Adam: October 2008 Archives

UPDATE: Alan at Broadstuff highlights some of the problems with this argument.

As  Lee pointed out in a comment, the one frustration with this expo is that it's been long on the idea that Web 2.0 is important to enterprise, but rather short on actual detail.

JP Rangaswami of BT Design went a little bit further in that direction, by outlining how social tools can usefully become part of our working practices - and even build on some of the existing ones.

Social tools enavble the communities within businesses to emerge. There are fewer figures of authority and it's more a peer space than the traditional heirarchial business.

And it's worth bearing in mind that communities are not mutually exclusive. You can be (and are part) of many communities, and (if you're lucky) many communities select you to be part of them.

Young people today are going to come into the workplace used to pervasive. mobile communications and they're not going to be impressed with the static, lock-down worsktations we have now.

"They're pre-trained not to think as stupidly as previous generations," said JP.

And you only get proper levels of productivity by loosening you grip on these tools. Instant messenging can be important because it's one of the few forms of communication where it's polite to be silent. "Are you still there?" has become part of the language of phones because mobiles drop connections. In IM it's not necessary, because there's a status, allowing you to see if people are online or not, or if they're busy, or away from their computers. In this context, e-mail has almost become snail mail - people become irritated if you don't reply.

So, public indications of what you're doing is useful. But in most companies, Outlook rules our lives, and it can tell you that the best time for this group of people to meet is this date. But it doesn't share or advertise that information beyond that group.

Compare that to Twitter where you can have a person to person conversation using the @username protocol, but it's in public. You can take it private if you want, through direct mesages, but the conversation is still captured in a useful form.

This isn't particualrly new - there have been forms of an activity stream or newsfeed since 2006 at least. But using these activity streams for aggregation of community activity is valuable. If you can share that data maongst working teams - or communities -  you gain the benefits of the network effect.

The final keynote of the day was given by Dion Hinchcliffe, who talked about the impact of Web 2.0 on the enterprise. Some of his presentation seemed to irk people who posted about it on Twitter, but I'll come back to that in a moment.

There were no real surprises in his preamble. Big, traditional companies struggling to get to grips with the internet, but they need to because 99% of people you want to access are there. And so are their competitors, and they have equal access. Traditional advantages like location mean nothing here.

"We've had [the internet] for 16 years, and only now are we getting a sense of how to win," said Hinchcliffe. "The rules are so different that there's a kind of congnitive dissinance about how much your business needs to change."

And this is where the controversy happened. He started talking about how to get Enterprise 2.0 ideas into your business.  "The easiest way to do it is to do nothing at all," he said. The ideas are viral and come in through the network."

Now, I thought he said "but not the best", but other people missed it, or I hallucinated it because both Suw and Andy posted tweets that disagreed:

(Suw's tweet, Andy's tweet)

However, whatever the level of importance he put on the idea, his suggestion was that these tools are so compelling that clued-up users will push them into work environment with or without IT's help.