Social Glass

My buddies over at e2oh.com were recently asked to blog over at wikipatterns as guest bloggers.  These guys have been instrumental in educating a very traditional management consulting firm on the values of social computing, not only for internal use but for external use with clients.  They fought many an IT battle to get the entire firm (17,000) to adopt an enterprise wiki.

Well done Nate and Jay.

It’s been an interesting transition for me back to industry. “Industry” is the term consultants use to describe normal jobs with normal companies - the kind where people bring their plants to work and setup pictures of people they know in their cubicles. The kind where people wake up on Monday morning, drive to work, work, drive home and do the same thing every day until Friday. It’s been three months, and I’m starting to acclimate to this routine way of living.

When I started I came in guns ablazing with a consultant’s mindset. “What, no data warehouse, no sweat. We’ll implement a master data management strategy and breathe life into dying data. And let me tell you about this nifty little thing called Enterprise 2.0. It’s going to revolutionize the world, man. Ever heard of SLATES?”. Sarcasm aside, people had actually heard about Enterprise 2.0 and were actually keen on the idea. But seeing things from the other side I’m starting to think Enterprise 2.0 will be overwhelming for many.

Here’s the logic: Enterprise 2.0 assumes that, within corporations, there are a lot of unsung heroes who’s voices are muffled by a thick wall of bureaucracy. These under-utilized knowledge workers are in dire need of a platform through which their ideas can transcend old-fashioned hierarchical structure so that their potential can be fully realized. Enterprise 2.0 promises meritocracy.

Sweet.

But consider alternative reasoning: Good workers are already very busy. Their managers already know they’re good and are filtering a saturating set of inquiries and non-critical disturbances into a trickle. Trickles enable concentration, and concentration is needed for people to do good work.

So why in God’s name would a very busy person want to put himself in a position to be even busier by seeking corporate-wide recognition for his bright ideas? He’s already well compensated. He’s already highly regarded. Why make life harder?

Good workers might run and hide from Enterprise 2.0 (and bad ones might embrace it).

During my career as a Manager with a Management Consulting firm I worked with two guys, Nate Nash and Jay Hariani, based in Washington DC who embraced Enterprise 2.0 like I’ve never seen anybody do before. They spearheaded a corporate initiative to rollout social computing software fighting battle after battle to convince more traditional folks of the value proposition.

These guys work in the emerging markets segment and frequently go to places like Kabul and Amman for work. Last year they put an outline for a proposal in a wiki for one of their clients and asked for help from across the organization to add content. Members of our firm from four different countries contributed with their various areas of expertise. That’s what you call collective intelligence, baby (although I’m not sure we actually won the work).

And despite their travels to dangerous places, they’ve managed to find internet access where ever they go and have put together an excellent blog on Enterprise 2.0, called e2oh.com. They have awesome insight as to how E2.0 can positively influence emerging markets. It’s a must read and a worth edition to your RSS reader.

Jay Nate, for example, writes about his experiences doing business in the middle east, where for one client called the “Ministry”, he says:

I look around the Minsitry and I am confounded as to how there are so many people working there who are clearly unqualified. But none of that matters in these places. It is all about who you know, how long you have known them, and how much they know about you. That is power. That is the business model. This is where social software within the enterprise can and will thrive almost immediately.

Plus you’ve gotta love this picture of Nate with his grenade launcher:

(interesting now that I’m in the US I’m still posting at 5pm Aussie time)

I’d like to direct your attention to a post by Jevon MacDonald called Enterprise 2.0: Where the f$#@ is my market? where he asks:

Is there such thing as an Enterprise 2.0 market? If so, can you sell in to it? If not: are there startups trying to sell to customers who don’t exist?

and answers by stating:

There is no Enterprise 2.0 market. Enterprise 2.0 budgets do not exist, except where some early adoptors create them, and there is no Enterprise 2.0 sales cycle. There are very few incentive available to experts right now and the discontinuity that has arisen in the concept is a symptom of that.

Jevon goes on to argue that an Enterprise 2.0 Software Market is validated only when there is a problem that software can solve on its own. Otherwise “The people who are making the most money off this term right now are consultants who are helping their clients navigate some of the fluff from the substance”.

I agree with this. As a consultant I’ve always considered Enterprise 2.0 to be more about shifting corporate culture than introducing new technology (although I write a lot about technology in this blog). I remember a quote from Paula Thornton where she wrote “..how many psychologists do you have on your team” as “we’re building products that should be influenced by the laws of human nature” instead of advances in technology.

When implementing Enterprise 2.0 we need to include strategies to change old school mindsets and get people to ask “why shouldn’t I share this information” instead of “why should I share this information”, for example.

Jevon does go on to say that Enterprise 2.0 software can be successful when focusing on industry verticals where, after a series of successful implementations there, a broader, more horizontal market might appear. Check out his post here.

Today is my last day with my firm in Australia. I’m heading back to the states after 2.5 years to take a break and then explore some exciting job opportunities. I’ve had a fantastic experience here in Oz and have worked with some amazing people.

I’ve worked on more traditional systems integration projects with large telcos and banks, done some interesting enterprise search implementations, built some cool demo applications, and preached the enterprise 2.0 doctrine to prospects who, in some cases, knew more about the topic than me! I’m very encouraged about the momentum I see in Australia in the social computing space, and I think my firm is well positioned to make a positive impact here.

I wish the best of luck to my colleagues. You can always find me on twitter or here on this blog.