Enterprise 2.0 and the issue of workforce composition

Following on from my previous post on the importance of social media enthusiasts breaking out of the echo chamber, I thought I would share a snippet of research from a study we conducted in collaboration with MWD a few months ago.

The reason for doing is because I think something a lot of people overlook is the composition of workforces. Advocates often argue that the real potential of ‘Enterprise 2.0’ is realised by rolling out social media freely across the workforce on a totally inclusive basis and letting people get on with it.

The problem, however, is that most employers rely on a high proportion of the workforce, those whose roles are very process and/or task oriented, just getting on with their job.



In case you are having trouble working out the use of percentages on this chart, what it is telling us is that in almost half of the organisations interviewed (a cross section of larger enterprises), fewer than one in four employees could be categorised as knowledge or information workers, i.e. the kind of employees for which a case might be made for improved collaboration.

For the remainder of employees, the potential distraction (equivalent to cost in business terms) of providing them with social media facilities is likely to far outweigh any potential benefits.

You can argue with this on idealistic grounds if you like, but if any social media advocate inherited control of a large enterprise and became immediately accountable for productivity, process efficiency, customer service and, ultimately, profitability, would they really be willing to take hit?

So, the takeaway here is to be realistic about the scope of your ambition for social media in a business context and be really quite selective about where you choose to roll it out. And if you do decide to go for it, then approach any initiative objectively. For more thoughts on this, see my article entitled 'Collaboration - get it together' published a little while back on Silicon.

Breaking out of the social media echo chamber

I was alerted through Twitter to an interesting blog post by Amber Naslund entitled "Are we sharing solutions or soundbites?", in which she discusses the issue of social media enthusiasts often failing to connect effectively with the business mainstream. She opens by saying:

Something’s been gnawing at me lately, and it’s taken some pondering to figure out exactly what it is. But I think I’m frustrated that we’re not doing a better job of carrying social media into the places it really matters: the businesses that don’t understand, don’t believe, or both.

It is a concern that immediately struck a chord with me as it is something that David and I have been discussing a lot lately - i.e. the fact that mainstream businesses need more insight into where, how and why social media fits into their world, if at all.

Amber is clearly a social media enthusiast, and just like other advocates, spends a lot of time developing and discussing ideas with like minded people, an example of the echo chamber principle in action. As she points out, though, this can can sometimes create an illusion of progress and consensus within a community that is not representative of wider world:

It’s comfortable in the echo chamber, because we can put one of our sound bites on Twitter and readily and immediately have the comfort of a bunch of replies saying “Amen”. We can put a post on our blog that outlines the truths we hold to be self evident as social media advocates, and we can be confident that there will be a trove of comments lauding us (or at the very least, merciful silence). But what good is any of that if we aren’t moving anything forward? What are we doing for those who are not yet sold on any of this?

Amber goes on to discuss some of the questions that need to be addressed to move things forward in a tangible manner and her full post is well worth a read (see here).

If you pop over there, you'll see quite a few interesting comments, including a couple that demonstrate the purist mindset that particularly thrives in the echo chamber and is in fact a big mpediment to making progress.

Buried in the thread somewhere are my own thoughts on the matter, but for your convenience, here they are cross posted from the original comment:

The biggest problem advocates have is the ‘magic bullet’ mindset. If you are a business leader or CIO, then the sound bites that get fired at you from the social media camp are just part of a constant stream of ‘magic’ propositions that hit you from IT vendors, management consultants, analysts, and, indeed, other advocacy groups such as the open source movement, cloud evangelists, etc.

Beyond this, there is a tendency for advocates to think far too generically, assuming that everyone has the same business problems and objectives, all weighted in the same way. This is not the real world. Culture, objectives, constraints, workforce composition, level of regulation, nature of IT landscape, etc, vary immensely between industries and organisation sizes, even between individual companies who might look very similar from the outside.

Against this background, it is impossible to generalise on the ‘actual’ impact of social media in business, not to mention the perceived relevance by business decision makers, as it is all so dependent on the environment. Adoption practicalities too are also dependent on context.

I picked up on one aspect of this recently, the cultural dimension, in a recent article I put together which discusses a snippet from a research study we conducted a few months ago (see here), but even that is only part of the equation.

The practicality of social media adoption, which is most productively considered alongside broader collaboration, BPM/workflow solutions, and emerging ideas in unified communications, is something we at Freeform Dynamics will be spending a lot more time on in 2009.

Meanwhile, I would urge social media enthusiasts to turn the telescope around and adopt a bit more humility. Enterprise 2.0 is just one part of a big complex set of things that’s going on in terms of business evolution, and it is important for advocates to get a handle on the bigger picture and understand where their ideas fit into the greater scheme of things.

Downturn perception versus reality?

I am in two minds about the feedback we have received recently through our research which tells us that IT professionals are generally not predicting doom, gloom and/or panic as a result of the credit crunch and associated economic downturn. I have written a couple articles for The Register and Computing which summarise the sentiment we are picking up (see here and here), and the level-headedness is on face value very encouraging.

But I can’t shake this nagging thought that people are simply underestimating the degree to which their IT budgets are going to be hit. This is one of thoose situations that arise from time to time when the feedback we receive through surveys and other input does not sit well with your instincts as an analyst.

Then again, perhaps I am being unduly influenced by news reports of household names in the retail industry going under, and the general sentiment in the mainstream media and amongst financial analysts that 2009 is going to be really tough in most markets. The BBC today has been forecasting unemployment figures shooting up to near 3 million again in the UK over the coming 12 months, for example, with the service sector being hit particularly hard.

However bad it gets, though, the good thing is that IT departments, for the time being at least, still seem to have a little time and budget to prepare for the worst. This got Tony and I thinking about the kinds of things IT professionals could consider doing to put themselves and the companies they work for into the best position to manage things as efficiently and effectively as possible through the hard times that are likely to come.

As is the nature of these things, the more we talked, the more we could think of, and we ended up turning the whole discussion into a full 15 page report on the kinds of measures that could be considered, from the obvious infrastructure improvement stuff, through various ways of enabling the business itself to respond appropriately to increased economic pressure and uncertainty. We have also included some thoughts on one of Tony's particular domains of interest and expertise - alternative funding and financing options for IT investment - an often neglected area that could come into much sharper focus over the coming months.

Anyway, if you are interested in our thoughts and conclusions, the report is entitled “IT Delivery in the Downturn”, and, as per the usual drill, it can be downloaded free of charge from here.

The futility of challenging Apple perfection

I know, I should get over it, but it does annoy me the way the Jobs faithful go on about everything being perfect in their world and Apple being able to do no wrong. Perhaps its age or maybe I have got some kind of genetic disorder that prevents me from ‘getting’ the whole Apple thing.

When I look at the Mac, all I see is a computer that uses exactly the same GUI paradigm as Windows PCs, just implemented a little differently, though not differently enough to pay a massive price premium for or to justify all of the hassle associated with switching and having to live with irritating compatibility issues. I then look at the iPhone and see a user interface design that has been deliberately dumbed-down and sacrifices efficiency for novice user simplicity, all powered by a handset with appalling battery life and inadequate external controls because the ‘slim and sleek’ look was prioritised above utility.

Now when I say these kinds of things, it is easy for me come across as ‘Apple bashing’, but in reality, my observations are simply made to challenge the notion that Apple is delivering stuff that is perfect and somehow more ‘special’ than other manufacturers, because it is not. Sure it has come up with some nice designs and implemented some original thinking in certain areas, but nowhere near as much as a player like IBM, for example, which has invested in and delivered serious innovation (as opposed to Apply style ‘nice touches’) for decades – there is no comparison here.

Where Apple is different is with respect to openness – or more accurately lack of it. The faithful point to tight integration between hardware, software and services as allowing Apple to optimise the user experience. Fair enough, and as massive BlackBerry fan myself, I am familiar with the advantages of an end-to-end proprietary solution. But such tight integration is a double-edged sword in that it can restrict choice and interoperability, which *should* be a major consideration for those considering Apple kit in a business context.

Anyway, fed up with feeling like the boy in the fairytale shouting “But the emperor’s wearing no clothes”, I snuck a cheeky little question about whether Apple or Microsoft can be considered more closed into one of our market tracker surveys to see what others thought. As it turns out, the majority of those who had an opinion identified Apple as the king of closed technology and the master of proprietary controlling behaviour. See here for some examples of what people came back with – lot’s of stuff Microsoft would get slated for big time if it tried to do the same things.

Meanwhile, at a personal level, having tried OS X for a couple of months, I thought it was alright, but my MacBook Pro now boots into Vista – not because I think it is better, but because it is simply more convenient and productive for the job I do. I wish I could say that my iPhone had been similarly repurposed, but it is pretty much just sitting there doing nothing at the moment. As a hard-core BlackBerry user, the iPhone looks like a clumsy prototype that is a total non-starter for my road-warrior type business requirements. I have even stopped using it for music as the user interface is nowhere near as quick and convenient as the navigation wheel on my iPod, which I have now gone back to.

But, having said all that, I have come to terms with the fact that I am not going to win these arguments. Apple somehow seems to have struck a chord with the masses and the elite, so I’ll just shut up from now on, accept my Apple blindness as personal affliction, and let them get on with it.