Beyond Enterprise 2.0

Just found: Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee are interviewed in the latest edition of the MIT Sloan Management Review. “Beyond Enterprise 2.0” in a section which looks promising as well: The Future of the Web. Best of all – it’s available as a free pdf.

Nearly all businesses today are critically dependent on the Web for their everyday functioning, so it is important to stay attuned to its continuing evolution, innovation and challenges. In this special report, a variety of noted experts explore a wide range of topics pivotal to the Web’s future, from e-commerce to collaboration tools to some of the Web’s unsettling vulnerabilities.

[Crossposting into the BMID-blog]

Wikipatterns, success factors and consulting

There’s another interesting article in the BusinessWeek feature on wikis in the enterprise, called “No Rest for the Wiki“, where short examples of corporate wikis, like e.g. Intels Intelpedia, are introduced.

Worthy to note is that these enterprise wikis started out as small maverick projects by enthusiastic proponents and evangelists, who attracted followers and traction by “word of mouth” and “giving good example”.

This resonates well with Wikipatterns, an initiative by Atlassian, makers of enterprise wiki Confluence. Wikipatterns collects and organizes common patterns and anti-patterns of wiki adoption in the enterprise. It supports wiki evangelists and wiki consultants alike, because the patterns are both generally applicable and because they help in focusing change management efforts and attention in implementation efforts. While we all know that motivating employees to contribute is an old question of people management and organizational management, wikis and other social software are putting up both new opportunities and new problems.

This is an interesting work area for social software consultants, because when companies don’t have the time (and organizational slack) to experiment, when internal wiki proponents have no (promotion and decision) power, and when manpower is lacking they can leverage their specialized knowledge and expertise.

Indeed, as a consultant my main job is in explaining to companies the hows and whys of wikis and their effective use in the enterprise, i.e. proposing adoption paths, planning implementation projects and helping to upstart and trigger wiki adoption. So guidelines, best practices and systematic sets of success factors help in the “selling” of wikis to firms, again both by internal proponents and by external consultants like me when called in to consult on wiki projects.

Moreover, I think that both bottom-up, grass-roots and management sponsored projects can profit from the collected wikipatterns. And as more and more collaboration initiatives are leaving “skunkworks-state” it becomes yet more important to know how to engage those willing to participate and those who hesitate. Again, implementation efforts that target broad internal adoption need a powerful set of tools.

But this is not all. Social software consulting in my mind also entails helping companies to embrace the collaborative nature of web 2.0, so that they can take advantage of what it offers. Hence it becomes clear that social software consultants must master a wider vision of wikis and social software, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 alike. Consultants must also reach across the fields of organizational change management, organizational design and strategy, because wiki usage is both happening in contexts and designed for tasks that are defined by organizational strategy. So creating the right environment for wikis is not restricted to some kind of change management and wiki uptaking coaching, but needs to understand and use principles, methods and tools of strategy-level consulting when due.

Let me give you just one example: strategies like Open Innovation and Mass Collaboration, where wikis and other social software can be used to facilitate collaboration. Consulting in this space may (and will) touch social software aspects, but the groundwork and basics are of an organizational (and strategic) nature. Lucky me, I am not a one-trick wiki pony, see some other areas of expertise.

Enterprise 2.0 is not about technologies, and not about wikis alone

What makes this BusinessWeek wiki feature outstanding is that it doesn’t restrict its approach on the technology.

Too often, people talk about social software in techno-gabberish, while we know that the main tasks are organization related and have more to do with change management, implementation and persuading people, i.e. finding promotors, followers, early adopters.

Supporting fitting organizational structures, through supportive management and coaching, maybe even rewards and benefit systems (I am no friend of this approach, yet, it has its merits), was not really discussed, but one could feel these issues lurking in the background in most articles.

The Next Wave of Enterprise 2.0

M.R. Rangaswami, of Sand Hill Group interviews
Web 2.0 pioneer Ross Mayfield of SocialText on what’s going to define the next few years in social software for business.

Enterprise 2.0 technology is revolutionizing the knowledge workplace. And despite debates over the name and definition, experts agree that the core concepts and business-driving power of Enterprise 2.0 will only continue to grow.

Organization, ad-hoc or well-defined?

Jack Vinson has some thoughts on an issue Jeffrey Philipps brought up (and that was discussed yesterday evening in a local meeting of enterprise 2.0 folks I attended):

People don’t bother defining their processes because they can’t see how it matters. Maybe they don’t believe they have an impact on the overall business. Or they are trying to protect their “turf” by being purposefully opaque. Or they’ve had a dozen other improvement efforts come through and there has been no real impact on the bottom line.
[…]
Understanding processes is helpful, but it is just as important to know which processes need to be understood. This is a common complaint of flavor-of-the-day programs: the idea is applied to everything in the hopes that it will do some good. It makes much more sense to look at the business and find the few places to apply an improvement that will actually make a difference to the business.

I’d add that
– neat orderly processes are not that ubiquitous and
– that they aren’t as important as most people think.

Especially knowledge (or innovation) work processes can’t be standardized (granted you can support parts and pieces of these processes with standard workflow gear), so trying to manage them into (computerized) workflows and all is not feasible and no worthwhile goal, whereas more freeform tools and concepts like wikis can be easily adapted to variable requirements – and even allow (process) solutions to emerge from within the organizational system.

If you want to know more and are looking for social software support and consulting assistance, contact me.

CIOs on Enterprise 2.0 …

Here’s a lengthy piece from Information Week on Enterprise 2.0, based on a study of 250 business technologists on the merits of going web 2.0 in the enterprise. It holds that business technology people are concerned about the security aspects of Enterprise 2.0 offerings.

Well, yes, compliance, due diligence, compatibility with IT governance and integration into existing infrastructure are valid concerns, and constant topic in my discussions with colleagues and fellow enterprise 2.0 folks.

But overall the article is not too negative about the prospects of enterprise 2.0, because it shows that the concept is gaining traction while being aware that these issues must be dealt with. So I have no doubt that more and more IT departments will start to facilitate the use of “2.0”-tools and concepts, if only because Enterprise 2.0 is essential for extended value net organizations:

It’s a new architecture defined by easier, faster, and contextual organization of and access to information, expertise, and business contacts – whether co-workers, partners, or customers. And all with a degree of personalization sprinkled in.

Yet,

[there’s] this tension between the IT department that wants to have this orderly, planned infrastructure, and you’ve got end users out there experimenting with all these different collaboration tools.

Susan Scrupski tracks some discussions in this field, i.e. the role of CIOs, of IT departments etc.

Equally interesting is Mike Gottas take on the article here.

Does Best Practice exist?

Here comes the question that lies behind many discussions I’ve had in the last days (e.g. here) …

I have started to think about what is best practice in a complex system – can it exist? In complex systems every situation is unique. Whilst practitioners closest to the problem will find a way of solving it, does that mean that the solution to this problem can be adequately codified and be laid over a totally different situation and applied in another context? Chances are that in a small team setting you might get away with this and build models to assist in finding the best solution. But as the number of people involved, and the problems to be solved increase, you will quickly move into new territory with a different frame of reference and set of contexts – so would one “best practice” work?

Hardly, yet best practices are important, which can be used when situations, tasks and (underlying) patterns are similar. Of course best practices shouldn’t be carved in stone but be open to adaptation and tweaking – it’s a start when we don’t understand them as “products” but as processes.

In regard of Enterprise 2.0 for complex organizational systems this makes it clear, that one advantage of light-weight and freeform enterprise social software systems is that they can be constantly improved and refined, whereas (customized) packaged software can’t be tweaked and optimized this way. This follows open-source concepts such as “release early and often” or “fail fast” and puts them to use in enterprise software projects.

This calls for a small start, that is expanded constantly with new services, from which one can quickly learn from user feedback …