I was just re-reading something I wrote the other day …
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 (on purpose, for purposeful activities) 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. Stay in the flow, and get used to it.
(Jon Husband)
… and I realized for the nth time that a core issue for the implementation of blogging as an element of Enterprise 2.0 is the challenge / dichotomy of incorporating an easier but somewhat more structured (?) form of information and knowledge exchange into work flows where (previously and still) email does much of what blogging offers now, but without the same peripheral and social connectivity (visibility, comments, etc.)
And a major sticking point / obstacle / implementation bottleneck may be the degree to which people are habituated to using or are imprisoned by not knowing well any other easy form in which to communicate. Jim McGee, in respect to the debates swirling about the implementation of social software in enterprises, makes the following key point:
Jordan Frank of Traction Software argued a while back that organizations benefit from using the tools in simpler ways (Beta bloggers need not lurk in the enterprise). While I agree with his arguments, they also reinforce the notion that feeling uncomfortable with literate thinking is a barrier to be addressed. Jordan’s suggestions are probably among the best advice for routing around this issue in most organizations.
If my hypothesis has any merit, it does suggest that some of the objections to these technologies will be rooted in emotional fears and insecurities that will be unexpressed and potentially inexpressible. To someone who can’t swim, “come on in, the water’s fine” isn’t very helpful encouragement.
… and yet
With every retirement or increasingly frequent management shuffle, the proportion of people who are reliant on and accustomed to functioning in fast flows of textual and image-based increases, as does the need for fundamental adaptation . One of the ways the younger generations have adapted is to simplify (and sometimes murder) language for communication over the Web.
There’s been a major shift in the nature of work over the last decade, the majority of it in the last five. The first half of the decade saw massive installations of large integrated systems and literally countless hours tied up in the change management adjustment process mandated by the implementation of these large systems, followed by the near-ubiquitous adoption of PDA’s, mobile devices and VoIP over the last five years .. literally a workquake.
(I recently retrieved a presentation developed with a couple of colleagues for a major HR conference in 2001 titled "Creating the Workplace of the Future". Back then, about 40% of attendees loved it, and about 60% thought we were nutters. it is very interesting (and, conceitedly, gratifying to look back 6 ears later and realize that it was basically spot-on)
Are we facing Workquake 2.0 ? The mid-80’s through 1995 saw the normalization and integration into accepted socio-economic psychology of constant adaptation to an ever-present insecurity. This was the first rapid and comprehensive fundamental re-writing of the employer-employee social contract in at leasta couple of generations.
Now comes the penetration and spread of the Web into many if not almost all aspects of daily work.
Would it be a surprise to see the common abbreviation of much of the English (and other) language into the more text-on-the-small-screen idiom that cell phones, PDA’s and laptops provide? Don’t most of use an already transforming email-ese in much of our daily communications? Writing formally, with proper structure, grammar, capitalization etc. is becoming more and more rare (I believe .. no research I can cite to prove this).
I think there’s a certain sink-or-swimness that’s emerging rapidly in the organizational and business world, at least in North America, western Europe and the urban commercial conurbations that form the global network of capitalism’s globalized economy. In other words, if Jim thinks inviting someone to "jump in, the water’s fine" isn’t appropriate in some cases, then there had better be (for those who do not want to learn how to swim) another game or sport available for them.
A case in point .. a quick glimpse at the workplace of the tomorrow that (figuratively) is just around the corner.
The Net Generation Hates Your Intranet
Born between 1977 and 1996, the Net Generation grew up immersed in a digital world. The internet dominates their personal and social lives, from instant messaging to peer-to-peer filesharing to virtual communities. They publish and participate in online social networks and swap ideas as easily as they swap songs and videos.
So what happens when one of these fresh college graduates joins a firm and finds a staid, traditional intranet with a tightly controlled publishing model?
They hate it.
This is a very real problem for companies trying to attract and retain new talent. These twentysomethings operate on principles of openness, participation and interactivity. If a company’s technology infrastructure, including the intranet, does not encourage free communication and collaboration, it misses a big opportunity. Worse, it alienates these younger, internet-savvy employees.
It will certainly be interesting to watch what kinds of coordination and management styles will emerge and how collaborative software and virtual workspaces will evolve … will they offer more presence, more easy ability to generate and then pull together open-space like processes online (Open Space-Online), or will they continue to put up more possible obstacles that will either sustain or increase resistance?
I’m sure there are many examples of new approaches and solutions I could find with an hour or two of focused research, but in the meantime, here’s ThoughtFarmer (developed by Chris McGrath), an interesting Wiki and CMS hybrid that promises to bring some real ease to the process of inside-the-firewall collaboration and productivity.
"Feeling uncomfortable with literate thinking" is indeed an obstacle to be addressed, as McGee has pointed out. But I think it had better be addressed by both solutions providers AND by those who are feeling the discomfort. Increasingly, people will just have to learn how to be effective in a world of work whose old foundations continue to tremble ominously (for some 
Tags: Jim Mcgee, Euan Semple, Chris McGrath, Enterprise 2.0, Net generation, information flows, collaboration, ThoughtFarmer, wirearchy
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