Legal Research

Enterprise 2.0: A different culture is a corequisite

By scott

Paula Thornton at The FASTForward Blog has a great piece on Enterprise 2.0: “Enterprise 2.0 Isn?t a Checklist”

Whilst it doesn’t contain any radical new thinking on the way to success for Enterprise 2.0 ? It’s the people, stupid ? I do like the way her mind thinks and how she expresses things. I agree in particular with her assertion about the role of IT and how traditional organisation IT thinking is something that can kill Enterprise 2.0.

“If you?re building a spaceship and lives are at stake, these practices are a must. If you?re running a company in today?s turbulent marketplace, everything that is locked down and fixed prevents the real human capital of the organization from adapting to constantly changing circumstances. There is never an ideal process or system and there will always be exceptions. IT cannot respond fast enough to these changes. That means the flexibility has to be built into the systems.”

I think having organisations that are adaptable is key. This also touches on an idea explored in the excellent book ‘Starfish and the Spider’ by Ori Brafman and Rod Becksrom about how being more decentralised in business can help to make your more efficient. This in itself often needs for there to be a cultural shift in the organisation away from command and control and practices and a culture that reinforce such behaviours. As Paula Thornton says “A different culture is not a prerequisite, it?s a corequisite.” I like that. ” It should evolve as enabled by the other changes. Such cultures have to move from ?rules? to ?guidelines?; from ?fixed processes? to ?governance models?; from binary to heuristic (obvious exceptions will be for those industries and/or business artifacts subject to legislation).”

All this must, of course, go hand in hand with enterprise 2.0 tools only being introduced to enhance and improve actual working processes. There is the danger that companies, who give lip service to having an open cultue, but who are in reality still very much command and control, decide to ‘get’ enterprise 2.0 and start telling people what the wiki , blog, etc SHOULD be used for,rather than making people aware of the tools and allowing them to discover how certain tools can best help them do there job better/quicker etc.

Full post as published by Information Overload on May 28, 2009 (boomark / email).