Dinesh Tantri on Enterprise 2.0
Dinesh Tantri [a new voice!] turns a conventional question on it's ear:
[from Is The Enterprise Web 2.0-ready?]This is at the heart of the problem. It is almost meaningless to ask "Is Web 2.0 enterprise-ready?" - Ask "Is the Enterprise Web 2.0-ready?". Are enterprises ready to let go of control where it is not necessary? Do managers see the implications of a participatory web within an enterprise? If they don't, the IT guys would have a huge problem sometime soon. Many of your employees may already be using Writely, Basecamp, Campfire etc., because unlike enterprise KM systems that focus obsessively on Organizational Knowledge, these lightweight tools helps people get things done. They put the individual at the center - not the enterprise. If you think you can accrue value to the enterprise first and the individual next-you are doomed to fail. Benefits to the organization from managing knowledge will be a side effect of individual's actions - and that is what social software enables.
The John F Kennedy slight of hand ("Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country!") is more than a rhetorical exercise. Taking on web 2.0 apps means adopting the entire zeitgeist. Yes, the individual is the new group, as I wrote in my first post here, and /Message, 99 days ago:
the groupware model of collaboration, where neatly partitioned worlds are created, and individuals are made to shift context in order to shift from one social thread to another, seems unnatural to me. The primacy of groups and group membership in old-school groupware is outmoded.The shift to the individual changes everything, and in revolutionary ways. Moving from groupware premises to "soloware" shifts the dialog about standards and interoperability. In the old groupware model, a company would buy a groupware platform and applications, and roll it out across all the users. It was standardized because everyone was using the same rev of the same product. When the issue of interoperability and standards were brought up, it was approached from the perspective of inter-company communication, or different sites within the same company. But in the soloware model, individuals may be using completely different tools, and share nothing in common but certain standards. But the glue that connects the dots in the soloware world are standards like RSS, IM interoperability, and blog trackback conventions: standards that allow individuals to do their thing, but to allow bottom-up aggregation of their artifacts along social connections. The groups are there, but latent, implicit in the gestural relationships of crosslinking, tags, comments, and blogrolls.
I envision a time where even in the largest organization, our lives as individuals will define the norm for computer-assisted work. The model of soloware will displace the 90s ideals of groupware in exactly the same way that the pre-groupware assembly line models were dethroned in the 90s. In our work lives, even in the largest, most conservative companies, we are instantaneously involved in dozens of projects, with teams of people that are constantly changing, with outside consultants and partner companies, and there is no end in sight. When everything fractures away from stable, long-lasting, closed teams toward the exact opposite, what is left are individuals in contact with each other, through soloware: individual needs first, group needs second, by extension.
We are, first and foremost, individuals. The concept that whenever we do something it should be intentionally in the context of a specific well-defined group is outmoded, and was always an approximation of what is really going on, socially. We are involved in social relationships, and what we do with others is always social, but not necessarily part of a group, or only of one group. So, let's put aside groups, and focus on the individual. The groups will follow.
But Dinesh offers some hope about the enterprise being able to turn this particular corner:
With grassroots adoption models there is still a change challenge. But fortunately, with word-of-mouth, change manages itself.
One of the key principles of the edge -- where the individual is the new group -- is exactly that: change manages itself.
Klas from MyWebDesktop.net
Thanks for a good post! I believe that one of the reasons why web 2.0 tools attracts a lot of users, is because the focus on the individual.
It is amazing how creativity starts flowing when people can collaborate and communicate with the people the want to, not the ones they are ordered to work with.
I have worked with a lot of project workspace tools (like Sharepoint), and the functionality is great,but when "implemented" in a corporate environment the result is usually that there is to much focus on control, and to little on collaboration, communication and creativity.
Posted by: Klas K. | May 07, 2006 at 11:36 AM