Individuals in Groups
Ross Mayfield, co-founder of SocialText, and Stowe Boyd, a leading social software consultant, have been discussing whether the focus of Enterprise 2.0 is the individual or the group. You can read Ross’ latest thoughts in his groups and networks post. We’ve weighed in on the topic, too. Gordon wrote that there is no enterprise — it’s made of people.
So what is Enterprise 2.0, anyway?
Unfortunately, Enterprise 2.0 means different things to different people. But it does imply a change in priorities and a different way of doing business. You’ll find those two concepts present in most definitions of Enterprise 2.0.
For the last century or so, we’ve structured the corporate engines of the economy to handle problems of scale. We’ve seen major revolutions in manufacturing, logistics, and transportation as a result. Mass production and mass distribution have changed the way we live and work and vastly improved our standard of living.
But not every business problem is a problem of scale. The same managerial techniques and organizational structures that make today’s cars and computers won’t work well for producing television dramas or delivering health care. Yet if you skimmed the business and economics section of your local bookstore, you wouldn’t find much good advice for in running those sorts of enterprises. Nor would you find many off-the-shelf software applications to help you run those businesses — until E2.0 came along.
Other sectors of the economy haven’t seen the dramatic productivity gains that manufacturing and distribution have. And most of those companies don’t follow the rigid corporate hierarchy lampooned in Dilbert. Law firms, medical practices, and consultancies often run on a partner model. In entertainment or design it’s not uncommon for the highest paid individual to be a member of the staff rather than the managers or directors. Where’s the Michael Porter for these companies?
That’s what Enterprise 2.0 is about. It’s about adapting some of the successful tools and communications technologies found on the open web to solve problems faced by people working in creative, knowledge-based industries.
The priorities have shifted from problems of scale to problems of innovation.
It’s about individuals in groups
Ross Mayfield is right when he says that “the fundamental unit of collaboration is the group.” Whether you’re managing a small team or large division, you’ll likely find dozens of products that can improve group dynamics or productivity. These range from old-school solutions, like hiring an information architect to redesign the internal web portal, to state-of-the-art E2.0 products from folks like SocialText, MindTouch or Jive Software.
But Stowe Boyd is also right. The primary difference between 1.0 and 2.0 solutions is the focus on individual users. Tim O’Reilly, who coined the phrase Web 2.0, famously summed the Web. 2.0 vibe by saying, “users add value.” Individuals can and should contribute directly to the content of sites they visit and the organizations to which they belong. If the fundamental unit of collaboration is the group, then the fundamental unit of knowledge work is the individual.
The challenge of enterprise social software is to make tools that work for both the individual and the group. It’s devilishly hard to do, and there’s no shortage of failed attempts, from custom IT projects that fail to high-flying dot.com companies that go bust. Getting ad hoc groups of intelligent, creative people to work together in harmony is an art.
But people thought the coordinated, mechanized dance of the assembly line was an art, too, before management science made it routine.
the book The Hidden Power of Social Networks is a great re-balancer for people seeking to look at the particular role that people have in the context of [work] groups. It measures the relative importance, cooperation and energizing abilities of the members, all while keeping the whole group as the unit of analysis (like your quote).