These days there has been an enormous amount of content and information flowing through the web about Enterprise 2.0 and how to specifically deploy social media tools within the enterprise that don’t
a) go stale with abandoned use
and
b) don’t expose people’s collaborative tendencies or lack thereof’.
Social Media relates to mainly web based tools, applications or utilities that generate and encourage conversation and activities that create degrees of participation and solidarity. Facebook, a social networking utility which falls under the overriding branch of social media, is an exemplary example of what encapsulates the essential features of the Web 2.0
However, despite the utilisation of a cocktail of web and mobile technologies; organisations are still finding it very hard to create that type of idealistic environment with social media (e.g wikis); and things are not turning out the way higher level management thought it would when they championed the implementation of social media in their businesses in the first place.
A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald entitled “Not every blog has its day – Lia Timson has some interesting points. As a point of reference, it should be noted that the innovation manager of Deloitte Australia – Simon Townsend – has a strong belief in how the general wisdom of the crowds shape their own direction. Within these contexts, the crowds will have tribes or castes of people who prefer one tool over another; as he puts it “the failing of wikis is that they are not completely intuitive. Not everyone likes that way of working”.
The article delineates the urgency of comprehending and acknowledging the “human being part of the equation”. This view is concurrent amongst others such as Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer whose primarily role is to drive “practice [in collaborative web based tools ], not just interest”.
In all totality, Deloitte’s Townsend’s says that something will be more like twitter and less like Wikipedia; and it will have to be intuitive and be underpinned by a robust databank with advanced search and tagging functions. At Deloittes, half of the company’s 4500 staff use the micro blogging software Yammer – which is very similar to Twitter except that organisations can purchase a “claim” to their network and gain administrative control of their employee’s ecosystem.
As with most social media software, it all starts out with a simple executed function such as a request for business question (in Deloitte’s case). What then develops is a concurrent culmination of knowledge and expertise which creates a repository of information from all tiers of individual expertise.
So in this light, one can appreciate there has to be some kind of high level social media maturity model. Lets classify them in stages shall we:
Stage 1: Pioneering – Where the three perspectives [Employee;Organizational;Technological] are aligned against a bottom up;
open source chartered technology and platform
architecture; together with a high social media focus
aligned against a solid vision with the right leadership and
governance.
Stage 2: Facilitating – Again, all perspectives are taken into account with more emphasis on the social/employee perspective to encourage community and a centralized approach to team building. Enterprise tools at this stage could start to be embedded within the social media tools scoped out in the pioneering stage.
Stage 3: Strategic Operations – In Stage 3; On demand and user centric technology platforms are rolled out initially and aligned against the overall organizational perspective and ergonomics. Although the tendency during this stage is to induce a freeze through Lewin’s force field analysis and induce a pull type of behaviour in employees which induces a higher propensity for participation and technology adoption.
We can surely appreciate the complexity which arises when digging into the blueprints and tasks schedules for teams involved in any facilitation or creation of technology platforms. In fact, the hardest part would be to align the existing capabilities of staff with cross and up-skilling. Different organisations have various approaches for coaching and people development, but in today’s Network Economy; what is required is something that aligns capabilities of teams with the necessary etiquette and know-how on using the plethora of free web based technologies out there.
In addition, to maintain congruency and a degree of control or moderation over employee behaviour and discourse (think Deloitte with Yammer); companies need to actually create a standardised behavioural system on team members defining how they are to achieve sustainability in agility, integrity and still manage all the changes to systems and processes and not to mention re-deployments during times of significant organisational change.
At the moment, I strongly believe the only way to achieve team-oriented outcomes is to create a clear and public accountability mechanism that ensures total transparency and optimistic outcomes. In my experience and affiliations with one of my root sources of inspiration, Bioteaming and the founder of this school of thought – Ken Thompson – I have learnt that the future of work in a network economy will be based on self-organising teams which are highly proficient on internet and cloud based applications.
Bioteaming as a business practice will emerge as the
new Team 2.0 in the greater World 2.0 spectrum. As
Ken Thompson puts it
“As enterprises gradually decentralize their operations
and new networked business ecosystems start to find
their way into profitable niche marketplaces, virtual,
networked business teams gradually emerge as the
wave of the future.
To be successful, virtual, networked business teams
need a strategic framework in which to operate. They
also need good planning and in-depth project analysis,
effective and accessible technologies, constant
coaching, systematic fine-tuning, feedback processes
and the full understanding that their success cannot
be determined by a pre-designated set of
communication technologies by itself”
So this basically sums it up and defines the need for virtual teams to flourish with new working practices based on simple principals of mutual trust.
If you are therefore looking for a reference to where to start on how to engineer your Team 2.0 – visit Ken Thompson’s shared knowhow blog www.bioteams.com and specifically this article http://www.bioteams.com/2005/04/06/bioteaming_a_manifesto.html and take interest in the link to the Change This dot com article.
Ken Thompson is an expert practitioner in the overall sphere of social media and sales optimization together with delivering keynote conference speeches and in house consultancy workshops. His direct speciality lies in utilising real time simulations, creating high performing teams, incubating business networks, social media and sales optimization and a plethora of team building workshops rooted in biological theory. He has been the prime source of inspiration for my blog: thealphaswarmer. 10/03/2011
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