Archive for the ‘Emergence’ Category
Two Strategic Visions for Enterprise 2.0
Enterprise 2.0 advocates seem to be splitting into two camps. Their goal is the same: finding ways to apply collaborative tools to improve the way businesses operate. But they differ on what strategy to use. Dennis Howlett cautions Enterprise 2.0 advocates to tread carefully.
The root of the debate is whether you feel it’s better to focus on organizational effectiveness or individual productivity. Oscar Berg highlights some influential articles from both sides and notes that there seems to be a bias toward personal efficiency in most of the arguments made to support Enterprise 2.0
I think he is right that there is a bias for personal efficiency. I think it’s a healthy one, though others disagree.
The two strategies
Every organization is composed of multiple functions. These are normally grouped into logical departments such as accounting, marketing, product development, and so forth. The proponents of organizational effectiveness ask the question, is there a better way to arrange these parts? Can we reduce the friction between these components?
Now, let's see... should marketing report to sales or...?
If you fall in this camp, you want to do things like improve interdepartmental communications, establish clear lines of authority and areas of responsibility, break apart organizational silos, ensure smooth hand-offs, and improve business processes.
Those that focus on knowledge worker productivity, on the other hand, focus on whether the parts themselves can be improved.
Adopting bright ideas to save time and effort.
If you fall in this camp, you’re concerned about knowledge sharing, expertise location, cultivating talent and skills, and making sure that individuals have the right information for making decisions and the right tools to take action.
Power to the people
Both approaches are valuable and necessary. Which one you prefer has much to do with where you sit within the organization, as this article on productivity points out. But there are good reasons why we should favor the personal productivity over organization effectiveness.
- Web 2.0 technologies follow a user-centered approach. Applying Web 2.0 sensibility to organizational problems will require lots of customization and re-engineering. Applying those designs to knowledge workers is a much better fit.
- Many employees are already familiar with the conventions of these social tools. They use them at home. You lower training costs by following those models as closely as possible.
- User adoption has been a major stumbling block in most Enterprise 1.0 technology deployments. It makes sense to highlight the benefits to employees.
- While there have been at least two or three different waves of enterprise products targeted at organizational effectiveness (ERP, portals/KM, BPM, CRM, etc.) the suite of office tools used by knowledge workers have changed very little since the early 90s. There’s simply more opportunity for improvement there.
- Small changes applied across all knowledge workers can lead to dramatic gains. Just like in finance, productivity improvements yield compounding interest. If you can save a few extra minutes per day or per week, over time it can add up to something revolutionary.
For these reasons and others, I believe that companies pursuing Enterprise 2.0 should start — and think — small. What can we do to simplify, streamline or eliminate the tasks that prevent our knowledge workers from producing their best work? How can we provide support to small, agile, ad-hoc teams?
For me, the defining characteristic of Enterprise 2.0 is that it is about the individual, not the organization. There would be no need for an Enterprise 2.0 approach if Enterprise 1.0 approaches had worked.
Instead of Enterprise 2.0, perhaps it should be Employee 2.0?
Why Enterprise 2.0 Will Fail
Scott Gavin recently listed the Top 3 Business Benefits of Enterprise 2.0 inside the company firewall.
- Personal Information/Knowledge Management
- Expertise Identification
- Collective Intelligence
I was glad to see someone discuss the internal benefits, because the E2.0 conversation lately has focused on the external benefits — how E2.0 can help marketing and sales.
The case for organizations reaching out to their audiences via social media is easy to make. If you want to improve your outreach efforts, you either have to go where the people are or create an inviting place for people to gather.
The case for E2.0 inside the firewall is considerably more difficult. As Tom Davenport points out, is essentially the case for what used to be called Knowledge Management, or KM. The term KM fell out of favor with consultants and analysts because it didn’t deliver enough of these benefits. There are a lot of folks hoping that flexible, easy-to-use “2.0″ applications might succeed where centrally managed KM failed.
But it likely won’t, because most E2.0 vendors are doing it wrong.
If the #1 benefit is personal knowledge management, why are all the big players selling to the CEO, CIO, and IT departments? Where are the tools targeting individual knowledge workers?
Missing in action
I can think of two reasons why we haven’t seen a flowering of office productivity applications.
1. The Free Brigade — Companies don’t think they can make money from ordinary people anymore. Even if software companies came up with killer applications that helped people manage their daily tasks, email and files, they don’t think they would be able to get people to pay for it. Perhaps their software will get pirated. Maybe some college students will throw together a free and/or open source version that will destroy their market. Or — the most common reason I’ve heard — is simply that employees don’t expect to pay for software they use at work.
2. The Microsoft Effect — Microsoft owns the corporate desktop computing environment. Period. Software vendors fear to challenge the hegemony of the Office Suite, afraid that they will suffer the fate of Word Perfect or Netscape or any number of other products and vendors that have tried, and failed, to break Microsoft’s lock on desktop computing. Despite the fact that Microsoft Office applications have been around for more than 15 years (an eon in software industry) and despite the fact that they have known deficiencies for managing information that the Content Management and Knowledge Management industries have exploited for years, there has been little or no direct competition in this space.
The Enterprise 2.0 distortion field
These two factors cause all Enterprise 2.0 vendors to compromise in one of two ways.
- While promising personal benefits to knowledge workers, they actually take their marching orders from senior management, who purchase the software.
- While promising to help individuals with their daily flow of information, they live in fear of deploying software to workstations and laptops, where all information is received and all the work is actually performed.
This means that most Enterprise 2.0 Software vendors violate at least two of Andrew McAfee’s criteria for an Enterprise 2.0 tool: Freeform, frictionless, and emergent.
Because many of these tools have a management bias, and will subordinate individual initiative to central control, they sacrifice being freeform and emergent. Because many of these tools will be based in the cloud to avoid the tyranny of the Microsoft desktop and corporate IT, they sacrifice the frictionless flow of information inside the firewall.
Ironically, the companies that actually deliver best on the E2.0 promise are ones that would never consider themselves enterprise software.
No Map
This week’s podcast of This American Life opens with a story of a policeman who arrives at the scene of a traffic accident to discover that the driver was a chimpanzee, dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans, who had freaked out in a thunderstorm, thrown his handler to the back of the van, and taken the wheel, only to crash into a streetlight.
As the cop arrives in the pouring rain, with the chimp hooting and screaming and the handler reeking of rum, he thinks to himself, “Now What? They never covered this back at the Academy…”
The point of the story (if one can be extracted from such a surreal turn of events) is that sometimes strange and unexpected things happen, and you will have to deal with it somehow. At some point, you have to operate with no map, no process, and often no idea of what to do next. You will have to use your best judgment.
Abnormal operating conditions
This story got me thinking about the way people work. About business as usual. About information management systems, and business processes, and taxonomies. And the reason is… those things are all made by monkeys.
Nah, just kidding. The reason is that all of these things are maps — they’re operational guidelines for how to correctly perform tasks at work.
People are good at following processes. We’re naturally creatures of habit. There’s a comfort to be found in knowing just how to handle each event as it occurs. Although we possess the most complex brain on the planet, we’re really pretty lazy, and if possible, we will try to avoid using it. (We’ll just do what we did last time. After all, that worked out okay, right?) Harnessing this notion of “standard operation procedure” has proved spectacularly successful, particularly in manufacturing and construction.
“Bob, your job is to tighten these 4 bolts here as the car goes past, okay?
Either taking advantage of this success, or just doing what we did last time, we decided that perhaps the whole world of work could be automated. That we could encapsulate a bank or an insurance company as a giant binder full of operational practices that could be consulted at any time. A kind of information production line, just like the way we built cars.
But unlike the production line, the inputs into a knowledge system are much less predictable.
- At some point, a chimpanzee is going to come into the bank and want to open an account. And then what? No Map.
- At some point, new communications technology is going to mean that we can’t physically stamp incoming correspondence. No Map.
- At some point, every person in the company is going to be able to publish their every thought to the entire world. No Map.
Manufacturing and construction are constrained by physical limits. There are well-defined boundaries. When things go wrong, it’s obvious — at least to a trained eye. Knowledge work is different. It’s creative, abstract, and often deals with situations outside the ideal and outside the norm. It’s about handling exceptions, not following recipes.
It’s these exceptions that have been the undoing of our attempt to automate knowledge work along the lines of Taylorism and Scientific Management.
And curiously, it’s the successful handling of these exceptions that defines the success of an enterprise. Thomas Watson Sr famously said “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate”.
He wasn’t talking about process mistakes — like forgetting to tighten the fourth bolt — he was talking about those awkward times that you find yourself with No Map.
Rules are for fools — and the guidance of the wise. And when we’re making decisions for our organization, be it building a process, buying information systems, or implementing a taxonomy, we need to take this as our golden rule.
Network Value on the Edge
ThoughtFarmer published a must-read article on the New Laws of Intranet ROI. It discusses how the mathematical models used to describe social network effects have evolved over time.
For the less mathematically inclined, you can skip ahead to their summary of the changes. The new thinking on how to evaluate the impact of a social network (emphasis by ThoughtFarmer) is to:
- Look at the network from the edge rather than the centre
- Calculate value from the user’s perspective, rather than the enterprise’s
- Quantify actual value rather than potential value
This is excellent advice. And it might help to explain why we’ve found that the most successful Enterprise 2.0 roll-outs tend to be bottom-up, emergent efforts.
