Is your Company Creating Zombies 2.0?

By Thierry de Baillon

Version française ici.

As time goes by, I see more and more surveys and positive case studies about Enterprise 2.0 adoption. This is good, but not so much. Most of the time, use of technologies such as instant messaging or web conferencing is viewed as concrete steps toward Enterprise 2.0 adoption. But is there any behavioral difference between meeting up face to face with someone and talking via IP networks? Barely any; this helps saving fossil fuels for our planet’s health and sets up a hypothetical technological ground for some later adoption. Not that much to jump for joy about.

Monitoring Enterprise 2.0 adoption should instead focus on communities, networks, and flows of knowledge, These are the real bricks on which to measure change, with a lot of precautions nevertheless.

Communities of practice exist for some time now in big organizations. They gather people with similar or related roles in a company, and are built around practical cases sharing, knowledge emergence and collaborative problem solving. While this is a great move toward new modes of collaboration and new, tacit, knowledge capture, these communities are often heavily structured and managed, just to insure that they “work”. Regular fixed-date gatherings, mandatory outcome, fixed agenda and assigned roles are among common practices. In other words, keeping control on the internal working of communities of practice allow organizations to fit roles, responsibilities and (collaborative) productivity all together.

But communities are inherently dynamic and have fuzzy boundaries.  Networks, which may both encompass or be nested inside them, are often unpredictable, uncontrollable, activate and dissolve on purpose, instill passion and disruption into communities. In networks relies the real power of communities. Without purposely enabling them and fully fostering their capabilities, which means giving up control and deeply changing the way we think about work, online communities are, and ever will, only be technology assisted para-hierarchical structures. Communities are the bodies, while networks are the souls of the collaborative enterprise.  Without a real cultural change, ‘change toward Enterprise 2.0 adoption’ merely means creating Zombies 2.0. Is your company into ‘socialwashing’?

‘Communities’ and ‘Networks’: A Conceptual and Linguistic 2.0 Mess

By Thierry de Baillon

Version française ici.  R8WDSZFCZWAY

Among the most overheard and misused buzzwords in companies are, you guessed it, ‘communities’ and ‘networks’.  One of the side effects of Marketing 2.0 is, besides embodying new relationships between brands and customers, raising awareness among top managers about the potentials of collaborative work.

Of course companies, particularly the biggest ones, are dealing with internal communities for a few years now, often without truly understanding how to energize and leverage their power, but goofy expressions such as “Facebook for Enterprise” are now making their way into executives wish lists and discourses. Social platforms vendors aren’t helping either. Socialtext’s claim is ‘Social Networking with Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration’; Jive Software presents its SBS software as “robust social networking software for employee communities”. An awful 2.0 mess…

Technology itself, introducing more and more real-time capabilities into platforms, contributes further in blurring the lines between communities and networks.

Both concepts have their place in the connected Enterprise. Not only is the understanding of what differentiates them is key to successfully implement socio-collaborative initiatives, but harnessing their complementarity also provides us with a valuable framework of building blocks to leverage the internal ecosystem of Enterprise 2.0.

Rather than fighting each other, communities and networks may, while serving different purposes, raise quality of connected work inside enterprise. Being fluid and highly interactive, networks can address specific issues out of the scope of a single community. They can be setup on demand, self-arrange to solve problems, then dismantled or put at sleep once the issue resolved. Networks act as powerful ad hoc task forces, their power amplified by real-time tools. Lot has been written about the need or not to embed community-based outcome into existing business processes.  I do believe than working in a connected environment will ultimately lead to replace our actual processes by some new adaptive individually empowered mechanisms, and we can already put this vision at work: correctly driven (and understood, which means they must not been implemented as a substitute for communities but built ASIDE them), social networks have the tremendous power to deliver.