Enterprise 2.0 Musings

Last week’s blog post was about a very concrete example for Web 2.0 – official Facebook page or not. I will push the release button after I’m back from China and beg for people’s “likes”

This week I would like to expand a little bit and muse about the “company” aspect of Web 2.0 which is summarized under Enterprise 2.0 – for a nice if not exhaustive definition of Enterprise 2.0 you can check this Wikipedia article.

Due to my job, I got a bit involved in this topic and will probably be much more involved in it in the future.

There are many things bugging me about this and the currently biggest is this:

Up to, let’s say, the 1970ties or even 1980ties we did business via phones, typewriters and letters, telex and faxes and stuff like that. Then we got the computer revolution and we got fancier phones, computers and email instead of typewriters and letters. There is no doubt that email made the world faster. All sorts of information, large documents, etc. were suddenly delivered instantly.

Now we have the next revolution around the corner, maybe we will not communicate via email anymore soon but by company equivalents of facebook, twitter, linked in, google + etc.

I am wondering though whether this will speed things up or not? Speed = time = money, speedier, speedier is the ultimate goal, and companies are greedily looking for anything that could speed up their processes.

At the moment I do not feel that social media are speeding things up though. They are rather slowing down, they create digital noise. Everybody throws out random information of whatever sort that he/she hopes his/her friends will take notice of, “like”, respond to, etc. … All that takes time.

Now, companies don’t want people to chat about the weather or their dogs during working hours but about business relevant topics. But even there, they want you to talk about business related topics that are relevant for YOUR specific job and not what department xyz is doing. I think the key success factor for companies in the Enterprise 2.0 area is to get the people to minimize digital noise = irrelevant crap, and to make them to issue the right information in the right amount at the right time to the right people. A mammoth task in my humble opinion and I don’t see a recipe anywhere on how to do that.

If I look into the social media tool that the company is about to launch and of which I am a pilot user I am confronted with an endless jungle in which I have to invest time to find the information relevant to me = it takes me longer than writing a few emails! I don’t think that companies know how to use social media for their advantage yet. It seems to me that at the moment they are counter productive to the desire for faster speed that companies have.

The social media issue is also scratching at another “holy cow” of companies: Leadership. While in the past there was the boss and people did (or did not) what he/she said, now the focus shifts to more cooperation, collaboration, team-work and bosses having to enable their staff rather than issue orders. That in itself is a nice thing, but many of the older generation that grew up with typewriters and letters find it difficult to adapt. Social media could help here or again hinder and make it more difficult for business leaders to decide something.

One thing is for sure, we are living in times of change and it doesn’t get boring!

Any opinions or experiences from your side? Would social media or do social media make companies slower or faster?

Thanks for your opinions!