Web 2.0 is gaining traction in the corporate world …

is this really reality? Now, I’ve been collecting and compiling some serious stuff on Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 adoption lately, some of them are worth pointing out … especially given a discussion I’ve had lately and that was revitalized today.

There’s this HBS Case on How Wikipedia Works (or Doesn’t) and the related discussion (“Wikipedia in Pinstripes”), that handles a lot of the adoption challenges social software has in the enterprise:

[…] Wiki is another experiment in how to generate more collaboration inside companies, but I’ve seen mixed results. It can be as simple as “We’re having an office party, please sign up on a wiki page, and tell us what you’re going to bring,” to “We’re going to run this project, bring in all your knowledge assets together, and then we can self-organize.”

What Wikipedia has shown is that self-selection is critical. Peer review is critical. So there is a challenge for firms that are used to managing employees and allocating the resources in a very top-down kind of way. Now we have a technology that enables self-selection, transparency, openness—how does a manager or management deal with the technology? Do they implement it in a way that’s true to the spirit, or is it top-down? And, again, there are some very successful examples and some not so successful examples.

From ‘lifestream’ to ‘workstream’

Via Jon Udell’s tweet: “From ‘lifestream’ to ‘workstream’ is a short conceptual leap“.

I like the concept of “streams”, social presencing and the above quote very much, yet I doubt that change management or organizational adoption of Enterprise 2.0 will profit from this nearness.

Even when the concepts are similar, these remain two separate worlds: Always-on, hyper-connected, cutting-edge knowledgeworkers are rare in the corporate setting – and there are some deep-rooted reasons for this … I don’t say that these are good or sensible reasons, but they are in effect anyway.

Some crossposts from my other blog …

Lately blog readership of this blog has taken up – yet, I suspect that some of you don’t know that there’s a sister blog on business model innovation and design (BMID) that I am writing too, and that sometimes stuff is blogged there that’s related or touching on Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 or Social Software. So here you go, in reverse chronological order:

Social Networks and Organizational Pathologies …

What’s the attraction in Facebook?

Make innovation a truly open and collaborative process

Marketinginstrument Community – Wie können Marken den Nutzer beeinflussen?

Portable soziale Netzwerke

Noserub @ Barcamp München Tag 2

MIT Sloan Business Insight, with a link to an interesting article (How can companies build organizational networks that encourage innovation?)

Jumpstarting innovation (and how to leverage collaboration …)

Technology, Innovation and Organization (for complex organizational settings)

Leitfaden zum Thema Web 2.0 & E-Commerce

The Impact of Web 2.0 and Emerging Social Network Models

Designing for Flexibility

Video on how to grow wiki adoption in organizations

I am catching up with some social software related videos I bookmarked in the past few weeks, and I wanted to point out one that I really enjoyed:

Stewart Mader on the enterprise wiki: why it matters to business, use cases, and how to grow wiki adoption in organizations.

It’s a pity that the slides that he used aren’t online (Stewart?), but still it’s a good one to watch.

Email is easy to write – and to misread …

Just a short (research) note, this article by Daniel Goleman in the New York Times sheds more light on the issue of communication problems and mistakes: “E-Mail Is Easy to Write (and to Misread)“, namely by stressing the growing importance of social neuroscience in explaining all the shortcomings. This is a neat update to my past ponderings (in german) on communication via social software in the enterprise, so I recommend that you check it out:

[…] social neuroscience, the study of what happens in the brains of people as they interact. New findings have uncovered a design flaw at the interface where the brain encounters a computer screen: there are no online channels for the multiple signals the brain uses to calibrate emotions.

And pay attention to Clay Shirky:

[…] put down little roots of face-to-face contact everywhere, to strategically augment electronic communications.

Fehlkommunikation nicht nur in Emails

Interessant: Stephan List im Toolblog zu Kommunikationsproblemen und Missverständnissen in der Email-Kommunikation. Diese potenziellen Probleme beschränken sich nicht auf Email-Kommunikation und die damit zusammenhängenden Schwierigkeiten, sondern können sich natürlich auch auf andere Formen elektronisch unterstützer Kommunikation auswirken – sei es in Weblogs, beim Editieren von Wikis oder in anderer Social Software. Nicht zuletzt entstehen so manche Akzeptanz- und Nutzungsprobleme von Social Software in Organisationen mittelbar aus den Unmöglichkeiten und Ineffizienzen schriftlicher (und asynchroner) Kommunikation.

“Klassiker” wie das Kommunikationsquadrat von Friedemann Schulz von Thun sind also nicht nur für Psychologen oder Kommunikationswissenschaftler interessant – es lohnt sich sehr den Begriff der Medienkompetenz um Überlegungen zu Ebenen und Funktionen der Kommunikation anzureichern:

[…] in jeder Äußerung [sind] vier Botschaften enthalten. Diese vier Seiten der Nachricht werden im Modell durch eine Quadratseite in einer eigenen Farbe repräsentiert:

1. Auf der Sachseite (blau) informiert der Sprechende über den Sachinhalt, d.h. über Daten und Fakten.
2. Die Selbstkundgabe (grün) umfasst das, was der Sprecher durch das Senden der Botschaft von sich zu erkennen gibt.
3. Auf der Beziehungsseite (gelb) kommt zum Ausdruck, wie der Sender zum Empfänger steht und was er von ihm hält.
4. Was der Sender beim Empfänger erreichen möchte, wird auf der Appellseite (rot) deutlich.