thinking and a return to older systems. This happens with individual thought patterns as well, so I guess I'm not surprised it happens with organizations.
Kevin Mullins
· 2 months ago
Here is another example of a problem solved with E2 from MIT:
With the decline of the world financial markets last fall, MIT took a big hit on its endowment and established a Institute-wide Planning Task Force with the goal of reducing cost by $100-150 million over the next 2 to 3 years. MIT created a simple php application to help facilitate this effort which allowed cost savings suggestions to be submitted anonymously or with the author’s name. This open effort called the IdeaBank delivered over 1000 cost savings suggestions which where then condensed into 200 recommendations with 5 main themes. And now, after the Planning report has been published, the IdeaBank is still online and its focus is to provide feedback on the report and the process.
Greg Lowe
· 2 months ago
I think perhaps that some strategies may seem rebellious, but in reality they are just the foundation for how many have achieved social participation; Take a strong "counter-opinion" as a way to start a conversation. How much attention do you get if you say "I have a new tool that is going to change the way we work." vs. "I have a new tool that is going to crush Command and control and break down silos." Sometimes it is sensationalism that gets attention...film at 11.
Dennis D. McDonald
· 2 months ago
You will never make any headway by citing facts and being reasonable!
James Harr
· 2 months ago
The role of the E2.0 proponent (who is not the CIO) is to make ESSPs desirable to the masses. The millenials are already on board, so it is boomers and a section of phobic x-ers that are the obstacle. Andy, I agree with your assessment of the 'non-crockness' of E2.0, but we have a choir/preacher relationship. How do we go about demonstrating value (ROI) to users, managers and decision-makers?
Salvatore Reina
· 2 months ago
Good article. I have some sympathy with some of Dennis's points, particularly around the unrealistic revolutionaries, but your article offers a reasoned view on why they should not be listened to. Like you, I am not sure how much of a game changer social software is, but I do think it will make a marked difference in the longer term to those companies that adopt it sensibly and in line with their way of doing business and making money.
I would add that microblogging looks potentially very powerful. It's been dubbed "river of news" in my workplace - no idea of it's provenance, but a nice term. Properly bedded into existing systems, I think this is a useful addition to networking activities and would also aid expertise location.
Btw, I think I was in that meeting with Eaun when the "Knowledge Coffins" comment came up (way bak in 06) - one of my colleagues, not me, but nice to see he remembered it.
Mike LaFleur
· 2 months ago
From my response:
"If the sole purpose of Enterprise 2.0 was to enable social networking in the business environment, then it would be difficult to come up with a compelling reason to implement it in the current economic environment. But this is a simplistic view of Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 is far more than creating communities; while the definition is still evolving, at its root Enterprise 2.0 conceptual and technological framework which provides agile and adaptable collaboration and information sharing combined with integration of enterprise data, presented to the user in one interface. It’s a little more that a forum."
I give you credit for addressing Dennis' dismissive blog in such a frontal way. It appeared to me that he was denying the obvious while obviously missing the point. (I commented at length "Denial is a river full of crocks" on my blog.) Facts have their place in a good argument, thanks for bringing them back to the conversation.
When I was an Enterprise Architect at a large financial services company a few years ago, I leveraged many of the E2.0 tools to support my effort to lead a community of about a thousand .NET developers scattered in multiple business units. We set up communities, shared work-spaces, and developed applications in a socially coordinated manner leveraging the support of wikis, discussion forums, blogs, and a home-grown social networking platform. And this solved a pressing problem we had in the architecture group -- how to lower the support costs of custom developed software by getting people to leverage common code that was: 1. deemed supportable by both the Architecture group and Ops: because it had already been tested and certified for security, performance, and reliability; 2. would meet the needs of the diverse groups who at first each said they needed their own way of doing things and were not very receptive to working with others; and 3. would not incur any extra cost to any of the development groups who participated -- since no one had extra money. We were inspired by the open source movement and by Enterprise 2.0. And we adopted both to meet the specific (cultural) needs of our (political) environment. What resulted was amazing cost savings (estimated at $6-10 million in the first year alone) with a total billed expense under $300K. Whereas we did not change the company, we did significantly change the experience of hundred of developers and dozens of production-deployed applications.
We can play the game and ask "but is that really E2.0 or not?". I don't see the point of that. I looked at the $10 million reduction in development expenses (a figure that we arrived via an independent firm that we hired to measure the process). And I looked at the 25 applications we launched on-time and *under*-budget that first year. Call it what you will, I call it "success". I credit the proper use of social business tools that enabled me to influence a thousand people who did not report to me, and lead a team of 10 architects who had other bosses.
This is one of many stories that we were able to recreate (at various scales, larger and smaller) within other groups in my company. And subsequently I found many peers in my industry who had similar stories about their experiences. However, most were not given permission to publish their case studies (enterprise behaviors have not totally changed yet, and some may never).
John Caddell
· 2 months ago
Andrew, great post as usual. I have a recommendation to add to the list of E2.0 problems.
Problem: how does a company give its entire workforce the same window into information within and outside of the company that company executives, strategic planners and customer-facing personnel have?
Answer: use a E2.0 application to collect stories, news articles, videos, Tweets, etc., that employees feel are important for their colleagues to be aware of. Readers use voting, commenting, posting related items, to add context to the data items. Significant items bubble up to the top of the viewing window, a la Digg. Executives can browse and search the archive to see what people are believing is relevant information for them. This information could illuminate weak signals, opportunities, threats, deep customer values, possible innovation opportunities, and many others. It can create a much better-informed workforce which will make better decisions and move faster to implement change initiatives.
Andrew, I Iike very much the list of examples as to how E2.0 approaches solve specific business issues. I also agree with you, that there is no point in offering revolutionary ideas about hierarchies and how evil they are. This is not a simple topic, with no simple answer. Besides, such a confrontational approach is likely to amplify the polarization in conversations taking place on innovation in Organizations, through E2.0 approaches.
At the same time, I am missing some models, or examples, of ways to activate the cultural shift that is necessary in order to find a right balance between hierarchy and emergence. In this context Dennis Howlett's point: "Like it or not, large enterprises ... have to work in structures and hierarchies that most E2.0 mavens ridicule but can’t come up with alternatives that make any sort of corporate sense." could be worth paying attention to.
I have been developing myself a model, (nice challenge), that aims to make the "Emergence of an E2.0 Culture" happen; and I might present it in San Francisco in a few weeks.
At the same time I am extremely curious, and willing, to learn what others have been developing as to how to introduce/grow a suitable - E2.0 friendly - culture within an organization. I would love it if you could find some time to offer one, or a few thoughts. Thanks very much.
David Reinke
· 2 months ago
Maybe I'm over-simplifying, but I don't think E2.0 needs a "model" or a particular culture to take root in organizations - at least the way Andrew describes it. Rather, I think the E2.0 takes root in organizations that are performance based when it offers a superior solution to a business problem. It's worth noting that in my own business (a crowd-sourcing fashion demand forecasting company) I have never once internally or externally used the term E2.0. In regards to culture, we're consistently adapting our solution to work inside our client's existing culture vs changing a culture - let's give this thing a chance!
kferaday
· 2 months ago
I think you allude to it in your "how do I navigate this huge company point" but providing a mechanism for sales teams to reach out to a broader audience (mostly internal) to support sales efforts is a great one. At my last company we used a wiki/blogs/file sharing to support sales efforts. This included competitive analysis, any intelligence gathered on prospects as well as being able to gather information from R&D to answer specific technical questions from customers that couldn't be answered in the field. This could work equally well for smaller, but distributed organizations. The only real roadblock I see in large organizations is still in discovery -- especially for large organizations. Alot of these solutions need to focus on how they can improve/leverage search services to support discovery.
dhinchcliffe
· 2 months ago
Hi Andrew,
I also responded to Dennis at length myself on ZDNet this afternoon:
Thanks for shedding light on the topic, though I think Dennis throws up skepticism about things just to get conversation going. I do think it's smart at this point to touch on leading misconceptions, such as the overthrow of hierarchy (I think something more interesting and subtle is going to happen instead) as well as your excellent examples of use cases.
I would only quibble with your comment that enterprises can shut down Enterprise 2.0 at will. The advent of mobile devices has ensured that this will not happen in all but the most locked-down environments (i.e. secure government facilities). I think almost all organizations have to face social computing one way or the other and the longer they wait, the more work they might have to do. Though again, I'm encouraged by how non-disruptive adoption has been so far with the relatively fast inroads (both via grassroots efforts and formal initiatives) E2.0 has made, at least in terms of how accessible the tools are in the last year.
Rick Ladd
· 2 months ago
Dion:
I agree the overthrow of hierarchy is unlikely and, while you haven't provided any detail on what that "more interesting and subtle" thing that's going to happen is, what I'm seeing in my very hierarchical aerospace company is a subtle shift in the method and efficacy of communication. I don't think strictly hierarchical organizations lend themselves to good communication. If it happens it's likely in spite of the methods the enterprise sets up to accomplish it. We are notoriously bad at passing information down, and few tell the whole truth when passing it up.
With the ESSPs we are using and experimenting (gingerly) with, the hierarchy - at least with respect to communication - is slowly flattening and, as a result, also broadening. People who may never say a word otherwise are beginning to comment on conversations or blogs. Things that might never get said, e.g. criticism or our outward, customer-facing website, are starting to pop up. I find this a good and encouraging thing.
I'm also inclined to agree with your second point as well. Working in what I would consider a very command-and-control, hierarchical organization that blocks access to social networks and personal blogs (very haphazardly, I might add), including Twitter, I nevertheless am seeing the writing on the wall for that kind of control. There are just too many ways to communicate, mobile devices (as you suggest) being the most obvious. A couple of years ago, phones with cameras were banned on campus. Guess how that worked out. Taking pictures is still verbotten, but everyone has a camera. We're expected not to take pictures of things we shouldn't be taking pictures of (like Kinetic Kill Vehicles on display in our Leadership & Learning Center).
Which points back to one of those interesting and subtle things I think you're referring to. Trust. In order for E2.0 capabilities to truly flatten the hierarchy somewhat (again, at least with respect to inter-company communication and knowledge sharing), employees will necessarily be granted a higher level of trust than is normally the case. We just saw this happen when the President of our company announced he was ceasing to use the moderated blog he and his Executive staff had been using for about two years, and moving the conversation to a more social (and unmoderated) "site" which more closely resembled what I think of as a blog.
Anyway, I am deeply grateful for both your and Professor McAfee's perspectives on E2.0, as well as both of your highly informative tweets. I have learned much and, by good fortune, have been able to transfer some of your knowledge to my company. All goodness!! Danke.
Dave Kinkead
· 2 months ago
The benefits of E2.0 will obviously impact organisations of varying degrees. While E2.0 wont be the best choice to solve every problem listed above, your first point - bring new hires up to speed - is one that all organisations can benefit from.
Case in point, when taking over a new company last year that had a strong isolationist culture of 'knowledge is power', I launched an internal wiki to document policy and processes and made department heads accountable for ensuring content was loaded. This single action was in a large part responsible for a 50% reduction in the time required for new hire training and orientation which translated into an approx $10000 per head cost reduction.
Fred Johanson
· 2 months ago
Enterprise 2.0 is certainly a crock from at least one key aspect. The term "Enterprise 2.0" implies equivalency with Web 2.0 tools, which is far from the case. In fact, I struggle to think of a single Enterprise 2.0 tool which is equivalent to a Web 2.0 counterpart. If you were a hot shot programmer, would you rather work on the next feature for Twitter or the next iteration of SharePoint?
A few examples from my company's 3+ year Enteprise 2.0 experience:
My company may use MediaWiki software, but it's vastly inferior to the Wikipedia implementation. Our IT department certainly isn't capable of keeping pace with the regular MediaWiki releases. You want a MediaWiki extension approved for your office wiki? Don't forget your TPS cover with that request.
A user that wants to use the non-sanctioned browser on the intranet? Forget it. We only do IE7 in these parts. So, yeah, you can forget those Laconica Firefox addons.
It would be great if could upgrade to the latest blogging software. We use open source, but there are non-trivial costs involved with testing and security accreditation. So maybe we can squeeze some money into the budget next year to do it?
Oh, yeah, and then there is that whole issue about blogging metrics. I need to somehow prove the blogs are generating value for the company, so that I can get that budget to upgrade the software. 1,000 people from across the company read 5 blogs on average per day, which means I should be able to get $K for a simple software upgrade. Three years later and those meetings are less-and-less fun. "Don't come back until you can prove a blog resulted in 100 additional sales!"
We also suffer from Enterprise 2.0 Shiny Ball Syndrome. We got the wiki up. That box is checked. Next! Hello, blogging. No one ever got promoted for making a wiki server a little more reliable or the tagging software a little faster. But hello enterprise microblogging! I am thinking maybe a nice holiday bonus with this one.
Web 2.0 tools have become so vastly superior to their (ahem) Enterprise 2.0 equivalents that I seriously doubt widespread Enterprise 2.0 adoption will ever be achieved. No enterprise(s) will ever be able to keep pace with the unrelenting innovation taking place on the Internet.
Our company lead users that should be building our mythical Enterprise 2.0 are in Parallel Kingdoms on their iPhones between Twitter sessions. I will put them up against your ESSP prediction market dream team any day.
JoeSchueller
· 2 months ago
I'm so glad you shared this. In my situation, I find the "fundamentalists" on either side of this argument so difficult to work with. Like anything in life, the truth lies in the middle. Emerging, egalitarian, networked solutions do not make 170 years worth of brand building and innovation processes and cause them all to be wrong. The key to this is trying to help people abstract information distribution (efficient in the 2.0 models) from decision accountability (what hierarchies can be good at).
This is why I've never pushed my solution on anyone. We haven't had a "roll-out," we've stayed in "beta," we don't advertise, we're just there. We're not "deploying" this. We'll certainly advise and evangelize where it makes sense, but we won't push it on anyone. If you do, you incite all the arguments that end up in people concluding this is a "crock."
Much like you've done here, we've had great success when we stop talking about tools and start talking about work processes that could benefit from broader, more transparent, more robust interaction. Inevitably, the discussion becomes less about what's wrong with the tool or who's being disintermediated, and more about how much faster and better we'll be able to work.
David Reinke
· 2 months ago
Joe,
Great comment. I think you are right on. I started a 2.0 company by accident - I wasn't focused on revolution. I was focused on a particular business problem in a particular industry and stumbled upon the social web as a sensible part of the solution.
I think there is a valid concern if more practitioners don't start leveraging 2.0 and creating real ROI stories, the "drum-beaters" may turn business leaders temporarily against e20 as another management fad.
Sumeet
· 2 months ago
Thanks Andrew for a great post. I believe E2 can revolutionize the way we work and share in the knowledge economy. The biggest competitive advantage for businesses comes through better productivity an innovation and these are the aspects E2 must aim at enhancing.
Technology, unlike in the past, must be applied as an enabler. There is no alternative to creating a culture for better adoption that doesn't mean we need to do away with hierarchies rather focus on relevant and secure access.
We experience all the challenges mentioned while selling Kreeo in enterprise but our conversion rates are extraordinary because we have been able to address all the key concerns as summarized beautifully by you.
I hope organizations don't repeat the mistakes committed in past and focus on outcomes and adapt to adopt a new trend. Focus on implementing solutions to harness the collective intelligence. I will be presenting my thoughts on the subject at the upcoming INTEROP, Mumbai conference. http://www.interop.com/mumbai/education/emergin...
Anne Marie McEwan
· 2 months ago
What problem does E2.0 solve? For one thing, the technologies can be used to shrink social distances in workplaces globally distributed across eco-systems (suppliers, alliances, partnerships, fragmented business units etc), and taking the opportunity to change attitudes and working practices from silo mentality to collaborative. See http://chucksblog.emc.com/content/social_media_... for a great case study.
In this era post-GM collapse and living through the aftermath of the global financial crisis, what other questions can we be asking? Solving problems are of course crucial but we do now have the opportunity to take stock of how things are done.
For me, the focus of E2.0 is not primarily the technologies. It is the underlying business processes. I have been saying that the process-based forms of organising, typified by TQM, JIT, Lean, Concurrent Engineering and others, represent the first wave of smart working. Process integration, continuous improvement and problem-solving are all essential component of these process innovation and control methods, and they tap into the tacit knowledge of previously ignored shopfloor operators. These methods are nothing without the willing contribution of these people. Power to the people? I'll say.
I see E2.0 as a label for the potential to reformulate business processes and business models into loosely connected, decentralised, peer to peer approaches to production within value networks that create economic and social value (Aspen Institute report, The Rise of Collective Intelligence, 2007 http://bit.ly/2Lzk6O).
Building on what we know from the the pioneering process‐based models of organising, social technologies in combination with reformed value networks and business models now create enormous potential for enabling a second wave of process and socially-based smart working. Continuous improvement (CI) in the first wave is now Collective Intelligence in the second (CI 2.0 if you like).
My views have been formulated through my doctoral research 15 years ago and subsequent recent monitoring of global workplace trends, I recently found Dennison, though, saying similar things in his prescient analysis of process-based forms of organising back in 1997:
As an architect for an enterprise software vendor, I’m a big E2.0 fan and yet sympathize with Dennis’ argument (but not the arguing). Some constituents of E2.0 are clearly finding value today, which I’m excited about. But there are people who tend to get preachy about the urgency of E2.0, protective of how E2.0 is defined, critical of questioners, and (perhaps understandably) suspicious of software vendors. That noise doesn’t bother me.
Social networking and other E2.0 features are relatively easy to buy or build, meaning the perception that enterprise applications vendors are too Jurassic to understand E2.0 is simply false. Also, it’s been pointed out (NYT: http://bit.ly/1GG0AG) that social networking grew fastest among people squarely in the decision-maker age range, which should dispel notions that the generation gap is a barrier to adopting E2.0 (although maybe a barrier to blind adoption).
I see 3 things which impede corporate E2.0 adoption. First, social features have to incorporate governance constraints surrounding data retention, privacy, and security. Traditional role & function security mechanisms conflict with the free-form, opt-in, and self-service spirit of E2.0. Meshing E2.0 with existing access management is expensive and lacking best practices. Second, E2.0 hasn’t yet sufficiently differentiated itself from already widespread Web 2.0 and collaboration tools. Finally, enterprise applications (and their information models) need to be useful and fully-functional social networking participants. That goal is still pretty much unfulfilled, but nicely describes a good part of my day job.
Nevertheless, enterprises and app builders alike are actively tossing E2.0 features into their efforts backlog along with other to-dos. But like many other useful technology initiatives, enterprises won’t push ahead unless they are good and ready. There is no need to make apologies for putting other priorities ahead of E2.0. Of all the possible drivers for implementing E2.0 or not, the one I don’t worry about is ignorance.
Tony Brice
· 2 months ago
But Dennis Howlett is, by his own admission, a curmudgeon. I know many curmudgeons and they are ALL wrong about forward looking things ALWAYS. Pay no attention. Too many companies are already getting tremendous benefits, including significant cost savings, from E2.0.
fidelman
· 2 months ago
There are many use cases in the Enterprise today. I find most of the dissenters are the consultant or pundit types that have little to no connection with large or small companies. They are doing a service however in helping to surface the successes.
Webcam
· 2 months ago
Very good article. “Like it or not, large enterprises – the big name brands – have to work in structures and hierarchies that most E2.0 mavens ridicule but can’t come up with alternatives that make any sort of corporate sense.” I totally agree with you.
All Comments
Peter Drucker spelled this out (in The Age Of Disruption) as the tension between the desires of the individual and the organization's desire for order. "Since all organizations require large numbers of people brought together [...], they all have the problem of balancing the objectives of the institution against the needs and desires of the individual. Each organization has the task of balancing the need for order against the need for flexibility and individual scope." If the balance between these two is lost, management has failed.
Drucker also sheds some light on the other inherent balancing act in the organization, between efficiency and effectiveness:
"The efficiency approach insists that results will come automatically if things are done right, and therefore mistrusts any deviation from proper procedure. The effectiveness approach, however, points out that in any social undertaking, 80 per cent of the results are achieved by the first 20 per cent of the effort and that the remaining 80 per cent produces only 20 per cent of the results. Above all, the last 5 per cent of the results in any social activity require as much effort as the first 95 per cent.
In the first approach, efforts are seen as central; in the second, results. In the first, the hallmark of good management is order. In the second, it is vitality. The efficiency approach sees administration as desirable and as the strength of an organization. The effectiveness approach sees it as a support, a necessary evil to be confined to the minimum needed to prevent collapse. The efficiency approach wants to make mediocrity capable of producing predictable results again and again. The effectiveness approach wants to liberate creative energy. This too is a realistic view of man."
I am on the side of the effectiveness crowd, and the goal of E2.0 is to push hard in that direction. The existing pre-Web and Web 1.0 tools and management disciplines are overwhelmingly oriented toward efficiency, but I think E2.0 is about Drucker's creative energy being liberated, at along last.
IBM also has a globalized infrastructure, where they don't care who is working from where, when, so it doesn't matter if you're there in person. What this means is, it also matters less what your title is and whether people play golf together and whether they've worked toghether before. What matters is whether what you just said on the phone or in your email actually made any sense. So this is where ESSPs really come into play, IMO. It's not about how hip, cool, etc FB and Twitter and wikis are. And it's not even about how easy they make it to share info, although that helps. It's more about the emphasis a company puts on *getting work done* and how they deploy *whatever technology it takes* to get that done. IBM realized it had teams all over the world that needed to work together. Different languages, different cultures, different time zones. What then did it matter whether you were in a given office, or not? So why not let people work from home? This isn't about making genY happy, it's about enabling a global workforce. If you have a to take a call at 5 AM to talk with someone at India, it's actually more efficient to do it in your pajamas than to get up, get dressed and drive an hour to your office. And guess what? That's better for business continuity too. No need to worry about a blizzard at headquarters causing everyone suddenly to work from home and crashing the dial-in servers. Intranet, good document management, great IM technology...IBM's been ahead for awhile on all that because *you need to do that if you've got teams all over the world.* And if you're talking to a jr product development person in India who has a great idea, are you going to bother to check what their title is? Did you even *catch* what it was? It's not that hierarchy doesn't matter, but it does get de-emphasized. One friend at IBM has never met her boss. He's in another state.
Which isn't to say IBM is perfect. She also throws up every day because of the stress. Different issue, though. :\ So...move the conversation away from ESSPs per se, and from younger workers, per se. Just ask what's more efficient. What enables true teamwork? What wastes the least amount of time, my worrying about who you are and stroking your ego, or my having channels through which to deploy my expertise with the best possible outcome for the company? I'm not seeing how contributing to a 600-page wiki is necessarily going to help, to be honest. Sounds like just a more creative time-waster to me. But not having to worry about offending someone because you put a lower-down in the to: line of an email and a higher-up in the cc: line would be cool. Being able to make a logical argument for why a certain launch timing would be better than a dumb idea put forward by some 20-something who inexplicably is a sr product manager, and have that argument actually evaluated on its merit--that would also be cool.
That's more how I would define ent 2.0--cultures that support and reward good thinking. I've been part of a few of those companies. I know they're out there. But it seems that with all the economic shrinkage and panic, there's been a narrowing of thinking and a return to older systems. This happens with individual thought patterns as well, so I guess I'm not surprised it happens with organizations.
With the decline of the world financial markets last fall, MIT took a big hit on its endowment and established a Institute-wide Planning Task Force with the goal of reducing cost by $100-150 million over the next 2 to 3 years. MIT created a simple php application to help facilitate this effort which allowed cost savings suggestions to be submitted anonymously or with the author’s name. This open effort called the IdeaBank delivered over 1000 cost savings suggestions which where then condensed into 200 recommendations with 5 main themes. And now, after the Planning report has been published, the IdeaBank is still online and its focus is to provide feedback on the report and the process.
I would add that microblogging looks potentially very powerful. It's been dubbed "river of news" in my workplace - no idea of it's provenance, but a nice term. Properly bedded into existing systems, I think this is a useful addition to networking activities and would also aid expertise location.
Btw, I think I was in that meeting with Eaun when the "Knowledge Coffins" comment came up (way bak in 06) - one of my colleagues, not me, but nice to see he remembered it.
"If the sole purpose of Enterprise 2.0 was to enable social networking in the business environment, then it would be difficult to come up with a compelling reason to implement it in the current economic environment. But this is a simplistic view of Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 is far more than creating communities; while the definition is still evolving, at its root Enterprise 2.0 conceptual and technological framework which provides agile and adaptable collaboration and information sharing combined with integration of enterprise data, presented to the user in one interface. It’s a little more that a forum."
You can read the whole thing at: http://mikelafleur.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/the...
When I was an Enterprise Architect at a large financial services company a few years ago, I leveraged many of the E2.0 tools to support my effort to lead a community of about a thousand .NET developers scattered in multiple business units. We set up communities, shared work-spaces, and developed applications in a socially coordinated manner leveraging the support of wikis, discussion forums, blogs, and a home-grown social networking platform. And this solved a pressing problem we had in the architecture group -- how to lower the support costs of custom developed software by getting people to leverage common code that was:
1. deemed supportable by both the Architecture group and Ops: because it had already been tested and certified for security, performance, and reliability;
2. would meet the needs of the diverse groups who at first each said they needed their own way of doing things and were not very receptive to working with others; and
3. would not incur any extra cost to any of the development groups who participated -- since no one had extra money.
We were inspired by the open source movement and by Enterprise 2.0. And we adopted both to meet the specific (cultural) needs of our (political) environment. What resulted was amazing cost savings (estimated at $6-10 million in the first year alone) with a total billed expense under $300K. Whereas we did not change the company, we did significantly change the experience of hundred of developers and dozens of production-deployed applications.
We can play the game and ask "but is that really E2.0 or not?". I don't see the point of that. I looked at the $10 million reduction in development expenses (a figure that we arrived via an independent firm that we hired to measure the process). And I looked at the 25 applications we launched on-time and *under*-budget that first year. Call it what you will, I call it "success". I credit the proper use of social business tools that enabled me to influence a thousand people who did not report to me, and lead a team of 10 architects who had other bosses.
This is one of many stories that we were able to recreate (at various scales, larger and smaller) within other groups in my company. And subsequently I found many peers in my industry who had similar stories about their experiences. However, most were not given permission to publish their case studies (enterprise behaviors have not totally changed yet, and some may never).
Problem: how does a company give its entire workforce the same window into information within and outside of the company that company executives, strategic planners and customer-facing personnel have?
Answer: use a E2.0 application to collect stories, news articles, videos, Tweets, etc., that employees feel are important for their colleagues to be aware of. Readers use voting, commenting, posting related items, to add context to the data items. Significant items bubble up to the top of the viewing window, a la Digg. Executives can browse and search the archive to see what people are believing is relevant information for them. This information could illuminate weak signals, opportunities, threats, deep customer values, possible innovation opportunities, and many others. It can create a much better-informed workforce which will make better decisions and move faster to implement change initiatives.
I wrote a blog post on this idea today (http://caddellinsightgroup.com/blog2/2009/09/a-...).
regards, John
I also agree with you, that there is no point in offering revolutionary ideas about hierarchies and how evil they are.
This is not a simple topic, with no simple answer. Besides, such a confrontational approach is likely to amplify the polarization in conversations taking place on innovation in Organizations, through E2.0 approaches.
At the same time, I am missing some models, or examples, of ways to activate the cultural shift that is necessary in order to find a right balance between hierarchy and emergence.
In this context Dennis Howlett's point: "Like it or not, large enterprises ... have to work in structures and hierarchies that most E2.0 mavens ridicule but can’t come up with alternatives that make any sort of corporate sense." could be worth paying attention to.
I have been developing myself a model, (nice challenge), that aims to make the "Emergence of an E2.0 Culture" happen; and I might present it in San Francisco in a few weeks.
At the same time I am extremely curious, and willing, to learn what others have been developing as to how to introduce/grow a suitable - E2.0 friendly - culture within an organization.
I would love it if you could find some time to offer one, or a few thoughts.
Thanks very much.
I also responded to Dennis at length myself on ZDNet this afternoon:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=744
Thanks for shedding light on the topic, though I think Dennis throws up skepticism about things just to get conversation going. I do think it's smart at this point to touch on leading misconceptions, such as the overthrow of hierarchy (I think something more interesting and subtle is going to happen instead) as well as your excellent examples of use cases.
I would only quibble with your comment that enterprises can shut down Enterprise 2.0 at will. The advent of mobile devices has ensured that this will not happen in all but the most locked-down environments (i.e. secure government facilities). I think almost all organizations have to face social computing one way or the other and the longer they wait, the more work they might have to do. Though again, I'm encouraged by how non-disruptive adoption has been so far with the relatively fast inroads (both via grassroots efforts and formal initiatives) E2.0 has made, at least in terms of how accessible the tools are in the last year.
I agree the overthrow of hierarchy is unlikely and, while you haven't provided any detail on what that "more interesting and subtle" thing that's going to happen is, what I'm seeing in my very hierarchical aerospace company is a subtle shift in the method and efficacy of communication. I don't think strictly hierarchical organizations lend themselves to good communication. If it happens it's likely in spite of the methods the enterprise sets up to accomplish it. We are notoriously bad at passing information down, and few tell the whole truth when passing it up.
With the ESSPs we are using and experimenting (gingerly) with, the hierarchy - at least with respect to communication - is slowly flattening and, as a result, also broadening. People who may never say a word otherwise are beginning to comment on conversations or blogs. Things that might never get said, e.g. criticism or our outward, customer-facing website, are starting to pop up. I find this a good and encouraging thing.
I'm also inclined to agree with your second point as well. Working in what I would consider a very command-and-control, hierarchical organization that blocks access to social networks and personal blogs (very haphazardly, I might add), including Twitter, I nevertheless am seeing the writing on the wall for that kind of control. There are just too many ways to communicate, mobile devices (as you suggest) being the most obvious. A couple of years ago, phones with cameras were banned on campus. Guess how that worked out. Taking pictures is still verbotten, but everyone has a camera. We're expected not to take pictures of things we shouldn't be taking pictures of (like Kinetic Kill Vehicles on display in our Leadership & Learning Center).
Which points back to one of those interesting and subtle things I think you're referring to. Trust. In order for E2.0 capabilities to truly flatten the hierarchy somewhat (again, at least with respect to inter-company communication and knowledge sharing), employees will necessarily be granted a higher level of trust than is normally the case. We just saw this happen when the President of our company announced he was ceasing to use the moderated blog he and his Executive staff had been using for about two years, and moving the conversation to a more social (and unmoderated) "site" which more closely resembled what I think of as a blog.
Anyway, I am deeply grateful for both your and Professor McAfee's perspectives on E2.0, as well as both of your highly informative tweets. I have learned much and, by good fortune, have been able to transfer some of your knowledge to my company. All goodness!! Danke.
Case in point, when taking over a new company last year that had a strong isolationist culture of 'knowledge is power', I launched an internal wiki to document policy and processes and made department heads accountable for ensuring content was loaded. This single action was in a large part responsible for a 50% reduction in the time required for new hire training and orientation which translated into an approx $10000 per head cost reduction.
A few examples from my company's 3+ year Enteprise 2.0 experience:
My company may use MediaWiki software, but it's vastly inferior to the Wikipedia implementation. Our IT department certainly isn't capable of keeping pace with the regular MediaWiki releases. You want a MediaWiki extension approved for your office wiki? Don't forget your TPS cover with that request.
A user that wants to use the non-sanctioned browser on the intranet? Forget it. We only do IE7 in these parts. So, yeah, you can forget those Laconica Firefox addons.
It would be great if could upgrade to the latest blogging software. We use open source, but there are non-trivial costs involved with testing and security accreditation. So maybe we can squeeze some money into the budget next year to do it?
Oh, yeah, and then there is that whole issue about blogging metrics. I need to somehow prove the blogs are generating value for the company, so that I can get that budget to upgrade the software. 1,000 people from across the company read 5 blogs on average per day, which means I should be able to get $K for a simple software upgrade. Three years later and those meetings are less-and-less fun. "Don't come back until you can prove a blog resulted in 100 additional sales!"
We also suffer from Enterprise 2.0 Shiny Ball Syndrome. We got the wiki up. That box is checked. Next! Hello, blogging. No one ever got promoted for making a wiki server a little more reliable or the tagging software a little faster. But hello enterprise microblogging! I am thinking maybe a nice holiday bonus with this one.
Web 2.0 tools have become so vastly superior to their (ahem) Enterprise 2.0 equivalents that I seriously doubt widespread Enterprise 2.0 adoption will ever be achieved. No enterprise(s) will ever be able to keep pace with the unrelenting innovation taking place on the Internet.
Our company lead users that should be building our mythical Enterprise 2.0 are in Parallel Kingdoms on their iPhones between Twitter sessions. I will put them up against your ESSP prediction market dream team any day.
This is why I've never pushed my solution on anyone. We haven't had a "roll-out," we've stayed in "beta," we don't advertise, we're just there. We're not "deploying" this. We'll certainly advise and evangelize where it makes sense, but we won't push it on anyone. If you do, you incite all the arguments that end up in people concluding this is a "crock."
Much like you've done here, we've had great success when we stop talking about tools and start talking about work processes that could benefit from broader, more transparent, more robust interaction. Inevitably, the discussion becomes less about what's wrong with the tool or who's being disintermediated, and more about how much faster and better we'll be able to work.
Great comment. I think you are right on. I started a 2.0 company by accident - I wasn't focused on revolution. I was focused on a particular business problem in a particular industry and stumbled upon the social web as a sensible part of the solution.
I think there is a valid concern if more practitioners don't start leveraging 2.0 and creating real ROI stories, the "drum-beaters" may turn business leaders temporarily against e20 as another management fad.
I believe E2 can revolutionize the way we work and share in the knowledge economy. The biggest competitive advantage for businesses comes through better productivity an innovation and these are the aspects E2 must aim at enhancing.
Technology, unlike in the past, must be applied as an enabler. There is no alternative to creating a culture for better adoption that doesn't mean we need to do away with hierarchies rather focus on relevant and secure access.
We experience all the challenges mentioned while selling Kreeo in enterprise but our conversion rates are extraordinary because we have been able to address all the key concerns as summarized beautifully by you.
I hope organizations don't repeat the mistakes committed in past and focus on outcomes and adapt to adopt a new trend. Focus on implementing solutions to harness the collective intelligence.
I will be presenting my thoughts on the subject at the upcoming INTEROP, Mumbai conference.
http://www.interop.com/mumbai/education/emergin...
In this era post-GM collapse and living through the aftermath of the global financial crisis, what other questions can we be asking? Solving problems are of course crucial but we do now have the opportunity to take stock of how things are done.
For me, the focus of E2.0 is not primarily the technologies. It is the underlying business processes. I have been saying that the process-based forms of organising, typified by TQM, JIT, Lean, Concurrent Engineering and others, represent the first wave of smart working. Process integration, continuous improvement and problem-solving are all essential component of these process innovation and control methods, and they tap into the tacit knowledge of previously ignored shopfloor operators. These methods are nothing without the willing contribution of these people. Power to the people? I'll say.
I see E2.0 as a label for the potential to reformulate business processes and business models into loosely connected, decentralised, peer to peer approaches to production within value networks that create economic and social value (Aspen Institute report, The Rise of Collective Intelligence, 2007 http://bit.ly/2Lzk6O).
Building on what we know from the the pioneering process‐based models of organising, social technologies in combination with reformed value networks and business models now create enormous potential for enabling a second wave of process and socially-based smart working. Continuous improvement (CI) in the first wave is now Collective Intelligence in the second (CI 2.0 if you like).
My views have been formulated through my doctoral research 15 years ago and subsequent recent monitoring of global workplace trends, I recently found Dennison, though, saying similar things in his prescient analysis of process-based forms of organising back in 1997:
http://www.denisonconsulting.com/dc/Portals/0/D...
Social networking and other E2.0 features are relatively easy to buy or build, meaning the perception that enterprise applications vendors are too Jurassic to understand E2.0 is simply false. Also, it’s been pointed out (NYT: http://bit.ly/1GG0AG) that social networking grew fastest among people squarely in the decision-maker age range, which should dispel notions that the generation gap is a barrier to adopting E2.0 (although maybe a barrier to blind adoption).
I see 3 things which impede corporate E2.0 adoption. First, social features have to incorporate governance constraints surrounding data retention, privacy, and security. Traditional role & function security mechanisms conflict with the free-form, opt-in, and self-service spirit of E2.0. Meshing E2.0 with existing access management is expensive and lacking best practices. Second, E2.0 hasn’t yet sufficiently differentiated itself from already widespread Web 2.0 and collaboration tools. Finally, enterprise applications (and their information models) need to be useful and fully-functional social networking participants. That goal is still pretty much unfulfilled, but nicely describes a good part of my day job.
Nevertheless, enterprises and app builders alike are actively tossing E2.0 features into their efforts backlog along with other to-dos. But like many other useful technology initiatives, enterprises won’t push ahead unless they are good and ready. There is no need to make apologies for putting other priorities ahead of E2.0. Of all the possible drivers for implementing E2.0 or not, the one I don’t worry about is ignorance.
http://setandbma.wordpress.com/2009/06/04/why-w...
I have a list of risks in not adopting enterprise 2.0
http://www.petewildermuth.com/2009/08/21-risks-...