I’ve had time to sit back and digest the great many discussions, meetings, and ideas circulating at this year’s excellent Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, just over a week ago. For just about everyone I spoke with, there was a consensus that this was a special event this year and the industry has hit a new level of maturity. This was evident by the proliferation of vendors, major client-side success stories such as CSC’s presentation on how they achieved over 50,000 registered internal users of their social community, and The 2.0 Adoption Council‘s outstanding all-day workshop of customer stories with concrete lessons learned about planning, advocacy, adoption, community management, ROI, and much more.
As I recently pointed out, it’s not hard to see why this is happening now: the writing is on the wall and the consumer world has driven much of this change to the extent the social is now essentially the dominant model for communication globally, at least on the Web. Social as the driver for business activity is still usually not the case in the enterprise, but it’s now clear that too will soon change.
Here were some of the largest take-aways for me and what I saw at the event:
Designing Enterprises for Loss of Control
British Telecom’s CIO JP Rangaswami gave a thought-provoking keynote that was notable for the lack of slides (instead, a real-time social media stream was produced live, alongside) as well as for putting forth the concept that enterprises boundaries are increasingly blurring with the greater network and that businesses must start getting good at “designing for loss of control.” This topic has long been discussed in Enterprise 2.0 circles and many of us already realize that the shift of control from institutions to communities of individuals has been long underway, yet it was only at the conference this month that there seemed to be ready understanding and acceptance of this concept in a mainstream way. While we’re still learning exactly what it means to design for loss of control, particularly in the enterprise, it’s readily in the spirit of social software with its general lack of barriers to participation or preconceptions about how people should come together and build value on the network.
Enterprises Are Going Social
If the presentations at the opening day’s The 2.0 Adoption Council customer workshop weren’t convincing enough, many of the presentations later on in the week were impressive. While most organizations worldwide now have social software in some form, at least departmentally, the deeper and wider use of Enterprise 2.0 strategically, across all stakeholders (customers, partners, and workers) is still emerging in most organizations. While this is leading to more sophisticated and mature discussions, such as the one around Social Business, extrapolating from the 200 organizations already participating in the council is sobering and I predict the data for 2010 will show that around half of all organizations globally had an internal enterprise-side social media strategy created to guide efforts across their business units.
Hi Dion,
I am not sure I would use the expression “Loss of Control” for what you describe. To me, what happens is a de-connexion between Authority and Legitimacy combined with the rise of front-end / customer facing employees due to a demand driven versatile economy. 17 year ago, re-engineering emerged from the same observation. Since, web 2.0 emerged and provided new channels for supporting it. A consequence is that people high in the hierarchy still have control, as they still have a co-ordination responsibility, but their scope is more focused on facilitating front-end individuals who know more to deliver operationally. We are finally moving away from the Taylorist assumption that only few people know, and consequently design and enforce processes applied by the rest of us. This is because more and more people are highly educated and are in a position to zoom out of what they do, for genuine action and correction (single and double loop learning). Welcome to the Knowledge-driven economy, where control is not lost but differently distributed thanks to a new social and business landscape, social computing and renovated forms of management.
One possible explanation of why some case studies were not convincing lays in the fact that most of the time people have not impacted the change that goes beyond technicalities. And this is not a question of Generation Y or whatever. Today, most people are using social media as a new channel to replicate old behaviors: one-way communication to reach the mass, outside or inside. One needs to change the culture to grasp the fruit of social technologies. This is precisely why Dennis is on the spot when writing “Enterprise 2.0: what a crook”.
Best,
Olivier