Euan Semple's easy Enterprise 2.0 not so simple: Minds, Business Models & Organizational Culture Change

Euan Semple has set Enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts abuzz with his post "The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0?"

Oh that implementing any technology in an organization could be this simple so I was encouraged to see Ross Dawson with the benefit of half a world away from the epicenter of Enterprise 2.0 hype write:

"But I think your post was dangerous in that some people will take it very literally, and then be disappointed and frustrated when the results don't turn out (or seem) to be very useful."

and the ZDNet blogger Dan Farber adding a dose of reality describing IT's likely reaction to the "get out of the way" suggestion and focusing attention on Dan Tapscott's observations based on his research  that:

"the 80 million Net generation young adults coming into the workplace will want to be part of an engage and collaborate model rather than command and control.  This will require a paradigm shift that “involves dislocation, conflict, confusion and uncertainty,"

Last September I was a privileged participant when Euan Semple spoke at the University of Warwick's Knowledge & Innovation Networks Social Media Workshop.  It was clear from the discussion following his presentation that the grassroots participatory media innovation Euan lead at the BBC wouldn't be quite that simple to accomplish in other participant organizations.

It's my observation of the BBC over the years starting with meeting Colin McIntyre, the BBC's Editor of Ceefax (supporting the Australian Caption Center implementing Teletext subtitling in 1985), or Lizzie Jackson at the 2001 Vircomm (virtual communities) Conference who recently chronicled the BBC's innovative web initiatives on this blog and more recently Euan Semple that the BBC is not a traditional organization.  How many organizations have the deep experience to publish this list of Web Design Principles ?

So while we can be inspired by Euan Semple's:

"Do nothing"
"Get out of the way"      
"Keep the energy levels up"

     and

"Provide free social media tools for play"

in my experience essential (and not so easy) ingredients for ensuring an organization creates value from adopting any new technology include:

Changing individual mindsets
Rethinking business models
Adopting analytics to measure value creation
Promoting new skill sets
Changing reward systems to incent both participation and collaboration.

For those focused on "tin tacks" like Ross Dawson some sources showing state of adoption and directions courtesy of Victoria Axelrod and Gary Colet:

• Business Week slide shows on companies using wikis and living and working online. (The latter includes usage of social networking sites and participatory media tools at work.) 
• CIO blogger Liana Varon encouraging CIO's to do better at setting goals and measuring performance
• Web 2.5 and issues around technology adoption in enterprises
• Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks, an omission from my earlier post on this topic.

And if your interest is in what else the future of enterprise technology might hold the list of forthcoming TTI Vanguard Conferences.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Comments

[Euan Semple]

If you read the post carefully it should be clear that I did not say that options one or two were the best options in terms of outcomes for the organisation.

The third option, while not necessarily easiest, is the one which is most likely to prove successful in terms of moving the organisation forward. It requires a lot of effort and energy and is far from doing nothing.

My motivation for the post was to push back against the wave of people trying to turn Enterprise 2.0 into much the same sort of thing as Enterprise 1.0 which it doesn't need to be.

In terms of the BBC being an easier place to do this I'd agree that the bright workforce and willingness to embrace new ideas helped but it was the "backroom areas" that embraced our environment first and they differed a lot less from their equivalents in other organisations than you might imagine.

[Simon Wardley]

I had a long chat with Steve Whittaker (BT / MIT) on emergent behaviours. He pointed to Lessig's arguments about the balance between law, the market, social norms and architecture. If you take this into the context of an organisation - then the market is the source of information (at one point centrally controlled changed but subsequently changed to participative and "free"), the architecture is the tools to allow this (at one point a CMS in the next stage a freeform Wiki). So what new social norms develop? Do the laws (company rules) support this? Is this desirable?

The problem with emergent behaviour is the same problem with the "wisdom of crowds". The crowd can equally be completely wrong as right (see Marquis De Condorcet) and emergent behaviour can equally be constructive or destructive.

In our case, though the first four years of the internal wiki were explosive & useful - we quickly met a "noise" barrier caused by an emergent behaviour - the fear of deletion ("oh, someone might want that ....").

So as an organisation we are needing to introduce "gardening" structures in order to maintain it's usefulness. It's not as simple as do nothing ... not unless you're very lucky.

[Simon Wardley]

By the way, that doesn't mean I disagree with Euan's post - I don't.

I also believe the rise of canonical information sources, reputation based systems, a more socially connected workforce & the arguments of conversation over product will accelerate adoption both internally and externally - as per our discussions with McAfee.

However some of those emergent behaviours even with with the best of intentions can be destructive (as per my "not deleting" example). These need to managed by an organisation - both positively and negatively.

So Euan is right in that - "do nothing" - will mean it will happen anyway. But obviously this is not the same as there is nothing to do when it does.

[Jenny Ambrozek]

Thanks Euan for the clarity and Simon for contributing your insights and especially experiences using a wiki. Assuming you know Pete Kaminski whom I've heard share different but also intriguing observations about using wikis as a day-to-day knowledge sharing platform.

And for the record my intent was not disagreeing with Euan's post. Rather I was trying to say, if not clearly as intended, that chances of success of such a grassroots approach will vary among organizations. In my experience organizational size, industry and culture will impact. For example swift adoption using a grassroots approach is more likely to work in a media company like the BBC than a highly regulated financial services industry.

I've seen participatory tools challenge senior management reluctant to lose control, especially when not understanding how business value can be created through "anthills" of grassroots lead innovative activity emerging in their organizations, or at the edges in exchanges with customers.

At minimum hopefully our exchange has established the value of interaction and sharing for understanding. Yes? No?

[Euan Semple]

As you guessed Simon we went for option three which is a lot of hard work!

One of the things we discovered with our wiki is that some people, often our librarians, liked gardening!

Sadly many will opt for option one as the default and mostly for the reasons Jenny highlights - they will think social computing is hard and think it is incompatible with their organisational cultures.

What i find interesting is that everyone assumes that this stuff is bottom up. It isn't. It is as liberating to the middle and top as well. How many managers do you know who feel listened to at the moment?

[Simon Wardley]

Jenny, I believe your point on "organizational size, industry and culture will impact" is extremely important because I suspect given two organisations the emergent behaviour will be affected strongly by such criteria as well as any "seed" ideas and individuals. It's not a linear or static system but instead dynamic and managing this is a non-trivial exercise and highly adaptive.

As with aspects of software development (especially that in the realm of competitive advantage, and hence novel & new), you cannot efficiently plan out the process of development as it is more akin to research and therefore dynamic (the three axis of technology, people and requirements being relatively unknown).

So Euan's option three (which they went for) seems the only viable course, but it hints at something which will make most "controllers" shudder. The process is more "try, measure and adapt" rather than a stepwise planned process with a Gantt chart.

I suspect at this stage, you cannot plan out a generic adoption of Enterprise 2.0 but neither can you ignore it as it will happen anyway. In Euan's case their librarians became the gardeners, in our case we are trying to work out how to create "a gardening" element as this behaviour has not emerged.

I'm very grateful to McAfee for the term "Enterprise 2.0", in the same way that Tim created "Web 2.0" and Sterling created "Spimes". The term creates a partition between "old" and "new", and helps us view the "new" without the baggage of the existing constraints.

It also encourages these sort of discussions, which I value highly. Thank you both.