Collaboration: March 2007 Archives

In response to a semi-rhetorical question I posed in my post on Enterprise 2.0 research last week, Niall Cook comments:

You ask: "...what will be lost or gained in the process of force-fitting the "engage and collaborate" functions and culture into the "command and control" of top-down IT directives?"

Simple. The users.

Well, yes, but it is more complex than that. Just as there are good and not-so-good uses of, e.g., wikis (or any technology of course) in enterprises, there are also good and not-so-good uses of policies, procedures, and organizational structures in enterprises. While I agree that there is usually way too much command and control, there are situations where it is just what you want (nuclear plant safety procedures, etc.). We are in the early days yet of figuring out where and how all these 2.0 technologies can be usefully applied, and what corporate culture changes will result.

Part of the debate is continuing with a bit of back and forth between Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport.

Finally there is some quantitative research on enterprise use of blogs, wikis, tagging, etc. to complement the very informal surveys we have taken, and the work done at the University of Massachusetts. Reports from Forrester (CIOs Want Suites For Web 2.0) and McKinsey (How businesses are using Web 2.0: A McKinsey Global Survey) published this week provide interesting, though not surprising, data. The McKinsey report is free with registration, and the Forrester report isn't expensive.

I haven't read the Forrester report (119 CIOs), but the executive summary focuses on their finding that most CIOs want to buy enterprise social software in suite form from large vendors rather from the smaller specialist software vendors. This fact itself is of course totally predictable, but it raises two interesting issues. First, just what are all the larger vendors, as well as midsize (e.g., content management vendors) doing about all this? (Short answer - all are doing something, but the details are often vague.) Second, what will be lost or gained in the process of force-fitting the "engage and collaborate" functions and culture into the "command and control" (last week's post) of top-down IT directives?

The McKinsey report (2847 executives, 44% C-level) found "widespread but careful interest" in "Web 2.0 technologies", and that they are strategic and will be invested in. I think their conclusion might be a little overly conservative given their findings. For example, 77% of retail and 74% of high tech plan to increase investment in these technologies. Note, however that McKinsey includes web services as a "Web 2.0" technology which not everyone would agree with.

See comments on these reports from Nick Carr, who points out where the Forrester and McKinsey findings differ. And see Richard MacManus' comments on what the Forrester findings mean for the startups in this space.

For a couple of vendor perspectives, Socialtexts' Ross Mayfield covers these findings here, and FAST's Hadley Reynolds talks about some similar research they have been working on with the Economist here.

Also (while not commenting on these reports) Andrew McAfee provides some info on how he is seeing enterprises using these technologies.

Dan Farber has nicely pulled together a couple of points in a post that suggest the inevitability of "Enterprise 2.0".

Dan references a post by Euan Semple that has been picked-up by Ross Mayfield, Tim O'Reilly and others, and a post of his own where he reports on some of Don Tapscott's research: "...the 80 million Net generation young adults coming into the workplace will want to be part of an engage and collaborate model rather than command and control."

In addition to the demographic fundamentals, there is some kind of a parallel here with the evolution of information technology where the rigid structured data in relational databases is now dwarfed by the unstructured or semi-structured content in content repositories and websites. And also with the increasingly distributed IT function.

(rigidly) structured data -> unstructured data or content
(rigidly) structured organization -> unstructured organization

Do these parallels make Enterprise 2.0 more certain? Well, the fundamentals (the demographics and the new expectations and behavior) are true in a very real sense already. But of course this doesn't mean that any particular Enterprise 2.0 products or technologies or best practices or methodologies or organizational reengineering will work. Dion Hinchcliffe has an extended thoughtful response that reinforces the fact that wikis etc. are proliferating behind the firewall, but also cautions that enterprise IT is a complex and controlled environment where enterprise 2.0 tools need to find a post-adolescent home.