Another Consultingology Business Goes Social

Just as predicted, more of the major business consulting firms are reorienting their services around ‘social business’, even if they are avoiding the term itself.

As I have argued strenuously elsewhere (see Enterprise 2.0, Social Business, And Work Media), we have seen the rapid transition from tactical proselytizing about ‘collaboration’ to ‘enterprise 2.0’, and now the movement to strategic reconceptualization of the company using the metaphor of ‘social business’.

Here, the newest adherent appears to be CapGemini, being counseled by Dr. Enterprise 2.0 himself, Andrew McAfee. McAfee can’t stand to say ‘social business’, since he spent years arguing against the term and at least some of what it has come to mean, so he and CapGemini are talking about ‘digital transformation’, instead.

Mark Fidelman via Business Insider

Don’t believe the world’s businesses are going social?  Take this recent declaration from CapGemini’s Managing Director, Global Head of Practices, Didier Bonnet when discussing Social Business with me: “We’ve actually repositioned the entire practice around digital transformation. So for us it’s not just changing one service offering; it’s our entire focus globally for our teams to deliver and to sell.” He came to that crucial decision after MIT and CapGemini interviewed over 160 executives throughout Asia, Europe and North America and discovered that businesses are digitizing. 

CapGemini’s decision was further supported by Andy McAfee, MIT’s Principal Research Scientist for Digital Business, view that, “analog companies eventually are going to get swept aside by digital companies. It’s my firmest belief about the future of business.”

While Bonnet and McAfee are careful to avoid the S-word, “social” in our discussions because for most executives it still equates to happy hour, social technologies are an important aspect of their research.  Bonnet explains, “it’s becoming a powerful and common word so we’re not fighting it anymore.” Indeed, executives are still terrified of their employees wasting time on social activities, but the visionaries are embracing social as a competitive differentiator.

But just to beat the drum one more time — after all, it’s New Year’s Day, so I should start 2012 fighting this battle — the transformation at work here isn’t companies going digital: it’s companies going tribal. It’s a transition to the open follower model — a la Twitter and Facebook — and a decisive step away from top-down, hierarchical, and centralized management.

The social tools that we have seen work so well, with such enormous and quick uptake in the open web, are based around social networks, and built upon the premises of social media. The versions of these social media tools being adopted for the business context are what I chose to call work media:

Work Media: social tools designed for the enterprise but based on the patterns of interaction, influence, and communication from social networks of the open web.  Work media tools share a number of characteristics, most centrally the streaming metaphor of Twitter and Facebook, with short updates from a variety of sources cascade into each user’s dashboard, from which each can derive a networked gestalt of the world. Work media is altering the DNA of business.

So, on a tactical level, businesses are adopting work media, and that is shifting the nature and dimensionality of business communication. When you change the way that people communicate and interact, you change everything. So this seemingly tactical change has deep, strategic impact on the business, and the consultingologists want to ride that wave. There’s money to be made, after all.

It’s not necessarily venal, however: companies can certainly use help in making this transition. But, at the same time, I am not sure that well-established consulting businesses — except younger, smaller, and less old-school ones — are the right resources to look to when trying to make sense of the social revolution. Better to find people who have been scuffling down that road a little bit longer.

(Source: Business Insider)

Enterprise 2.0, Social Business, And Work Media

Andrew McAfee will be keynoting the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week, and sets that up by noting that it’s been five years since his paper of that name was published in the Sloan Management Review.

Next week the Enterprise 2.0 conference will take place in Boston, a little more than five years after my article of the same title appeared in Sloan Management Review. It’s fair to say that the use of emergent social software platforms (whatever you want to call it) has become a mainstream business phenomenon.

Which is heartening, since I’ve devoted a fair amount of my bandwidth over the past five years to understanding and talking about this phenomenon.

Well, this post is about ‘whatever you want to call it’ and I want to call it work media. But let’s go back, and review the past five years, or so.

Unmentioned in McAfee’s piece is the fact that the Enterprise 2.0 conference was originally called the Collaborative Technologies Conference for two years, 2005-2006. I was an advisor to the folks that dreamed up the conference back in 2004. Following the growing use of the Enterprise 2.0 term, the Collaborative Technologies Conference’s name was changed in 2007. I served on the program committee until 2010, and launched the LaunchPad and innovation awards for the conference.

But, I departed from the Enterprise 2.0 fold some time ago, arguing that the term is too restrictive. For a few years I was a vocal advocate for the term social business (see Andrew McAfee on Social Business versus Enterprise 2.0, One More Time), but that term has lost what distinguished it from Enterprise 2.0, aside from the avoidance of the way tired ‘2.0’ suffix.

And worse, social business seems to have been coöpted by consulting firms hoping to recreate top-to-bottom reorganization of businesses by consultingologists (see Social Business And The Retreading Of Failed Business Metaphors).

I introduced the term work media to peel away the remnants of old thinking about the application of modern social tools in the business context. I wrote about this in passing a few months ago (see Work Media, Systems Of Engagement, Or Social Business?).

The upshot? Enterprise 2.0 — like Web 2.0, that it is modeled on — is an attempt to differentiate a class of technologies and practices based on being unlike a pre-2005 1.0 generation of tools and techniques. Everything prior to 2005? 2006? Prior to 2000? However, the world has moved along considerably in that period of time, including innovations like tablet computing, the growing dominance of the cloud, and the rise of streaming based technologies like Twitter. Presumably these weren’t envisioned in Enterprise 2.0, except in the most general way.

And social business is a term that lifts ‘social’ from social media/networks, and encourages us to metaphorically imagine businesses operating in a more social way. One of the problems with the term is that it implies that businesses aren’t particularly social unless they adopt these new tools and tricks, which is problematic even if not intended that way. Secondly, social business has another meaning outside the US, meaning a business dedicated to social causes. As I said in Social Business And The Retreading Of Failed Business Metaphors, the social business moniker has been taken over by consulting companies, and like knowledge management and enterprise reengineering before it, social business is going to be associated with a lot of expensive flops.

So I am proposing the term work media to characterize a class of stream-based social tools that are being applied in the business setting. It’s a much more limited and less grand term:

from workmedia.ly

Work Media: social tools designed for the enterprise but based on the patterns of interaction, influence, and communication from social networks of the open web.  Work media tools share a number of characteristics, most centrally the streaming metaphor of Twitter and Facebook, with short updates from a variety of sources cascade into each user’s dashboard, from which each can derive a networked gestalt of the world. Work media is altering the DNA of business.

It’s a more focused term, just dealing with the tools and not the metaphysics of management intentions in the changing world we are in. Don’t get me wrong: it’s fine to wonder about what management is supposed to be doing, and how workers are supposed to make sense of their role in the changing business context. I just think we need a simple term for the tools being adopted today and a validation of the fact that the tools can be productively discussed independently of sweeping enterprise reformulation or reconsideration.

That’s what I would be talking about if I was speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. But I am not speaking.

McAfree gives us a hint about his keynote, and it doesn’t look like he’ll be talking about work media:

In my short keynote at the conference, I’ll look back at the past five years and also look ahead. I’ll spend some time talking about what I see as the two biggest threats to E2.0: old-fashioned bosses and newfangled computers.

The Church Of Savvy: Not Just In Politics, But In Enterprise Software

Jay Rosen has established the term ‘the church of savviness’ to refer to a belief system that ‘binds together our political press corps in Washington.’

Jay Rosen, Karl Rove and the Religion of The Washington Press

Conservatives think the ideology of the Washington press corps is liberal. Liberals think the press is conservative in the sense of protecting its place in the political establishment. Karl Rove once said that the press is “less liberal than it is oppositional.” (A fascinating remark coming from Rove, since it apppears to put him at odds with the conservative base.)

Whereas I believe that the real—and undeclared—ideology of American journalism is savviness, and this is what made the press so vulnerable to the likes of Karl Rove.

Savviness! Deep down, that’s what reporters want to believe in and actually do believe in— their own savviness and the savviness of certain others (including operators like Karl Rove.) In politics, they believe, it’s better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere or humane.

Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.) Savviness—that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it,” and unsentimental in all things political—is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain.

What is the truest mark of savviness? Winning, of course! Everyone knows that the press admires an unprincipled winner.

And, more recently:

Jay Rosen, “This is part of what’s so insidious about press savviness: it tries to hog realism to itself.”

To the people inside it, savviness is not a cult. It is not a professional church or “belief system.” It’s not really an object fit for contemplation at all.  But they would say that political journalists need to be savvy observers because in politics the unsavvy are hapless, clueless, deluded, clownish, or in some cases extreme.  They get run over: easily. They get disappointed: needlessly. They get angry—fruitlessly—because they don’t know how things work in practical terms.

The savvy do know how things work inside the game of politics, and it is this knowledge they try to wield in argument…. instead of argument. In this sense savviness as the church practices it is the exemption from the political that believers think will come to them because they are journalists striving only to report on politics or conduct analysis, not to “win” within the contest as it stands.

Prohibited from joining in political struggles, dedicated to observing what is, regardless of whether it ought to be, the savvy believe that these disciplines afford them a special view of the arena, cured of excess sentiment, useless passon, ideological certitude and other defects of vision that players in the system routinely exhibit.  As I wrote on Twitter the other day, “the savvy don’t say: I have a better argument than you… They say: I am closer to reality than you. And more mature.”

Now in order for this belief system to operate effectively, it has to continually position the journalist and his or her observations not as right where others are wrong, or virtuous where others are corrupt, or visionary where others are short-sghted, but as practical, hardheaded, unsentimental, and shrewd where others are didactic, ideological, and dreamy.  This is part of what’s so insidious about press savviness: it tries to hog realism to itself.

I have had a long interchange with Dennis Howlett over the years regarding the principles of social business, which I have defined in this way, last January:

Stowe Boyd, Defining Social Business

Preparing for the O’Reilly panel today organized and moderated by Josh Ross on the topic of social business.

A social business is an organization designed consciously around sociality and social tools, as a response to a changed world and the emergence of the social web, including social media, social networks, and a long list of other advances.

The first question, aside from background of the panelists, will be “Please define social business.”

My short answer is ‘Social Business’ denotes businesses organized around social networks and the use of social technologies to support them.

A social business is an organization designed consciously around sociality and social tools, as a response to a changed world and the emergence of the social web.

But it really is larger than that. 

A social business is an organization designed consciously around sociality and social tools, as a response to a changed world and the emergence of the social web, including social media, social networks, and a long list of other advances.

The context for business has changed dramatically in recent years — a shifting global economic climate, accelerating need for sustainable operations, and a political and societal demand for increased openness and transparency in business. Add to that the implacable impact of the social web, which is changing the way people interact and perceive the world and their place in it, and which has already drastically changed media and society.

The combination of these forces is already changing business operations. Once businesses have intentionally reconsidered their core premises — how to innovate and prosper — in light of the real-time social web and the new context for business, we can expect a profound reformulation of business operations, technologies, and culture. 

Einstein stated, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” I maintain that a new sort of business is needed to fix the mess that 20th century business has created.

Metaphorically, a social business will seem more like a village than an army, and where a lot of 20th management approaches will be obsolete. We can expect these features:

• ubiquitous use of social tools, and social networks,
• greater levels of personal autonomy,
• self-organization of groups and projects,
• very porous boundaries with the world,
• high reliance on non-financial motivation, or personal meaning and purpose,
• internal marketplaces for ideas and talent,
• and senior management operating more like Hollywood producers or investors than autocrats. 

As Gibson said, ‘The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.’

Over the next ten years, we will see companies in a staggeringly wide distribution of these and other related characteristics. Some will seem like companies straight out of The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit, while others will have moved so far along these lines that they almost don’t seem to be ‘businesses’ in the conventional sense. Social businesses may seem more like communities, movements, or religions than what we think of as businesses, currently.

And Dennis has been making his displeasure about the use of the term ‘social business’ known, but not by arguing about the principles involved. Instead, Howlett has adopted a ‘savviness’ cant: he isn’t arguing, he uses his savviness instead of arguing.

The most recent example comes from a series of tweets yesterday:

@rwang0
R Ray Wang
Best Practices Report: Applying Social Business Challenges To #socbiz Maturity Models http://bit.ly/efiUrT #rscwebinar#constellationrg
15 hours ago 

@dahowlett
Dennis Howlett
@rwang0 the notion of best practices re social business is nonsense. Stop pimping that stupid idea. Seriously.
14 hours ago

@stoweboyd 
Stowe Boyd  
@dahowlett baloney
14 hours ago

@dahowlett
Dennis Howlett
@stoweboyd really? Try selling that bill of goods to businesses that do serious stuff and not the airy fairy crap you talk about
14 hours ago

It struck me, last night as I was boarding a train from NYC headed home and after reading this interchange, that all of Howlett’s howling is of this sort. Those advancing new ideas are cast as ‘pimps’ who actions are suspect because the ideas are new, and they don’t line up with his savviness notions of how hard-bitten, ‘practical’, shrewd executives make decisions. And of course, it’s all about adoption by these same savvy executives: it’s all about winning.

Howlett is being purely oppositional, and he makes no first principle arguments. His rhetoric — like the airy-fairy wisecrack — is dismissive of the idea of new ideas, the notion that some new insight could come from reconsidering the world based on new information. See The Social Business Naysayers, for example: 

Howlett is not alone in opposition to new ideas in the software enterprise space. Andrew McAfee, who is the leading advocate of the Enterprise 2.0 meme is similarly dismissive: see Andrew McAfee on ‘Social Business’ versus ‘Enterprise 2.0’, One More Time, in which McAfee tries to make the case that ‘social business’ is a very old idea as a means of dismissing it.

I have argued that what is going on here is the collision of two mindviews.

One — the Enterprise 2.0 school — are much more conventionally grounded in the prevailing ideas of 20th century information technology and business management, and who see internet technologies of as just a collection of slightly newer tools to replace the slightly older tools in place in the world of busines.

The second — the Social Business contingent — believe that the social dimension is the most important aspects of the new web, not the technology that underlies it. We feel that there is an opportunity for businesses to reformulate themselves, and at a fundamental level, to operate more efficiently and sustainably in a changed world.

As is generally the case when a new worldview comes along to upset the established premises and priesthood of an established orthodoxy, there is a great deal of invective and animosity. It’s very personal. 

So Howlett calls me airy-fairy, resorting to savviness, using wile and wording where no argument is offered. After all, the subtext runs, no serious executive wants to run a business based on what we’ve learned from behavioral economics, social pysychology, network analysis, and cognitive science? Or what customers of social business consulting firms are learning? That airy-fairy stuff?

Thomas Kuhn argues — in The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions — that the distance between these sorts of divergent world views is simply too great to be spanned, since the words and values of the differing groups are incommensurable: they simply are talking past each other. But, inevitably, the evolution of ideas leads to a Darwinian selection process, with those ideas that are most productive will survive.

Savviness is simply a technique to cloud the issues, and to persuade those shopping in the marketplace of ideas to defer rationale discussion: it sheds no new light. At the best, it is side commentary; at its worst, it is mockery, and often, intentionally so.

Getting To The Bottom Of Social Business

There has been a large and varied response to my recent post on social business (see Social Business, Not Enterprise 2.0, and the longer piece at the Enterprise 2.0 blog, Social Business: Why The Enterprise 2.0 Moniker Is Wrong).

Some have said that the 2.0 version numbering approach is positive, because it suggests an obvious alignment with Web 2.0, Government 2.0, and a long list of other 2.0s planned or in use.

My response to that is two fold (no pun intended). First, I am strongly in favor of the Web 2.0 term, because it has been well-defined, has become part of the tech lexicon and thinking, and is useful as a model and to differentiate what is going on now from what preceded it. But other derivatives, like Office 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, have not established their independent utility (although Gov 2.0 might, some day soon). In part this is because there just isn’t enough there. And, specifically in the case of Enterprise 2.0, the principles that underlie what is happening in today’s Web revolution run counter to today’s reality within businesses.

It may be a small thing, but the way that metaphors work matters in cases like these. We are, implicitly or explicitly, trying to lead people toward a conception of an improved model of business. We have to rally support for these ideas, and having the right sorts of symbols and themes can help dramatically. Or, said in the negative, using the wrong concepts may impede progress.

I think the version release model does not help, in this case.

Version release numbers represent a specific moment in time: a release date. So, ‘Mac OS X’ or ‘Windows 7’ each represent an era, a period of time, largely defined by what was released at the initial date.

Web 2.0 fits that bill reasonably well. It suggests that there was a preceding, Web 1.0 era, and that we learned and thought and fiddled, and then we consolidated all that into a new release: Web 2.0! And, it fits pretty well.

But Enterprise 2.0 is nothing like that, or if it is, it is a conjecture about some future period of time. At the best, it represents the gradual adoption of Web 2.0 technologies into the enterprise, which is slowly happening. But it does not really say anything about what sorts of changes in management and operations need to happen to leverage the possibilities arising from these new tools and techniques. So I have come to think that, in this context at least, 2.0ing is a trap. It suggests that we have crossed some defining boundary into a new way of doing things. But we haven’t. Companies are only now starting to take the first tentative steps toward a new basis for business.

If we wanted to stick with release terminology, perhaps ‘alpha’ might be the right term, but even that is too concrete for where we are. So we need to avoid all release terminology.

In the Open Enterprise research project that I kicked off late last fall, and conducted during the winter and spring of 2009, I focused on the openness of the Web as a defining characteristic of the change that I believed was starting to happen in the world of business. Our investigations with many companies and practitioners led to some support for this, but I discovered that openness was only one of a group of characteristics, and, I now believe, not the most critical one.

What jumped out of the study — in retrospect — is an understanding that the social revolution on the web will lead to a social revolution in business, and openness is one part of that emerging whole.

I saw today that James Governor has announced a new initiative based on the ideal of ‘Responsible Enterprise 2.0’. I think this is a case much like my choice of the ‘open enterprise’ last year. Responsibility, like openness, is perhaps too narrow a term for what James and his collaborators intend. ‘Responsible Enterprise 2.0’ conjures up visions of green eyeshades, which isn’t going to enthrall any community much, and falls into the release numbering trap, again.

Whatever term fights its way to the forefront of our collective consciousness, it will have to be perceived as encompassing the sexy and dynamic side of the business, like innovation, creativity, product design, and marketing. Anything that smacks of accounting will not excite people to take bold action or undertake sweeping change.

I am pushing for ‘social business’ because it leverages the heat of the social web, and the real-time elements that are growing there, today.

And ‘social business’ builds on the concept of that we are all people connected on the earth. This brings in the related themes of corporate justice, sustainability, eco-responsibility, and a host of other forward-looking themes.

But, as it must, our attention must be drawn to the benefits of reworking the engine of business — where products are conceived and built, deals are done, and customers are heard and satisfied — not just the brakes.

We need to get to the bottom of the business, down to social scale, where people touch other people, where good things happen, and rethink work from there, upwards. This is what social business design is about, and that’s why the name fits so well.

David Weinberger, Andrew McAfee, and… (thud) IBM

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference, and I will not be blogging a lot, but I have hit my first dislocation.

David was wonderful, and recapped the messages of his new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, leaving us on a wonderful philosophical slight-of-hand: when everything is miscellaneous — when all information is both information and a means to makes sense of it — and the means to makes sense of it is put into our hands, then we, the edglings, control everything. It’s our world, our internet, our digital future.

I wanted to be marching down a street in the sunshine, arm-in-arm with my brothers and sisters with flags waving, singing the Marseillais. Truly. No kidding around.

Andrew was more quotidian, opting to give a report card on the progress of the Enterprise 2.0 meme in the 18 months since he coined the term. (I whispered William James’ adage to him, just before he took the podium, “you coin a new term at your own peril.”) He was at the same time both more positive (giving high marks to the spread of the meme and the maturity of the technology) and more negative (on the time frame of real revolution in enterprises) than I am. But still, I found it interesting.

Then… thud. A general manager from IBM’s software group is telling me about IBM’s Enterprise 2.0 push with business mashups and Lotus Connectors. It’s actually something I am interested in, at least a little, but the context of these ads is very, very old school.

Maybe I am too harsh when I say it just sounds mashifying business portals. Still, this is likely the transitional period that we will have to go through. The revolution will come as a series of small transitions, and so I have to put up with IBM slide shows with dozens of trademarked buzzwords, like Info 2.0(r), Lotus (r) Connections (r), annd QEDWiki (r). And an analogy to the Web 1.0 Internet/intranet/extranet model, and telling us that the Web 2.0 shift is not your father’s Internet anymore. Ok.

But it’s still arresting to go from the stratospheric thoughts of Weinberger to the screenshots of IBM’s thinly veiled marketing pitch. I have psychological whiplash.

Stowe Boyd on Web 2.0

I was interviewed a few weeks ago, by CIO.com’ Diann Daniel, at the Cutter Consortium’s Summit, where I presented a keynote on Web 2.0:

[from Stowe Boyd on Web 2.0 in the Enterprise - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership]

[…]

All the sudden you have this renaissance happening on the Web and with such technologies as open source challenging the established software players. It’s all very destablizing, and the natural tendency for a lot of people is to say, I don’t like this and I’m going to resist it for as long as I can and I will try to rally people around me to help me resist the invasion of these new ideas. I hate to say it but that change-resistant behavior is, for many, human nature.

It’s all about fear and avoidance, alas.

They also interviewed JP Rangaswami (see Web 2.0 for the Suits: One Visionary’s Take), who came over from London to support my panel session.

Metaphors Matter: Collaborative Technology Versus Social Tools

My friend, Doc Searls, one of the visionaries behind the Cluetrain Manifesto, and an all around great mind, is fond of pointing out how important metaphors are. How we frame a discussion, or structure our terminology about something, can have much more profound impacts than we might at first imagine. For example, he recently argued (at the Les Blogs conference in Paris), that the First Amendment guarantees for freedom of the press might not be protected for bloggers, unless the bloggers wisely start to describe what they are up to as “journalism.” If we call ourselves something other than “journalists,” he points out, the Federal government may try to abridge our freedom of speech, since only the press is protected from government contols.

A similar although not so politically charged battle of words is going on in the world of collaborative and social technologies. And, like Doc’s advice regarding freedom of the press, the choice of words involves high stakes, since behind the words there are the various constituencies using them, with potentially divergent agendas.

I hope that the danger inherent in metaphors doesn’t blow up in this discipline, like we saw in the ill-fated knowledge management experiment, where the industrial and financial concept of managing and controlling assets led to a wholesale dehumanizing of knowledge and disastrous results in hundreds of knowledge strip-mining projects.

On one hand, it may seem obvious and sensible that we are talking about people collaborating: sharing information, coordinating activities, and posting messages. Working toward shared goals, in project teams, trying to get things done. All very straight forward, and, perhaps not so obviously, very corporate, very industrial.

Superficially, there is nothing wrong with a focus on collaborative technology. But I believe that this perspective, this metaphor, is flawed. It stresses the wrong side of the coin.

The collaborative technology metaphor highlights the machinery, the technology platform that underlies people collaborating, and underemphasizes what people are doing: socializing. And I don’t mean socializing, like gossiping, per se. But I do mean the creation, care, and feeding of social ties, the use of trust and reputation, and the application of digital identity.

Technologists — and I am a recovering technologist, so I know — focus on the tools, the plumbing, and information flow. Collaborative technologies are viewed as pipes that bits float through; people are sources and sinks for messages, or documents, or other artifacts through these pipes. A collaborative assemply line, where people are like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, struggling to keep up with the information flow.

But people focus on other people, not the infrastructure they tread upon. They don’t — in general — think about information in some disembodied way. They instead focus on their goals, their partners and clients, and when they think about getting things done, they approach it from a social perspective. “What will Jane think about working closely with Rich on this project?” or “Carlos doesn’t have great presentation skills, so who can we get to do the sales pitch for Company X?” or “What is the best group of people to pull together for this project?”

And while non-technologists are happy to adopt better communication, coordination, and collaboration tools, they seldom fall into “info-speak” about them. They don’t adopt instant messaging because it can lead to generalized performance benefits for the extended network of users (a technological/analytic viewpoint), but because it is a very natural, conversational, and effective form of communication.

And more importantly, perhaps, social tools quickly transcend their IT roots. They go beyond moving bits and bytes around the ‘net, and instead change the way in whihc we interact. As I wrote in 1999:

The big story of the transformation of business culture isn’t the props — the servers, networks, ten million websites, and all the information lying around in databases and in HTML — but what people are saying to each other and how they coordinate their actions, behavior and goals. The big story is that the global computer network is an enormous chat room, enabling us to collaborate in unexpected, complex and novel ways. We are experimenting with new social systems, systems that to an unprecedented degree involve software and hardware.

In the ’60s, it had become unthinkable to run a business without a telephone on every desk. By the late ’80s, everyone had to have e-mail. The need for cost justification of these new expenses, at first demanded by management, fell by the wayside as the second-order effects — the social impacts — became felt.

The rise of PCs has not led to increase in productivity relative to things that people formerly did without PCs, like writing letters and memos or selling widgets. PCs have decreased productivity in these areas. Why? Because people are spending their time in new activities, activities that were not possible before, and adding new value to the business. And all that comes for a price — the time spent in the care and feeding of computers, networks and software.

And at the same time, a new category of software is emerging, software intended to augment social systems. Not to change the company inadvertently, like e-mail did, when the electronic analog of interoffice mail became something else, grew into something else by changing the way people communicated and led a change in the structure of the company. No, this generation of software is intentional, designed from the start to guide human behavior into new paths and patterns, to counter prevailing ways of interaction. I call these social tools: software intended to shape culture.

I don’t believe we can cede control of these essential tools to the technologists. It’s not about information flow, or other industrial themes of efficiency. Its about human interaction and the benefits of new ways to interact. The tools are only a means to that end.

So, headed into the upcoming Collaboration Technology Conference, I maintain that we are really exploring the design, application, and benefits of the social side of these tools. We must never lose sight of that end, even when we slip into technospeak about the pipes, wiring, or plumbing below our feet.