I’m excited to share with you that Bill Ives is featuring a series on his Portals and KM blog this week called Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One. Today’s link is here. I’ve been a big fan of Bill’s for the past couple of years. I’ve always had an interest in the topics he covers, and I like the way he covers them. Well, thanks to the magic of twitter and blogging, we got into a conversation about the topics we share an interest in — like Enterprise 2.0, KM, productivity, etc.
As the conversation turned into a conversational interview, we started to talk about an interesting edge condition: Can Enterprise 2.0 scale down, all the way down, to an Enterprise of One? Consider the irony, Enterprise 2.0 faces scale challenges when you consider large companies. I hear an odd Catch-22 of issues from practitioners challenged by the issue of scale:
- “Enterprises are too small for the network effect to self-sustain”: Enterprise 2.0 cannot leverage the kind of numbers that you find on the public Web. Whereas on the Internet, you have millions of people constantly creating, refining, and promoting information — most Enterprises deal with populations in the thousands – perhaps tens of thousands. The 90-9-1 rule reminds us that typically, only a tiny percentage of participants create much of the content . But 9% and 1% of millions is a lot of people. Many Enterprises don’t have enough content creators to get critical mass without intervention from a project sponsor. So relative smallness of many companies is a challenge to the viral growth of networked activities.
- “Enterprises are too diverse for meaningful collaborations”: An interesting observation. The reason large companies are large is because there are many differentiated jobs to do. And when you put it all together, many people within companies really don’t need to talk to one another. In fact, they’d have nothing much to say to each other. In order to have a meaningful conversation, you need a shared topic. Sure, all the finance people can talk about finance; all the sales people can talk about sales; engineers, developers, and project managers can talk within their tribal groups – and they can even talk between tribes. But you can’t have everyone talk to everyone about everything. If you tried – you’d have, um, Twitter. And that’s a bit too much chatter for many companies to handle.
Both elements of feedback are true in a sense, and yet with careful community management, enterprises can foster organic conversations (even with fewer than millions of people), and these conversations bring meaning and value to the workplace (because employees find those in the organization they will have valuable conversations with). But when you scale down, all the way down, to the single person shop — then where is the conversation? Isn’t E2.0 all about the conversation? Where’s my dogeared copy of The Cluetrain Manifesto?
Of course those who are in an enterprise of one engage in conversations! And yes, there is more to E2.0 than facilitating conversations. A big part of the E2.0 puzzle is to address some of the good old Knowledge Management and Business Process Management problems that are a constant challenge to every organization or every size. What I mean: Most people struggle with simple questions like these:
- Where should I put information that I’m working on?
- Where should I put information that I want to share with others?
- Where should I put information that I think I’m done working with?
- Where can I find the information that I know I put somewhere?
- Where can I find information that someone has made available for me?
These are basic questions that are at the core of managing knowledge and managing knowledge processes. And we all deal with these questions — even if we are self-employed, or unemployed.
So Bill and I had a great conversation about the tools out there that can help. He took lots of notes and captured many elements of the conversation that I think will be very valuable to you — even if you are in a large or medium enterprise. I highly recommend reading his series. I promise to follow up in subsequent posts by sharing with you some other tools that I use to manage information.
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I must say this is a great article i enjoyed reading it keep the good work
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Excellent post, and sounds like a stimulating conversation. Sitting within an organization trying to leverage E2.0, we are hitting similar barriers…
I agree with the “Enterprises are too small for the network effect to self-sustain” concept, and my belief is that the really powerfully viral effects of social media can happen only if an organization is willing to go outside the Enterprise, and connect with the outside world for opinion, feedback, brainstorming etc.
Often this concept is met with resistance, even within a large organization’s own intranet, centrist corporate culture usually finds itself ill at ease with the “uncontrollable” feel of collaboration across silos, which to management often feels like a lack of focus on their own departmental priorities.
My point is that not only size of the organization, but also corporate culture matters in being able to make work “Social” again, (a phrase the launch of Jive SBS today is trying to coin).
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Jurgen,
You make an excellent point about bringing the virility and energy of the public conversation into the enterprise itself it. But you will get resistance — as you should expect.
Let me suggest that one way to manage this (at least at first), is to have the community manager – a trusted employee of the company who seeks to help grow the E2.0 initiative in a way that protects the company’s interests – have him or her be the conduit for the information flow between the internal and external conversations. This gives management “one throat to choke” — a sense of control and focus. Consider that most companies have someone on staff (or on contract) who talks to the press; and have written policies that tell all employees never talk to the press on behalf of the company — rather to forward all inquiries to the PR department. This is what organizations are used to – and for good reason. PR is a skill, and when done well, is crucial to handling the tough situations. Community Management is a public relations role – if not directly, at least in spirit.
When the community manager does the job well, demonstrating careful attention to issues of reputation, information leakage, relevance, and value, this will set the tone for others to copy. There’s much more to say here, so I guess I’ll start to draft a post on this topic! But this is one of the reasons that E2.0 communities (especially in medium and large organizations) need need need community managers.
Thanks for the response, and I agree that some thoughts on “Best Practices for E2.0 Community Managers” would make a great blog post
I somewhat question that a community manager would have enough SME knowledge to himself navigate detailed topics that others within his organization may have knowledge of, so if the organization expects that role to be a “single voice” to the outside world, it would surely fail…
Likely a more successful approach would be for him/her to be a moderator of conversations with the outside world; I think a lot of innovation comes from dynamic / direct exchanges of participants who are passionate on the same subject matter.
The mechanism of how a community manager can foster and cultivate this without getting in the way would be interesting to explore, and also how the size of an organization influences the setup for this.
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agreed. And I think there are different levels of Community Management. SME leader is the best, of course.
Your simple questions have inspired us! We’ve adopted the phrase “Aware of and Access to” as part of our value proposition. I really do dig the intellectual honesty that there are some very fundamental issues that vex knowledge workers each and every day. Cheers, SQ
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