Enterprise 2.0: A solution in search of a problem

A CEO’s first question, after the decision to launch a new product or expand to a new market in a different geography, is WHO will lead this endeavor? states the EVP of HR of a global media giant. Notice the CEO did not ask what technology will we use to support.

Talent at the end of the day is what makes or breaks a business. Technology enables individual and group performance which translates to organizational results. No doubt in some cases poor technology actually hobbles organizational performance.

I’m a technology advocate, but I think the emphasis needs to be on the who, not the how which is where E2.0 has focused despite protestations of its proponents. Reading some of the recent manifestos Andrew McAfee’s How Beautiful it is, how easily it can be broken or Michael Kreigsman’s mash up of Gary Hamel and McAfee,  Enterprise 2.0, the Kumbaya irony  one still gets the sense that technology is the “white knight” if we can only get the people to collaborate.

Technology generally has developed along the lines of someone seeking a better means (automation) to an end – an extension of what we have, tractor replacing a horse.  Sometimes technology is applied to satisfy a desire to have more knowledge (fmri to map the brain territory in operation when we think of an object or concept - now a reality) and lastly, technology is a happy accident – a tool for one purpose turns out to have business benefits - Facebook like social networks, blogs wikis, and RSS – repurposed consumer tools for business.  Historically, happy accidents abound.  3M’s semi-sticky glue meets scrap paper bookmarks equals Post-it Notes (now digital). Social media feels like Post-its.

Jenny Ambrozek and I have written before on technology/tool transience in our Facebook Groups for Business investigation. Five years ago only a small group used FB, two years ago what was Twitter? A year from now who knows what tool we will have.  I’ll go so far as to say these technologies are only artifacts in our search to keep making our work and life more efficient, effective and meaningful. 

Which gets back to the CEO’s question WHO will lead the business endeavor?

 Once we start talking about WHO we are back to the beginning again.  People, their skills, abilities, competencies, relationships and networks. Yes, social networks the backbone of getting work done or not.  Not all folks play well with others. We are inherently social, but with social comes both competitive as well as collaborative behavior.  Human behavior is a well studied field, but some how not known to many technologists. 

Why businesses don’t collaborate- Meeting management, group input and wiki use  is a nice survey conducted by Stuart Mader and Scott Abel.  There really are no surprises in the report. All the usual suspects are accounted for – resistance to change, too many tools, and not enough time.

 Organizational – people basics are what matter. Rob Cross, interviewed for the Financial Times comments, You can kit everybody out with Google’s new Wave system, which combines all the latest communication and social networking features, but if the right people are prevented by bad gatekeepers or energy-sapping bosses from working together, nothing will come of it.       

Technologists keep tripping over the same human system in the middle of the floor.

 At the 2009 Miami FOWA conference I caught up with Mark Masterson about my observations on human systems which he captured in his blog post on the event…

 At dinner Monday night, Victoria and I had been kvetching over the problem that too many wheels get reinvented in the IT industry. People never seem to know what other people have already done, and assume they've had some profound insight when, in fact, they've just gone down a path well worn by any number of other people. In particular, people don't read enough. We're all in such a hurry -- there never seems to be enough time to just sit down and learn. So Victoria's gripe was that there was lots of research, both existing and ongoing, on things like organisational models, webs of trust, and so on, all of which contained significant information of value for IT practitioners working on software to enable things like social networking and collaboration. Yet, she said, it was a rare developer or designer that she'd meet who had the slightest idea of the existence of such research. 

 Leap frogging our selves into the future

The good news is each wave of technology actually does leap frog us over our own human limitations.  Although the business of leaping can be pretty messy; just like the game, most of us have good intentions of moving forward, but we succumb to change fatigue.  Efficacy has us opt for the equilibrium of status quo (which I prefer over resistance, having a pejorative slant) just to survive in our fast paced work environments.

A few folks stand out in the next leap forward Sandy Pentland, MIT – "sociometers" Honest Signals, Tim Berners Lee, Harvard – Linked Data , Fred Wilson, tech venture capital  – Union Square Ventures, neuroscientists Marcel Just, Carnegie Mellon University – “thought identification” and Gemma Colvert, Neurosense – neuromarketing. 

What connects these wizards is sensing (as in detection) and semantic (as in smart web). Between sensors, semantics and science our connectedness will become transparent. What they are achieving will more nearly marry our brain patterns to our social behavior with a web presence.

We are moving to linked data in a profound way – stuff talks to stuff and has been for the past few years. RFID chips track goods in the supply chain and your car trouble is diagnosed remotely. With Tim Berners-Lee’s Linked Data we will begin to not only structure how we tag information but be able to see the relationship of data sets as in network maps.  My wiki may hold information which is unique or 95% redundant to another. The benefits become obvious.

Pentland’s “sociometers” are now gathering early data on the dominance of our nonlinguistic communications and their importance in increasing our 'network intelligence, comments Bob Metcalf. Looking much like a cell phone, the sociometer provides real time social network relationships.

These technologies are not science fiction. They are works in progress being used by top brand companies. Unilever, Intel, P&G, McDonald’s, and MTV-Viacom are all exploring neuromarketing.

Today’s web 2.0 and E2.0 are still rather clunky requiring endless conscious clicks between oceans of information accompanied by huge amounts of human energy to get people to become “users”.  Ideally, we are “prosumers” with the above technologies, simultaneously generating and consuming.

Predictive power

What makes these technologies a leap ahead of web 2.0/E2.0 is their predictive power and embedded science of behavior.

Hopefully, when the CEO asks “who” will lead, science based technologies will enable an informed answer. The technology solution is then to serve the ever present problem – how to enable us to be more effective and efficient at what we want to do.

~Victoria G. Axelrod