Donna Bogatin on Social Enterprise: Group-First or Me-First?
Donna Bogatin picks up on the "Me First" thread in her Social enterprise: Oxymoron or business logic? at ZDNet, today.
Stowe Boyd laments efforts that “miss the social bullseye” by being group-oriented, in what he characterizes as a "me-first" world.To bloster his case, Boyd puts forth MyFace and Facebook self-promotional member profiles and his personal blog:
Web 2.0 social tools…Social networks, explicit ones like MySpace and Facebook, or implicit ones in social media, are really organized around individuals and their networked self-expression. I am writing this blog post, and publishing it, personally. It is not the product of some workgroup. It is not an anonymous chunk of text on a corporate portal. My Facebook profile pulls traffic from my network of contacts, sources I find interesting, and the chance presence updates of my friends.Boyd’s argument in favor of “real” social applications advocates anti-social and exclusionary sounding stances:
I am the center of my network,The buddylist is the center of the universe,
I don't need to participate in groups to exist or to share, or to matter, in this world.
What world is “this world”?
The MySpace and Facebook worlds of “self-expression”? OR
The IBM envisaged corporate network world enabling team members to “work anytime, anywhere with anyone.”
The enterprise, and society, profits from a “we” world, as in we’re in this together world, not a “me” world, as in what’s in it for me world.
"Me First" doesn't equate to a selfish, "what's in it for me" approach. The notion is something different. In conventional groupware, a user's principal mode of operation is acting as a member of defined groups: The Budget Planning Team, East Coast Sales, or Marketing Communications. These groups serve several functions:
- Relationships between members of the group are symmetrical: all members have direct interaction with each other.
- The group defines a repository of information: discussions, documents, and so on are managed within the group, with group members gaining access to the because of the membership in the group.
- The purpose and goals of the group are intended to be taken on by the members, and -- in principle -- all the interchange within the group context is supposed to accord with those goals.
I could go on, but these principal points are enough for now. So, in the classical enterprise collaboration model people are, first and foremost, members of groups, and these groups define people: what their rights are, what their purpose and goals are, and so on.
But the social take on this is that people are individuals, first and foremost, with their own desires, interests, skills, and goals. People interact with other people for a variety of reasons, which include collaboration around business goals. But in the social, me-first model (contrasting it with group-first models) people's relationships are potentially asymmetric: for example, I may be on your buddy list, but you aren't on mine. And in the me-first model, I possess what I make and I opt to share it with specific individuals (or not).
Anyway, I thought I would clear up the misunderstanding I caused by being a bit fast and loose in the earlier post. I am not some Gordon Gecko type, saying "Selfishness is good." But building social applications around the individual first, rather than groups, is the core distinction between '90s style groupware -- still dominating the thinking of enterprise IT people and analysts -- and 21st century social software.
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