By making things visible, getting rid of workflow (t d f) and structure - and freeing up time - an enterprise could tap into the added value of people’s networks within and outside of its firewalls - freeing up the power of innovation (t d f) and productivity. But that will only happen as long as the individual and organizational benefits become visible themselves or some kind of pain forces change on the strongholds of command, control and planned (imposed) structure.
It’s now wonder that it’s difficult to lead executives to operative participation (t d f), they are educated as gatekeepers of control from outside and above, trying to keep their collars clean and making their hands dirty on different places. Their desire to interact and participate in the open needs to be nourished.
At least they need to just enable an environment where others could do so. An environment that supports the emergence of structure versus an environment that imposes structure from above.
The road to Enterprise 2.0 (= “the use of freeform social software within companies.“) has to be a stony one - that’s always true for innovation that moves from the periphery (=consumer market) to the center.
But as we already observe there is something going on: having an eye on growth and innovation via open, decentralized and collaborative environments and consulting (t d f) enterprises in applying that to its framework became an analyst’s team major task.
Fantastic times and opportunities for all of us! But never forget that in 1997 some of us thought that a messageboard is a business model in itself.
Andrew McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0: “For about a decade companies have been providing users around the world with free Web-based communication channels like email and instant messaging. These channels have been valuable for people from Cambridge to Antananarivo. But the information exchanged via these channels isn’t persistently visible, so it’s not consultable — it doesn’t form part of the huge ongoing reference work that is the Web. ”
[...]One of the main ones is that the shift from Nupedia to Wikipedia was a huge reduction in the amount of structure in the content creation and editing process. The structure was intended to act as a barrier to bad content, but instead it acted as a barrier to all types of content, and to broad participation.
[...]
I’ll end this post with an anecdote that showed me that these three trends [commonly named Web 2.0 - tnb] are not yet well understood by many business leaders. Last week I was teaching in an executive education program for senior executives - owners and presidents of companies. I assigned a case I wrote about the internal use of blogs at a bank, and also gave one additional bit of homework: I pointed the participants to blogger and typepad, and told them to start their own blogs and report the blog’s URL to me.What they reported instead was that they had no intention of completing the assignment. They told me how busy they were, and how they had no time and no inclination to mess around with blogs (whatever they were). Out of two classes of 50-60 participants each, I got fewer than 15 total blog URLs.
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Tags: Business, IT, Social Software
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