Latest Post | Last 10 Posts | Archives
Previous Post: Eight ways that cloud computing will change business
Next Post: Running your SOA like a Web startup
Posted in:
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 our social behaviors, skills, tools, and expectations between the workplace and our personal lives (and any other distinct settings). In practical terms, these different environments will never be exactly identical, but in a singularity they would be far more similar than they are different. In other words, it's the effective collapse of the barriers separating our work habits and personal habits for engaging in group behavior (i.e, team work, collaboration, etc). When it takes place, it would simply reflect the realization that we are both creatures of habit as well as prefer to use the easier/best tools for the job.
In my talks on Web 2.0 in the enterprise, I usually review now well-worn stories of how the network effect of social systems often displaces more traditional systems in the workplace with surprising speed. These are simple examples of singularities taking place. These include how AOL's Office Wiki platform quickly and largely displaced Documentum, how CIA's Intellipedia began draining participation and knowledge from official systems of record, or how Doritos has steadily been using crowdsourcing the last few years with thousands of customers to create some fairly impressive results using open business processes. There are many others.
Many of them also show that social computing can be adopted but that they also tend to upset the apple cart. In particular, constituencies that have a stake in doing things the old way are disrupted by new social models for achieving those same business objectives, whether the replacements are highly collaborative work processes or the network co-creation of product designs and other outputs (aka Product Development 2.0).
That's certainly not to say that there are nothing but success stories. Fellow ZDNet blogger Jennifer Leggio recently covered the 9 largest social media failures of 2009, which underscores a key point: Organizations won't trumpet failures and unless the efforts are visible on the Web, the stories often go untold and the lessons unlearnt. Ironically, we'd all learn a lot more about mistakes (which you often learn more from than successes) if only business were more open and social. And that's the point. Most organizations, despite impressive adoption numbers over the last year of the tools for social computing, are generally failing to appreciate the widening gap between the way they operate and the changes in their workers and the wider world. One small example: In the last couple of months, social sites have become more popular even than e-mail in the U.K. (only Internet search is more often used than social apps), a seismic change indeed, but one in which we ourselves can barely process the implications of, much less the enterprise.
So what's an organization to do? Are there strategies that can help mitigate the seemingly growing tension, take advantage of new skills and behaviors of our workers, and avoid potential for sudden and/or unexpected changes in our businesses? In fact, is it even possible to intentionally encourage and adopt bottom-up processes? Fortunately, based on the experiences of those that have adopted them, there do seem to be some general strategies that can help.
I would love to hear the stories of ZDNet readers that are encountering social computing tools and initiatives in their business. Please relate any stories that you can in Talkback below.
posted by Dion Hinchcliffe
June 8, 2009 @ 5:07 pm
Previous Post: Eight ways that cloud computing will change business
Next Post: Running your SOA like a Web startup
WordPress Mobile Edition available at alexking.org.
powered by WordPress.
