Social Glass

Enterprise 2.0 is about helping knowledge workers foster productive collaboration, innovation, and create a more connected culture. Knowledge workers keep each other informed through blog posts, author wiki pages together, and share bookmarks for interesting information resources. Together they generate folksonomies - user perspectives on corporate information assets, and bypass IT-sanctioned applications in favor of more helpful tools.

But do all of these activities concern Management - you know, the people who organize the “doers”? Management spends most of its time in meetings reporting progress and being appraised of new initiatives. Does Management really have time to make sense of all of the blog posts, wiki pages and social bookmarks in their Enterprise 2.0 Solution? I’m not sure they do.

Management is more concerned with milestones and KPIs. Milestones track the development of new product features and release dates. They track progress. Progress is achieved through the effort of knowledge workers who may or may not be using Enterprise 2.0 tools to do their work.

And Management’s management is concerned with KPIs (key performance indicators). KPIs track progress at a macro-level and let business strategist understand how well their strategies are being implemented.

Managers need to make sense of the organized chaos that is Enterprise 2.0. From a traceability perspective, knowing which blog posts and wiki pages helped contribute to the development of “feature X” would help Management give recognition to those who authored those assets. It would also help Management track the ROI on their Enterprise 2.0 investment. Semantic Web search engines offer perhaps the greatest technical hope for providing this automated capability. Imagine a world where information assets were annotated with metadata that helped computer programs derive the same meaning from them as humans do through natural language. Each asset about “project Z” could be annotated as such helping a semantic computer program automatically aggregate information about said project.

But I digress.

I’m not convinced that Enterprise 2.0 is a platform through which Management will track milestones and KPIs. Managers don’t operate in the “Detail” layer. Instead, they’ll depend on their teams, which do operate in the detail layer and do leverage Enterprise 2.0, to help them make sense of progress.