Category: Social Networking
November 18th, 2009
Salesforce Chatter: Social operating systems emerge on the IT stage
The next big shift: Intranets, portals, and software suites that are the integrating force of the social fabric for our organizations. This morning’s announcement here at Dreamforce today from Salesforce of Chatter, an enterprise-class realization of Facebook and Twitter, is further evidence of the industry’s push for social Web capabilities for business activities.
Early indications are that Chatter will drive conversation and attention on this subject in enterprise circles very much like Google Wave did for consumer circles (as well as some businesses.)
Of course, a central question is — given current economic challenges for example — whether this is what the enterprise world is really looking for right now. However, as I’ve covered here throughout the year, enterprise social computing has been coming into its own as a significant component of modern business software for a number of reasons lately.
So while adoption numbers vary, it’s an increasingly smart bet that not only are social applications moving into the enterprise, but that existing business applications will begin to get more and more social features.
I often cite Reed’s Law as compelling evidence that social systems have a strong innate tendency to create more value that non-social systems. The message: Social business applications are just a more effective model in general for building business value. However announcements like Chatter begin to make this argument less important. That’s because it’s built right into the Salesforce platform and according to Sam Diaz “will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com.” In other words, the argument is essentially over when social computing becomes baked into the infrastructure of the enterprise.
This will allow the 135,000+ existing apps built on Force.com to have a unified social environment complete with security and one common social graph as well as consistent, shared collaboration features. This is a major step up from the traditional world of non-social business software, all the more so because it’s as much of an infrastructure play as an application play. A comparable response would be to make Microsoft Office more social or perhaps more accurately, the fundamental Google Apps infrastructure. It’s also arguable that the new Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is just such a move (creating an enterprise-wide social environment that’s also an app platform) that’s just not as clearly communicated.
In the end there’s a lot to be said — particularly in the sometimes uncertain realm of enterprise social computing — about having a secure solution that works across your application environment and is easy to integrate into your existing applications and user environments. And while the Salesforce ecosystem is far from a consistent application environment for most enterprises, which are a complex landscape of legacy systems from dozens of vendors, it highlights the next big shift: Intranets, portals, and software suites that are the integrating force of the social fabric for our organizations.
Chatter is a solid example of
November 12th, 2009
Enterprise 2.0: What do we know today about moving our organizations into the 21st century?
We spend 60-80% of our time in the workplace on interaction and collaborative activity. This week in Frankfurt at the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT and last week at the inaugural Enterprise 2.0 Conference West in San Francisco has been an good microcosm of the state of the industry.
It does appear that we’re entering a new stage in the maturity of enterprise social computing. The good news: Most of the lessons learned are good ones, yet as we’ll see, some challenges remain.
Based on my conversations with practitioners and thought leaders here and the many discussions over the last two weeks, the practice of Enterprise 2.0 has effectively moved beyond the initial novelty of years past. There’s now a much more practical focus on how to create, manage, and govern social business communities, the specific ways to deliver measurable business value, and most of all, a desire to learn what works best (or not) in the realm of collaboration and social software.
The broad outlines of what it actually takes to apply new social business models have emerged lately along with the techniques to deliver on them successfully in the longer term. In particular, these include topics such as business case, tool selection, worker policies, community management, and the governance of social business environments.
Just as importantly, we are also starting to see customers implementing Enterprise 2.0 in scale. These typically include enterprise social networking, wikis, and social CRM. This is different than a year ago when there were only a handful of stories about Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 companies seriously exploring the potential benefits of social computing.
In the sense that the hard work has started, we are also seeing the end of the beginning for Enterprise 2.0. We’ve learned a lot along the way, particularly from early adopters, and it has been interesting to participate back-to-back in two of the largest enterprise social computing events of the season. This has helped get a sense of what’s taking place in Europe and North America with customers as well as the industry growing up around Enterprise 2.0 in terms of tools and services.
Related: Social applications are now well-entrenched in enterprise networks around the globe
Where is Enterprise 2.0 headed?
Here are my top takeaways from the discussions, research, and findings here in Frankfurt this week and San Francisco last week:
- Businesses are actively seeking information about how best to implement Enterprise 2.0. While last year they were kicking the tires and evaluating what the benefits are (establishing why) there’s a lot more actual project activity this year and this is driving significant demand for knowledge about how. The rise of the 2.0 Adoption Council is one demonstration of this need to share information about what works. Further providing evidence that there’s a need for how: A recent survey showed that 36% of their members were currently managing multi-million dollar budgets this year for Enterprise 2.0. In other words, they’re in the “how” stage. Finally, the end-users I talked with in my workshops at both events demanded detailed, specific information about how to make Enterprise 2.0 work for their businesses.
- There is still lots of debate about how to
October 25th, 2009
Are the iPhone and social networks making the classic Web and intranet obsolete?
Many as-yet-unforeseen new developments will create enormous societal, cultural, and business opportunities over the next decade, just as long as we don’t make irreversible decisions down the wrong path. There’s been an important and relatively sudden change taking place over the last couple of years in the way that we interact with the Web. While direct access or search activity has been (and still is) the most common way that we access the content and applications of the Web, new ways have been rapidly growing and competing with how we work online, both at home and at work.
Thus these new models, exemplified by social networking sites like Facebook or mobile apps on platforms like the iPhone, Palm’s new webOS, and Android, will ultimately herald a change in the way that we work with our IT systems in the enterprise.
The once relatively unified world of the Internet, with a few major top-level types of access directly connected to it (browser, e-mail, IRC client, newsreader, etc.) and a few key sub-apps such as search that virtually everyone online used have been extended — as well as fragmented — into popular new channels into which users are now rapidly moving en masse.
That’s not to say that direct usage of the Internet (loading up and using sites and apps via the traditional Web browser) is going away. It’s still far and away the most common way to interact with the Web today and will likely be that way for quite some time, if not forever.
But real shifts in both online platform alternatives and in the mobile market are beginning to usher in foundational new usage patterns by users. These new channels — of which the latest generation of mobile apps and social networking platforms, which are often tightly integrated with the Web but are not truly one with it, are just the two biggest examples — demonstrate what is probably a generational transformation of the vital border between us and the Internet.
And this is the crux of the point: Where the point of user attention and interaction resides and who controls it is one of the most important conversations between us and our “preferred intermediaries”, a fancy term for who we like to work with to interact with the Web. This in turn has significant implications for enterprise intranets, our often clunky yet essential local “Web” in our organizations.
Why are these changes happening? There are at least two major reasons:
The first is that user attention on the Web has been moving to social networks, best exhibited by Facebook, which has been the single largest gainer of online usage in the last 3 years, over all other applications. Even e-mail has been eclipsed in many markets and only search remains more dominant. Social networks, which are platforms in their own right — just like the Web, but also have touchpoints well outside of it — have come into their own as competing yet codependent platforms that sprawl across the Internet, telecommunications infrastructure, mobile devices, and desktop computers.
The second reason is
October 5th, 2009
Twenty-two power laws of the emerging social economy
Traditional measures of business success are becoming less and less important.There is a time for big picture thinking and there is a time for details in business and IT, the latter which make business and technical strategy a reality and the former which provides needed direction and focus.
Highlighting the big picture side last week we saw Steve Ballmer’s exploration of the efficiencies he believes are being driven by something he calls “the new normal”. In this view, he tries to frame up how a reset of economic expectations during the downturn has created an environment that is putting pressure on business to do more with less, affecting IT at least as much as the rest of the organization, if not more.
We’ve seen also seen similar and broader variations on this theme this year, such as John Hagel’s capable attempt to define the “Big Shifts” in business taking place in this century. Just recently McKinsey published a similar reported titled The 10 Trends You Have to Watch: And What They Mean For IT in the Harvard Business Journal (summary is by Gartner).
If we factor out the commonalities in these views, it highlights a core set of strategic trends in IT and business in 2009, namely:
- New resource constraints. Today’s new economic baselines (the downturn, green business, etc) are requiring that we find ways to accomplish our goals using fewer resources. This includes identifying the means to capture opportunity and transform “in process” business activities using newer, more efficient models. Business leaders will need to effectively link IT and business much more so than in the past to accomplish the movement to this new baseline. This also doesn’t mean everything is constrained. As we’ll see on the technology side, abundance is being produced that may address shortcomings in the business side.
- Value shifting from transactions to relationships. This is the growing realization that the traditional rote business transaction as the core source of organizational value is diminishing and value is now coming from relationship dynamics. This has many implications including using new management methods (example: from top down command-and-control to community curator and facilitator), tapping into new reservoirs of innovation, adopting new ways of interacting with customers, or driving better tacit interactions. Web 2.0 and social computing will be key enablers of this for business units and IT organizations that want increased relevance.
- Industries in flux with new ones emerging. Previously stable industries such as finance and media are feeling the pinch the strongest, but most others are as well. The recession is creating a bigger gap between healthy and unhealthy businesses while many industries are being unbundled or transformed into new ones (traditional software companies moving to SaaS and cloud computing for example or the rise of crowdsourcing competing with outsourcing at the low end.) Again, today’s dynamic Web-driven global knowledge flows and agile online models for computing and collaboration — as well as economic and intellectual production — are now a significant change agent.
- Moving from change as the exception to change as the norm. Today we’re seeing faster consumer behavior shifts, quicker pricing changes, more rapid product cycles, and faster media feedback loops. While this can also lead to more extreme market conditions, it also enables opportunities to be turned into bottom-line impact for organizations that can adapt to market realities quickly enough. The network is the culprit (and solution) for much of this again: We now have pervasive social media instantly transmitting and shaping cultural phenomenon and faster financial cause-and-effect in the markets, real-time online markets, and so on. In the 21st century, following a plan is increasingly less important than responding actively and effectively to change.
- A shift of control to the edge of organizations. This has been predicted at least as far back as the Cluetrain Manifesto, if not farther. It’s not even really a shift, it’s more like the addition of a new dimension to how we operate organizationally, something I’ve referred to previously as “social business.” This new addition changes the dynamics of where useful information comes from, how decisions are made, and how more autonomy and self-organization will be needed (and tolerated) in modern organizations to meet more dynamic and changing global marketplace.
As I explored recently in “How the Web OS has begun to reshape IT and business”, today’s Internet has become a central driver of how we do things today. It’s the richest marketplace that
September 17th, 2009
Going beyond the hype: Identifying Enterprise 2.0 best practices
There’s been plenty of discussion recently in the blogosphere, including here, about the successes and challenges of Enterprise 2.0 projects. But there’s still just a rough general sense of what it really takes to create an effective collaborative community using social tools.
It’s starting to become clear that successful Enterprise 2.0 efforts have community management as a core function. Stewart Mader’s guest post this week on Dennis Howlett’s blog here on ZDNet helps tell part of this story: As businesses go about their daily activities, they aren’t looking for either Enterprise 2.0 or a social tool like a wiki for its own sake. Instead, they are looking to solve problems and meet their deadlines in easier, cheaper, and better ways. To the extent that social computing can help do this, it will remain a topical subject in business and IT. To the extent that it’s a distraction, a risk, or more overhead, it won’t.
Those trying to read the tea leaves about Enterprise 2.0 these days can see that the software at least has arrived in a bare majority of companies, even if it’s just Facebook or Twitter across the firewall. Genuine adoption and meaningful integration into business processes has certainly happened in a number of organizations, but is still the edge case today rather than the rule. That’s not to say the current case studies aren’t reporting gains, they generally are. But the message here is that many enterprises are now actively in full contact with the social computing world, whether they want to or not, and now it’s time to understand how to deal with the benefits and issues.
What does seem to be emerging are the first broad outlines of a body of knowledge on how to make social computing work in a business setting. So-called best practices and effective techniques are beginning to be identified and understood. And if one accepts that some level of adoption of social tools is inevitable in most workplaces (just not that big an “if” these days), then understanding how to manage the upside while dealing with any potential downsides of Enterprise 2.0 just makes good business sense.
The advent of most new technology improvements to business ultimately get codified into frameworks or methodologies, big formal sounding words that just refer to systematic ways of identifying and applying methods in a given discipline. This helps identify and organize practices that work and ones that don’t by ensuring new efforts don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time. The first social software and Enterprise 2.0 methodologies are now beginning to emerge, some explicitly but most implicitly, as practitioners assess their early successes and try to understand what worked and what didn’t.
Emerging best practices in social software
The last couple of years has seen a steady, conscious effort to collect and codify social computing techniques and best practices. These include:
- Andrew McAfee’s attempt to create a pattern language for Enterprise 2.0.
- Stewart Mader’s excellent Wikipatterns.
- Sun’s well produced Social Software Pattern Language.
- The social patterns captured in Designing Social Interfaces by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone and probably best summarized here.
But while these efforts are laudable and often extremely useful when designing social software or structuring online communities, they often lack
September 9th, 2009
Government 2.0: A tale of "risk, control, and trust"
Yesterday in downtown Washington DC I was fortunate to be able to attend two important Government 2.0 events: the LMI Executive Forum on Mission 2.0 and O’Reilly/TechWeb’s Government 2.0 Expo. Both of these events highlighted the benefits as well as the challenges of improving the way the government does so much of what it does today.
Self-organizing and self-directed behavior is much more likely in the government of the near-future.
Social collaboration, information sharing, and open data were broad themes extensively explored and certainly championed by many at both events, admittedly myself one of them. Cautious optimism was apparent in the participants as there seems to be a broadening consensus that there will be striking changes in government over the next few years. This optimism was occasionally overshadowed in many discussions by the recurrence of issues such as the challenges that bureaucracy poses to progress including HR, policy, reward systems, and management motivations. Especially evident were worries about the classic issues of hierarchical management which LMI Executive Forum participant Mark Oehlert summarized smartly in three broad themes: “Risk, control, and trust.“
The interest, however, in improving government through the innovative use of the latest Web 2.0 approaches and tools is at the moment reaching nearly a fever pitch in the public sector, at least in the nation’s capital. Throughout the summer and fall there have been events and meetups around the Washington DC area exploring how social computing, Enterprise 2.0, agile integration, and data sharing between agencies in the federal government can achieve many of the goals for next-generation government that those, including national CIO Vivek Kundra, have been expounding in recent months.
A lot of this recent interest has been spurred by a new administration, particularly President Barack Obama’s early moves this year, and the issuance in particular of the Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies on Transparency and Open Government. In this document, Obama says that:
Government should be collaborative. Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector.
While orders and memoranda are issued all the time in government, often without substantial impact, the broad influence of social computing these days, both in the consumer space as well as the enterprise, has made social systems one of the top approaches of interest when it comes to open government initiatives this year, as we’ll see from the discussions yesterday.
Exploring Mission 2.0: An emerging subset of Government 2.0
The LMI Executive Forum yesterday was attended by senior members of various government agencies including the CIA, DNI, and the DoD. The attendees, including myself as a guest, discussed at length social computing in the federal workplace, in particular the more secure, mission-oriented environments such as the intelligence community. The use of Web 2.0 tools in this environment can be called Mission 2.0.
A number of key points came out of the discussion that highlight the differences between private sector use of Web 2.0 approaches and their realization in a so-called Mission 2.0 environment. In particular is
August 18th, 2009
Using social software to reinvent the customer relationship
The elimination of decades of inadequate communication channels will suddenly unleash a tide of many opportunities, as well as challenges, for most organizations.As Web 2.0 applications move more deeply into the strategic operations of enterprises, a unique hybrid of social software has emerged to help businesses deal with the giant sea of customers that awaits them on the other side of the network. While Enterprise 2.0 tools, primarily aimed at collaboration, are certainly part of this story, they often don’t help companies enjoy the full range of possibilities when it comes customer-facing social computing.
Enter the rapidly emerging Social CRM space, an area that’s become significant enough that there’s now a dedicated blog on the subject here on ZDNet by the terrific Paul Greenberg.
This year’s rise of enterprise social computing is opening a new front line in many businesses where the old ways of engaging with customers is no longer sufficient or even competitive. Many organizations I talk to these days are now evaluating the way social software seems to be altering the CRM landscape. In particular, Social CRM has recently come into its own as a leading model for this transformation. For comparison’s sake, online customer communities were a very hot topic last year in this same space, but as I pointed out then, it was surprisingly hard to create them repeatably. My sense is that Social CRM will be a more predictable, reliable model for applying Web 2.0 to customer relationships using many of the strengths of the community model.
Read Michael Krigsman’s 3 Big Reasons CRM Initiatives Fail
This is not to say that many of the social media tools that companies have deployed already aren’t good examples of Social CRM. Many of them are and this highlights a major discussion in the blogosphere last week sparked by SocialText’s Ross Mayfield, who posited that with Social CRM, the people are the platform. The key point here is that where online tools let customers have a social relationship with a business — in other words, interaction that is visible to them and other customers whenever possible — then some Social CRM is taking place. Without a fundamentally community-based relationship, you’re just back to traditional, one-on-one push management of customers. This latter model, a closed and asocial mode of customer interaction, is the very antithesis of Social CRM.
Social CRM: It’s all about people
For its part, Social CRM paints a vision of creating a deeper and more engaging community-based relationship with your customers, instead of the traditional approach of managing them, in a very Cluetrain Manifesto way. Part online community, part crowdsourcing, part customer service, Social CRM can create an emergent, collaborative online partnership with customers that can result in an array of improvements to business performance.
Far from being just for the benefit of the business however, with Social CRM customers tend to 1) be much more in control, 2) are in sustained contact with the organizations they care about, and 3) can use self-service, mutually visible participation, collective history, and peer relationships to assist each other as much — and often much more — than the classic CRM model ever could.
But like any composite, heterogeneous group of participants, Social CRM necessarily entails less deterministic control and outcomes. For example, these new Social CRM tools will let anyone ask a question publicly and anyone else in the community (customers or employees) answer it. Or provide a means to let new ideas flow in from the community in a very Dell IdeaStorm fashion. The question of who decides what the right “official” answer is, or which ideas will be selected and how non-employee submitters will be compensated are currently hard questions to answer for many organizations.
Then there is the challenge that by its very nature Social CRM is
July 29th, 2009
Assessing the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace in 2009: Robust and crowded
Social software platforms, including services such as Facebook and Twitter, have become one of the primary channels for communication amongst consumers this year, even eclipsing e-mail in some parts of the developed world.
It was companies that either open sourced eventually or took open source and then made it enterprise class that often scored the best.The same however, can’t quite be said yet for the workplace. While the adoption numbers for social applications are still impressive in business (about half of all large organizations), actual adoption and use is lagging significantly behind the non-business world as organizations take the time to assess a range of issues with enterprise social computing, including appropriateness, security, control, management methods, and roll-out strategies.
However, given the widespread interest and popularity in social tools these days, it’s becoming a pretty safe bet that you’ll be seeing them in some form on a workplace intranet near you. The question is in what form? The choices of social tools these days can be daunting and are only increasing rapidly, with new entries appearing weekly and existing ones being upgraded often. What’s increasingly needed is a detailed look at what’s currently available in business-class social software and how it sizes up, which we’ll try to do in high-level form here.
As we’ll see, since last year’s marketplace map, there has been a veritable explosion in social applications that are intended for use in business settings, both internally or externally. These offerings have a surprisingly wide range of features and so in this post I will explore one of the broadest and most important categories of business social software, Enterprise 2.0, in detail. I’ve also included a pretty comprehensive map of the marketplace for 2009 as defined by the products that are available today (or are highly anticipated and soon to be released, such as Google Wave.)
Enterprise 2.0 software: Choice abounds
A wide range of software providers now proclaim that they make Enterprise 2.0 tools, or have adapted/extended what they make today in order to address this space in some way. This includes the full gamut of open source projects, commercial vendors, startups, and established Web firms such as Google.
In fact, during the course of the survey work, it sometimes seemed like every company making business-oriented collaboration and communication tools is now offering Enterprise 2.0 capabilities in some form. Overall this is a good sign for customers (because supply is most likely greater than demand) and though all new markets tend to shake out, we are no longer in early days with social software. This means that the majority of these products will likely be around for the medium to long-term. It also means that there is probably something available that will fit your specific choice of features, price, technology needs, standards support, and other requirements.
Click To View In Detail
The visual above can be clicked to view the gallery containing the full list of Enterprise 2.0-capable applications assessed in this survey.
There are over 70 major products on this list — many of them entire software platforms in their own right — with a wide range of Web 2.0 capabilities including blogs, wikis, forums, community, social networks, and social messaging. Every attempt was made to be inclusive while still adhering to the spirit of “emergent, freeform, social collaboration” tools. Also, a product had to be compelling and capable in order to appear on this list at all; all of the offerings that made the cut are solid products in my opinion. Literally hundreds of candidates did not make the cut.
Further Reading: The enterprise microblogging marketplace for mid-2009.
So, for example, a simple but popular microblogging tool like Yammer appears on the list along with the widely used, feature-laden Microsoft SharePoint suite. It’s important to note that these are very different applications in terms of
July 27th, 2009
Ten top issues in adopting enterprise social computing
Last week ZDNet’s Larry Dignan wrote an insightful post that analyzed the recent report from Charlene Li and the Altimeter Group/Wetpaint about early data that seems to show an intriguing correlation between social media engagement and corporate financial performance. The key finding was this:
To be specific, companies that are both deeply and widely engaged in social media surpass their peers in terms of both revenue and profit performance by a significant difference.
This report (details and copy here) is encouraging news for those embarking on applying social software to various parts of their business. But, as Larry points out, these numbers can be interpreted a number of ways. Many organizations would rather wait for best practices to solidify before climbing very far up the social computing adoption curve. So while there’s increasingly less question that there is genuine ROI in social media, the question still remains whether it can directly drive fundamental, bottom line performance in the average organization today.
This highlights a key conversational thread that came out of last month’s Enterprise 2.0 conference: Does social computing really deliver significantly better business performance? Or is it merely a minor incremental improvement?
Unfortunately, despite an growing body of encouraging case studies, evidence, and research, the jury is still out on total impact social computing will have on businesses. This return will even vary widely for many organizations for a number of reasons will explore below. At present, the uncertainty is simply because that there are not enough organizations that have incorporated social computing approaches (which encompasses the full range of social software as applied to business that include social networks and Enterprise 2.0 to things like crowdsourcing and social CRM) across their lines of business for us to get a complete enough picture. Even the ones that have done it, haven’t done it long enough to see what the results actually are.
Instead, as companies begin pilots and initiatives, we are seeing the first wave of issues cropping up as the larger cultural, IT, and business impact of social tools begins to be felt.
Sidebar: What is social computing? It’s the use of social software within and between organizations and any interested parties such as employees, customers, and partners. Social computing, as explained here, can usher in significant large-scale shifts in where productive forces and innovation come from. Organizations will all adopt enterprise social computing tools in slightly different ways and will generally proceed from ad hoc usage, often by applying widely available consumer tools at first, to more evolved open business models. As of this year, about half of all large organizations now have social computing tools deployed in some manner.
The following is a summary of the issues I’m hearing from practitioners in the field as well as from our clients and industry contacts.
While these ten issues with social computing are the ones I hear about most, your mileage will almost certainly vary. However, I believe them to be representative of where we are in 2009. Please note that these are by no means insurmountable obstacles and merely represent a good cross section of what early adopters typically encounter as they begin climbing the social computing adoption curve (see diagram above).
Ten top issues with social computing in business
- Lack of social media literacy amongst workers. Anecdotally, the farther a business is from the technology industry, the less likely that line workers will be familiar with the latest software innovations. Those who haven’t been maintaining blogs, updating wiki sites, using social networks, sharing information socially, etc. will require more education than those who do. Even the basics of netiquette as well as key techniques to get the most from social computing platforms such as encouraging the building of links between data, tagging information, or establishing weak ties over the network are often poorly understood even by frequent users of social computing tools. In short, social computing requires some literacy efforts in most organizations to achieve effectiveness, just like personal computing skills did a few decades ago.
- A perception that social tools won’t work well in a particular industry. There is often an assumption in many specialized industries — such as medicine or manufacturing, just to cite two random examples — that social tools won’t
June 8th, 2009
Reconciling social computing with the enterprise
Umair Haque wrote an impressive tract on his Harvard Business blog late last week about Twitter and how it changes the rules of innovation. It’s an incisive and challenging piece that well worth reading if your looking at cutting-edge business trends. It also helps surface what’s turning into an increasingly larger gap between what happens in the business world and what happens everywhere else.
It will sometimes be a challenge to find the right metrics that help you to drive decisions about your social computing behaviors that improve the business. Jeff Jarvis and Michael Arrington made similar points over the weekend about process vs. product, ostensibly about their particular industry (journalism) and how social processes are competing — often more effectively, though very differently — with traditional, non-social “product” creations, namely news stories. As we’ll see, you can find similar examples of this now in many other industries. The key point: The processes involved in how we accomplish our daily work are being transformed by social tools on the network. Along the way, the act of work itself is becoming more of a collective journey instead of a final destination as our individual work experiences become more open, collaborative, participatory, and social.
The net result is often better and richer outcomes, though the journey can occasionally devolve into a less-than-deterministic result that can be (for the time being) rather unsatisfying, though rarely does it come to a complete stop until everyone who wants to has a crack at it.
On the other hand, the classical way of working has been to create finished, perfect-as-possible outcomes (products, services, etc.) from opaque, unknowable, lengthy processes which outsiders, within or outside the organization, could not directly perceive, alter, or improve. As Jarvis writes of traditional work methods:
It is the byproduct of the means and requirements of mass production: If you have just one chance to put out a product and it has to serve everyone the same, you come to believe it’s perfect because it has to be, whether that product is a car (we are the experts, we took six years to tool up, it damned well better be perfect) or government (where, I’m learning, employees have a phobic fear of mistakes - because citizens and journalists will jump on them) or newspapers (we package the world each day in a box with a bow on it - you’re welcome).
The key point here is the broader changes we are experiencing today: The pervasive presence of social software and today’s highly open, interactive, and remixable Web embedded deeply into our personal lives is increasingly allowing us to experience a new way of living. And it’s one that bears less and less resemblance to the workplace all the time, with significantly differing behaviors, skills, tools, and expectations. This situation creates a delta that, sooner or later, will simply become untenable for many organizations. We simply aren’t keeping up with the pace of change, never mind that not all workers are experiencing the change of the modern world the same way or at the same speed. Media sharing sites, social networks, and social tools have become embedded deeply in a large percentage of people’s lives, just as long as we remember it’s not everyone.
This increasing distance between these two worlds creates a gap — a disconnect, even — that increasingly cuts organizations off from their most valuable assets (their people) and also exerts a subversive force on organizations as their workers help themselves to the tools of their own volition, bring their (and arguably better) new behaviors and processes to work, and try to get things done with them, whether that’s crowdsourcing, Enterprise 2.0, online customer communities, etc.
So what will happen? Will there just continue to be a growing chasm between the worlds of business and how we do things outside of work? Or will the gap just become too large to sustain, with an equilibrium shift suddenly taking place in some way that creates what I’ll call (for want of a better term), a social singularity.
Singularities are popular topics with tech audiences. Read about technology singularities and Internet singularities.
A social singularity would be embodied by a convergence of
An internationally recognized enterprise architect and business strategist, Dion Hinchcliffe has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to accelerate project schedules and raise the bar for software quality. You can follow Dion on Twitter.
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