Thanks to Stuart Henshall’s (prolific and comprehensive) return to blogging, I found and read the post "How Will Enterprise 2.0 Transform the Workplace", by Idris Mootee of the Innovation Playground blog.
Given that I’ve just finished a revision of the 2004 Ark Group publication "Making Knowledge Work" in light of the recent arrival of Web 2.0 capabilities and their gradual migration into the enterprise (Enterprise 2.0), I think the paragraph in bold in the excerpt below is right on.
The questions he asks in the first paragraph are often hard to answer, and I think it’s increasingly apparent that they highlight one of the major differences between work design assumptions from the Industrial Age (static, linear task sets, replicated and reproducible skills applied to sequential parts of a value chain, the application of knowledge vertically in upward chains of decision making, etc.) and what we will all need to understand in an age of information-carrying and knowledge-building networks (wirearchies, if you will).
Work inputs and outputs, roles and responsibilities and deliverables will increasingly be negotiated between participants in networks held together by purpose and common information and values who are seeking to create or build the value (response, capability, fulfillment) that a customer (also in a network of opinion and experience) is looking for.
I’ll of course offer my usual kvetching and note that I have been writing about this for a while, for example in this May 2002 article titled "From Hierarchy To Wirearchy – the future of workplace dynamics" in the World Future Society magazine The Futurist.
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So why (do) Enterprise 2.0 initiates gets stuck? Because they fail to answer many of the following questions: How does it help the organization to improve business performance? What does it mean for the knowledge workers? How does it contribute it support human capital development? What are the incentives to share? What are the core issues and does the business and IT teams see the same issues? Who owns the issues and is that a plan to resolve them? Are there agreements on the key risks and is there a plan to mitigate them?
There are also cultural, compliances and legal issues. And if free comment is allowed in a corporate blog or wiki, the company has to be alert to the dangers of libel or infringement of employee rights laws. There must be reasonable measure to ensure the content adheres to certain standard to balance the rights of individual opinion and respect for others. And from a technology standpoint, there’s realistic concern about how 2.0 technologies interact with legacy systems and what it will cost to ensure that the IT project is appropriately staffed and resourced.
But the biggest idea is the “transformation of the workplace”. This new generation of social networking and collaborative software is transforming the workplace and starting to take on the very human characteristics of interaction and collaboration that will fuel a burst of productivity to rival the advent of e-mail. It will take 2-5 years and that’s what a typical corporation usage adoption curve will look like.
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Tags: Enterprise 2.0, workplace, wirearchy
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