I spend much of my time talking to people about Enterprise 2.0. Indeed yesterday I was the chief ‘provocateur’ on a virtual round table organised by Career Innovation, facilitated by Jonathan Winter, the CI founder. With colleagues from organisations like Boeing, Marriott, and Allen & Overy we spent an interesting 90 minutes discussing the impact of social media in the workplace, and how that might take business to the state known as Enterprise 2.0. It was a stimulating discussion. Thinking about it afterwards though, I wonder how much is hyperbole, and how much is real. Our business language is full of words like ‘innovation’ and ‘revolutionary change’. But do those things ever really happen? I doubt it, and if they do, it’s in rare cases. Very rare cases. The fact is Enterprise 1.0 cultures have been built up (and been successful) over many generations. In big organisations particularly, the culture stems from the vary roots of the bureaucracy. Changing it is never going to be possible in a hurry. Even when there’s a ‘survive or die’ crisis. Revolution is not possible; it’s always going to be evolution. And the same will be true of the transition from Enterprise 1.0 to Enterprise 2.0. It’ll be a long slow process, requiring a huge amount of perseverance, some luck, and some real long term visionary thinking.
An example to get you thinking. There’s much talk of Generation Y (those born with a mouse in their hand) stimulating major changes to the way businesses work. Indeed, I have myself stood up at conferences and suggested the same. GenY people don’t use email. Email is Enterprise 1.0. They use social networks, text messages, instant messenger etc. to organise their lives. And, so the argument goes, they’ll want to do the same when they arrive in the workplace, and this will change the way we do business. Forever. But will it? Or will the organisation grind them down first? Especially as email is the infrastructure on which business is actually run. The Gen Y people might find they have to use email just to get things done at all. So revolutionary change is unlikely.
I hope I’m wrong as these are exciting times, but as we come down from the peak of inflated expectations, those of us involved in deployment activities need to put on our pragmatic hats, be realistic about the prospects, and try and speed up the evolution rather than trying to stimulate the revolution.
2 comments:
Well, up to a point. I know a few Generation Y (or @jobsworth might say Generation M who do use email.
But not the corporate email; they use gmail and hang the consequences. Why stick with a 50M mailbox, when Gmail gives close to 8G? "Hey, we'll be able to go seamlessly into video. Can Exchange do that?"
Yes, I know they shouldn't. But they do. They'll also take a corporate build PC, and blow it away with an Ubuntu build.
Many folk use their private Macs and the web portal, because they think their corporate PCs are a productivity sink.
I think the change is coming. And we'll either demonstrate the longed for agility, or lose folk who want to work in a nimble company.
Evolution is natural. Revolution is not. :) I think that Enterprise 2.0 developers should take the facts you mentioned into account. In fact, some of them already do.. I work for a project management 2.0 software provider, whose product integrates with email and traditional pm systems (MS Project). We believe that integration is the future for Enterprise 2.0 solutions.
Post a Comment