Venkatesh Rao suggests that Enterprise 2.0 isn't taking off until the cool kids start pushing it:
[via Can Enterprise 2.0 Afford to be Boring?]The exciting people, by and large, are missing. One part of the reason is hard to fix. The exciting people — say the guy leading the consequential re-org, or managing the “bet the company” product launch, is probably far busier than everybody else. But I suspect there is another reason: to put it in terms of an American high school analogy, it is the same reason the “cool kids” avoid the “loser kids.” Enterprise 2.0 is mostly populated by the equivalent of band geeks. The equivalent of football players and cheerleaders are possibly avoiding it. Just possibly, they might be thinking “nobody who is anybody goes there; nothing that matters happens there.” And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Enterprise 2.0 stuff fails to deliver value, despite popularity and heavy activity, because the valuable stuff isn’t happening on it to begin with.
The world of business inherits its exciting elements from the market economy, the only truly Darwinian ecosystem (modulo bailouts) that modern information workers participate in. Those who participate in the risks, participate in the excitement. Those who want safety and security do their best to stay out of the line of fire.
It is critically important that Enterprise 2.0 tools get adopted by the risk takers and in-the-line-of-fire people actually driving the business. If we speculate that 20% of the employees are responsible for 80% of the results, we need that proportion reflected in online activity. The people who don’t pull their punches. The ones who dare to call a spade a spade. The ones who know how to tell the truth without unnecessary collateral damage. Without them, the revolution that Enterprise 2.0 thinking is capable of triggering will not happen.
Nate Nash disagrees:
[via ]First off, the claim that Enterprise 2.0 is inhabited by the equivalent of band geeks and high-school losers sounds like a text message you wish you could take back after a SharePoint bender. My dear friend, we are not losers. We are the organizationally elite. We are a minority because of the majority interest’s penchant for feeding tube IT and collaboration that is…well…easy. Keep thinking I sit alone at lunch because nothing that matters happens here. I am sorry, but in the rat race to be a better, faster, more informed knowledge worker (can I still say that?), the cool kid good looks, easy going nature, and belief that all problems can be fixed by relationship X or quid pro quo Y is a surefire sentence to a lifetime of inconsequentiality.
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Yeah sure…there are some geeks using the technologies. And yeah sure…the guy who is a jerk in real life will probably be a jerk on the wiki. But in both of cases, having these events occur in the clear will go a long way toward said “loser culture” breaking down the crippling organizational and technological silos – put there by the football players and cheerleaders – evidently as a representation of their “winner culture.”
I think both of these guys are off.
Venkatesh, it's totally possible to be cool and into Web 2.0 tools, and even, perhaps, how that might change business -- in the large or the small -- for better. But the folks generally in charge of enterprise 2.0 efforts, Nate, are likely to not be the most wild-eyed fanatics.
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