Green Tea Ice Cream

Well, I eventually made it into the session. I can’t say as it had 100% of my attention as a steady stream of people chose that particular hour to hammer on my door with papers that needed signing, reports that needed checking and all the everyday detritus of an overly operational department, but some interesting points managed to filter through all the local distractions. The focus was on adoption of “Enterprise 2.0″ technologies, though perhaps that turned out to be too defuse a subject area as there wasn’t (a generic problem with any kind of short, round-table discussion, admittedly) much scope to develop specific issues.

Still, here are my (very) rough notes and reactions:

1. The line-up. Not sure how long this link may be live.A stellar crew but ten men and three women.? I guess that’s why they call it Enterprise. This may sound like a trivial niggle but it could be argued that the majority of the corporate workers who could benefit most from improved social networking technology are women. Information is a resource, control of resources equals power, destabilising the control of information through social software spreads that power more evenly – and I’d contend that an organisation where people have more equitable access to resources is a more effective one.But I’m getting way off topic…
2. Dealing with opposition. Euan Semple was great. I never encountered him during my two stints at the BBC and that was definitely my loss. At one point he suggested that one tactic for dealing with the digitally obtuse (my term) was to wait for them to die! More seriously, he talked about dealing with opposition through collecting return on investment stories and turning the question back on doubters (the ROI on a Wiki compared to having a meeting, what’s the ROI on email…).  I think that most management opposition comes down to wanting to see something quantifiable. To expand on that, corporations are uneasy with things they can’t measure and much opposition comes from an almost instinctive urge to drive a stake through any new or less than immediately comprehensible. Jenny Ambrozek (I think it was her – speakers didn’t regularly announce their names so it wasn’t always easy to tell) commented that with a wiki, everything that goes on is available for audit, a level of transparency you don’t often find in corporate activities.
3. Structure vs improvisation. Some interesting exchanges on the extent corporate wikis (and that seemed to be the focal technology) need to be steered or structured. Views ranged from winding it up and letting it go to setting up wikis with very specific goals. Even in the context of a relatively free instantiation, panellists agreed that there was a need for “co-conspirators” (Semple’s term). Suggestions were to build wikis that cry out to be re-fashioned (though I’m not clear on how that encourages the uncertain or under-confident to join in) or to simply move some essential (but presumably non-mission critical!) activities wholesale onto the new platform so that people were obliged to engage.
4. Predictions for Enterprise 2.0 (this is very much my edited memory of some of what was said!)
   Jerry Bowles (I think): “We’re at the intersection of technical and strategic demands – people who figure it out quickly will get an edge – it’s not going to be a fast, two year cycle of development but a five year cycle…”
   Jim McGhee – “a fairly small minority of organisations will be able to make it a part of their culture – the rest will dabble or fizzle or the knowledge will remain [locked up] on a need to know in the middle..”
   Jenny Ambrozek- saw the future as somewhere between the two – “change takes a long time, it’s easier for smaller organizations who can work more nimbly. With environments like Second Life life exploding – is this [still?] web 2.0, what challenges and opportunities do these environments provide?”
   Euan Semple – “…a lot of people are trying to turn Enterprise 2.0 into a thing and make it look difficult but what we’re talking about is the ongoing learning of the web, once you had the printing press you weren’t going to give it back…” (someone’s interjection) – ” an adoption cycle quite different from the hype-cycle”

What did I learn? Well, it provided a useful personal nudge in a number of areas – one staff member came in to my office part way through the event enthusing about the wiki she’d just set up. The corporate beast in me thought “We’ve got to talk about how we use that!” Then Euan made his comment about co-conspirators, other people talked about (to paraphrase) the utter futility of managing a wiki top-down and the beast crawled back under its rock. And I’ve got a co-conspirator. Cool!

More generally, though, I couldn’t help feeling that the session as a whole shows that there is still something of a gulf between the consumer-driven, bottom-up focus of web 2.0 and the ambitions of the proponents of Enterprise 2.0 to bring about a similar level of change and disruption (a positive word in my lexicon) to the habits of organisations. I do believe that it’s possible to deploy the insights of community driven practice to bring about all manner of change within an organisation but I don’t think that it can be done without a deep understanding of the nature and dynamics of organisations. Still, early days.