Enterprise 2.0 and Implementation

There has been significant growth in the use of the term Enterprise 2.0, and there are now growing numbers of consultants offering advice to organizations and blogs devoted to chronicling its beginning movement through the enterprise world.

As both an observer and a participant in this area of activity, I am constantly drawn back to the half-century or more of management literature and the interesting experiences many organizations have had with respect to addressing major change, whether it has involved the design and implementation of ERP systems or other large integrated information systems, or the launch and ongoing work at developing the culture and dynamics of a learning organization.  Most of today’s major change initiatives involve the minds, work habits and motivations of knowledge workers, and will rely increasingly on participation, engagement and interaction.

I think it’s fair to say that much of the business / management literature has chronicled the major difficulties and frustrations many organizations have had with respect to the implementation of major change.  I would argue (as many have before and with me) that many of the problems have been socio-cultural and psychological in nature, and stem from dissonance between an organization’s structure, its decision-making and power dynamics and the nature of knowledge work and knowledge workers

With respect to my observations, a mental placeholder for me over the last year or so has been the article The New Organization, in The Economist of January 2006 (unfortunately, the article is now behind The Economist’s paywall).

The article references a McKinsey Quarterly article.

Last year, Lowell Bryan and Claudia Joyce, two of the firm’s consultants, argued that “today’s big companies do very little to enhance the productivity of their professionals. In fact, their vertically oriented organisational structures, retrofitted with ad hoc and matrix overlays, nearly always make professional work more complex and inefficient.”

In other words, 21st-century organisations are not fit for 21st-century workers.

This is echoed by Mercer Delta:

[Mercer Delta] recently observed that “the models and frameworks that shaped our leading organisations from the end of the second world war through the conclusion of the cold war are clearly obsolete in this new era of e-business, perpetual innovation and global competition.”

The design of today’s complex enterprises, says Mercer Delta, requires an entirely new way of thinking about organisations.

Given that many organizations have had less-than-stellar results when confronting and then undertaking major change, why would we expect anything other than much wrestling and gnashing-of-teeth when it comes to designing and implementing social software and web services directly aimed at improving personal productivity whilst also engaging in linking, sharing information, mashing up, getting together to do what works, etc.

The issue of empowerment and responsiveness has been on the table for a long time now, and it doesn’t go away.  But the issues of structural habituation to command-and-control proves an obstacle with enormous sticking power.

I would argue that almost all of the advice that is whirling around the emerging phenomenon of Enterprise 2.0 (or wikinomics, for that mater) could be relatively easily distilled down to something like this:

Just start practicing with this stuff !  It is not going away, and I suspect strongly that the presence of web services and social software will only intensify.  Practicing is good, and the productivity landscape it addresses will from now on involve more and more of the "sociology" engendered by personal cognitive and working styles interacting with others and with the larger integrated systems of an organization.

So, it’s a safe bet that it will take practice, and learning what works for a given context and different groups of networked people.

Choose one or several purposeful pilot projects.  Don’t fret endlessly about getting it right.  Get good advice, make good common sense decisions, and learn from the practice.

I’m willing to bet that a substantial number of organizations either try too hard to "get it right" right out of the box, or get really frustrated by the impacts of blogs and wikis on leadership and management styles and the organizational culture, or will experience regular waves of discomfort with the relative non-linearity of the dynamics of blogs, wikis and mashups.

Just practice. You will have the rest of the future to get it right, and the future keeps changing faster than we do.

(Jon Husband)

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