Andrew McAfee started his excellent, keynote speech at the Office 2.0 Conference by saying that he was going to pose more questions than answers, and that is a reflection of the fact that we are right at the start of the change to office 2.0 and enterprise 2.0. This is as significant a change, with similar characteristics to the time when the IBM PC came along and desktop applications and networked PCs challenged the centralised world of mainframe and midrange enterprise applications. Andrew was explaining where we are at now, but wondering what the situation will be like in 2, 3 or 5 years from now. He categorised the types of technologies we use as:
- Structured interactions, handled by standard business applications - Enterprise IT
- Unstructured interactions, where we use e-mail and the Internet - Network IT
- Discrete tasks, like creating a document, or designing a presentation - Function IT
Then he added Enterprise 2.0 to his diagram alongside the unstructured interactions adding blog and wiki technology along with prediction markets and tags. He explained that the O20 and E20 technologies are beginning to blur the boundaries between these types of technology, even though the current products aren’t that easy to use, lack workflow and integration capabilities. As these issues are addressed, the picture will change.
He then went on to discuss the different characteristics of the constituencies that make use of the technologies - User, Managers and Organisations. Users are deeply social, busy and often irrationally biased. For them the tools must be intuitive and easy to use, or they just won’t get adopted. He expounded the 9x rule, quoting John Gourville. We tend to overweight the tools we already have by about 3 times, and underweight the new tool we are being offered by 3 times, so this gives a factor of 9x between the old and the new, so the new tool has to be 10 times better than the current tool before it get’s adopted. I can see this phenomenon at work in our Enterprise Irregulars group. Like so many current users we are comfortable with e-mail as our collaboration tool of choice. We’ve improved things slightly by using a Google group so we can organise our discussion threads, but we also have two wikis. Even this group of over 40 technology and E20 evangelists avoid using the wiki to collaborate on content, simply because in the form we’ve implemented it, it isn’t 10 time better. Doh!
Andrew was discussing our social nature, explaining that although we are all individual, our differences are weak. He quoted a great example of a social psychology experiment where students at a seminary were each asked to go to explain the parable of the good Samaritan, and then suddenly told that had to go now to present their parable immediately in a particular room. On the route, somebody was planted playing the part of a passed out drunk. Every student rushed on past to get to the presentation.
However, all users aren’t created equal, and question from the audience triggered Andrew to discuss the fact that, in general 90% of users are lurkers who don’t contribute. 9% do make the effort to do something, and only 1% are the main contributors. He highlighted that organisations need to engender a management culture with the good, stated reasons for the collaboration required, and an atmosphere for putting that in to practice. That is one of the keys to getting blog and wiki technology adopted by organisations, although the young workforce, MySpace generation will begin to change the dynamics over time in any case.
He explained that the biggest opportunity for companies is to find a way to tap in to the knowledge and human capital in their organisation, and that is exactly what these kinds of tools could be addressing.
However, one of the key barriers is that CIOs are threatened by the rise in this kind of social software approach. The tools threaten their fiefdom, so although they are cheap, quick and easy to use, they might shrink their empire, so they typically raise security as an issue. Organisations needs some form of stealth strategy to aid adoption in spite of many CIOs.
I would have liked more answers, but this was a great session to set the scene for the conference.
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