Social Tools In The Enterprise. Contradiction In Terms?

I often hear people talk about deploying social tools ‘in the enterprise’.
And that’s a good thing. A great first step. But I wonder if the description is a sop to the fears of those-who-would-control?
Keeping things closed, internal, secret, locked away; makes the boss feel safe, doesn’t it?

But to get the greatest value from ‘social tools’ you have to see through the walls and act beyond them.
The adoption of social tools ‘in the enterprise’ has the effect of throwing up a silo around where and how those tools will be used. Internal wikis, private blogs, employee forums etc.

I know there are cases where they have been seen to work very well. But I wonder if even in those cases they could have worked still better by open thinking: opening up the silos and letting the conversation flow within and without the silo walls.

Ideas are not IP, implementation is.

Let’s not talk about deploying social tools in the enterprise.
Let’s talk about adopting social tools. Period.

Comments

[Suw]

David, I've been talking about the *adoption* of social tools in business for ages, as have plenty of others. Indeed, I wrote my social software adoption strategy - which has influenced the way that many companies and organisation, including the CIA!, foster the use of social tools - over two years ago.

Companies do fall into the silo trap, where different functions or department build walls around themselves and don't communicate with the rest of the business. Social media is very good indeed at perforating those silo walls, and eventually bringing them down. There's plenty of evidence around that social tools are indeed very useful in business, for communication, collaboration, discovery, and all sorts of other things.

However, you seem to be intimating that businesses should do all of their work out in the open, in public, where the world can see. Whilst I think there's a lot of IP that businesses to could open up and give away, I don't think that we'll ever see any of them deciding to, say, open up their company wiki. And I don't blame them. Why would a business give the game away to their competitors? Why would they open themselves up to trolling and abuse?

A degree of transparency is good, total transparency is unrealistic.

[Eric D. Brown]

Great idea David. I've been saying similar things...rather than compartmentalize knowledge into group wikis, etc, open it up to everyone. You never know where innovative ideas are going to come from.

[JP de Vooght]

I am hopeful as well.
The enterprise is a large network of ordinary people organized to achieve extra-ordinary things as a NASA director once noted. Until now, we have been taught that this required organizational techniques.
These techniques, as Shirky observes in his last book, have gathered some dust and the organizations may end up losing on two counts: not learning to leverage social tools internally as well as fighting harder battles with coordinated customers/partners, externally.
Things progress slowly and enterprises must learn to cope with these new ways. fast.
Today's hurdles in large organizations are equivalent to promoting ideas in our local communities or cities. I would argue that the tools can be put to use, as you argue frequently, to form ad-hoc teams to address transient problems efficiently.
The use of these tools has to go beyond the obvious and really aim at empowering ad-hoc coming together of employees to, say, close a deal, finish a project on time or fill urgently a vacant position...
It is time to look at Enterprise 2.0 as a way to introduce a new "Small World" prespective to management and amend/replace the old matrix-oriented views.
Tools and social network know-how has come far enough for us to bring out the weak-ties and present the organization with a few distributed network views of itself.
This would lead to better ways to innovate as well as integrate with up-stream and down-stream partners in its value chain.
Imagine that: "We're a Small World organization" instead of "We're a matrix organization"...
- JP

[david cushman]

Hi Suw: agree TOTAL transparency is unlikley. That's what I'm suggesting in the phrase: "Ideas are not IP, implementation is." Ideas only get better by being shared, and allowed to continue to breathe. I always think closing an idea off and saying it's finished is a little like shooting it dead, stuffing it, mounting it and putting it on the wall.
It's that value that companies should connect with. How they implement those ideas (the strategy if you like) is very valuable. Good strategy and bad implementation is a bit like a Ferrari with flat tyres ( I read that some place else!). There's lots of value in making sure the tyres are right and I'm cool with some judicious IP in this area.
Eric and JP, huge thanks for taking the time to contribute. I wouldn't be learning from your shared thoughts if I was doign this on a company forum!

[Lee Bryant]

hmmm.... I think your statement "Let’s not talk about deploying social tools in the enterprise" is misguided, to be honest. I also suspect you misunderstand social tools as being solely about communication, rather than operations or collaboration. There are all kinds of conversations, projects and initiatives that could theoretically benefit from being opened up across the boundary of the enterprise, and indeed a degree of this is happening already. But how do you open up projects and operations, etc.

Openness has been reified to such an extent among evangelists that you/we have forgotten the value of intimacy and identity. The biggest, most open fora often "suck" precisely because they are so open that people have no bond, don't take responsibility and do not share common purpose. Imagine trying to run a company that consisted entirely of Comment is Free members...

We need to talk about social tools in the enterprise because if we say 'your organisation does not exist' or 'you are an open wiki' then (a) we would be wrong, and (b) nobody would listen. Apologies for the jargon but there is a big Win-Win in helping enterprises adopt internal (but externally connected) social tools that humanise the enterprise, provide a modern working environment, dramatically reduce coordination costs, improve effectiveness and also make companies better global citizens.

I suspect we agree on most of that, of course; I just think your post over-simplified somewhat.

[david cushman]

Lee, I'm a little baffled? Are you thinking I don't advocate the use of social tools in companies? Far from it. Precisely the opposite in fact. I want social tools which function across the enterprise AND beyond.

To your too-open-and-you-kill-the-value-of-intimacy point:
Can I suggest a link which gives a less simplified version of my thinking in this area:
Communities of Purpose are the Business Units of the 21st Century: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2565589/Communities-of-Purpose-are-the-business-units-of-the-21st-Century?ga_uploads=1

Social tools bring together people with shared purpose. Sharing our metadata as widely as possible allows us to connect with people who share our purpose globally.
It's why you and I have found each other right here and now. We would not have done if I had posted this on my company's forum. The whole world isn't here joining in this conversation. Those for whom it has value (the purpose around which we are gathering) are.

To your identity point - I have also written at length on that. If you're interested in exploring that (I spoke on it at BlogTalk 2008 and at the Digital Identity Forum in 2007) there's also a white paper on my blog (fasterfuture.blogspot.com).

Apologies - not my intention to give you a reading list - just think those documents might help reveal where I'm coming from and why I draw the conclusions I do.

They are not intended to kill the ideas stone dead though (ie end the conversation).

best dc

[Lee Bryant]

Thanks for the references. I am sure these will show that you know what you are talking about (which I don't doubt) and also that we agree. The issue is just whether the use of social tools within the enterprise deserves special treatment or whether we treat it as simply an extension of the wider use of of social tools.

As I said in my comment, you seem to think this is all about communication rather than operations and other purely internal areas. There are plenty of communication use cases for opening up beyond the firewall, so to speak, but equally there are strong use cases for purely internal systems. Communities of purpose (i.e. those aimed at getting something done) need boundaries, and right now the organisational boundary is real for most people. Why can't a company be a community of purpose, or perhaps a series of them?

I think that if we advocate a free-for-all and do not respect organisations as entities with their own boundaries, then we will get fairly short shrift from businesses. Many of these companies have bee built up over decades if not centuries, and in a group of 10k or 100k people, they have networks of sufficient scale to achieve many of the network effects of open social tools within their boundaries.

Ideally, long-term, I would like to see the porous membrane that Hugh drew in a cartoon once, and a lot more across the firewall activity, but if we are to engage with large companies and help them change then we also need to have a certain degree of empathy and respect for them.

[david cushman]

I think we do agree on much. And if it's a project that is about generating something you can attach an IP label to then we will concur. But I do stand by the notion of openess beyond the company firewall.
One extra node added to the network doubles its value.
One.
I do recognise the difficulties of making this happen in large organisations. I work for one.
Can you clarify the distinction between communication and other functions of social tools you're describing? Aren't all social tools effective because they allow human beings to connect?
Apologies if this seems to be just semantics?
For me, all connection is about the meeting of minds - communion, requiring the communication of ideas.
My brief summary of that is: Conversation is where ideas turn into action. Action is where value is created.
More nodes = more conversation = more groups of purpose = more value.