Well, I think it’s still a field under construction, all systems normal – but it’s also promising and rapidly evolving. This industry is forward-looking and the value of the field is now validated (not by numbers or cases – 1.500 attendees are pretty impressive still, as are the numbers of exhibitors – but rather by the quality and matureness of the talks and discussions and by the case studies and experiences of those engaged in it). It’s now necessary to really show and tell companies how to leverage it (less complicated for tools, way more complex in terms of Enterprise 2.0 paradigms, principles and methods) to improve business performance, processes and overall company fitness. Now, more companies begin to make significant investments in Enterprise 2.0 platforms, following the early adopters. And they all know that they are in this for the long haul (and plan for a longer journey without shortcuts, avoid cargo cult imitation and thus may head for sustainable success).

Some of my other learnings include:
- I like this town, its systems of public transportation and the attitude of its people, though there are times when you wonder a bit. I don’t like that you have to pay the equivalent of 6€ for a regular beer, on the other hand this is probably a good thing too …
- a new acronym – HiPPOs – the Highest Paid Person in the Organization via Andrew McAfee’s keynote (on the four tensions of Enterprise 2.0). I like funny metaphors.
- live-waving and -documenting during a conference is demanding (I either need more collaborators on this or a time-machine, hint). Some more thoughts on this later.
- interesting that both sessions I probably enjoyed the most were kind of “sandwiching” the actual conference, ie. the Monday all-day workshop of the 2.0 Adoption Council and Thursday’s Enterprise 2.0 townhall meeting. This mustn’t worry the people in between like the keynote speakers – the format of discussing in a smaller group like on Monday is very hard to beat.

In the townhall meeting (acting as both “time to look back and review” and forum) we agreed that integration, processes, (organizational) culture and finally metrics and the corresponding approaches to (understand) the measuring of success must be topics to watch more, as they were spared a bit from this year.

Besides this, what was missing from the mix at #e2conf that can be dealt with next time? Legal and technocratic aspects of Enterprise 2.0 (or they were sailing out of my sight, hmm, I heard some small mentioning of compliance). Dealing with the technological underpinnings (good thing). And more interestingly: Tackling the complexities of organizational psychology and the changing nature of leadership in a social web world. Organizational development and its established and able set of methods and tools (this one really should be a natural fit as its paradigms and principles are very fitting to those of Enterprise 2.0 and it may inform and help us dealing with that big, hairy thing called culture).

So I am now planning for the next #e2conf planned for Santa Clara in November (the call for papers is open). I would love to be there again and am thus thinking of handing in a proposal (there’s an idea that emerged between the european crowd in a pause outside the Westin, it needs some flesh but it sounds interesting so far

ps. Yes, visiting the refurbished frogpond has to wait till next time in Boston. Above the sad reality of my trip there on Friday, all empty and no ducks or frogs in sight. But construction work is necessary at times, and it helps in building a nicer environment for us all …

Gil Yehuda said at the SUMMIT that we need to choose the right words and a common vocabulary when communicating (with the C-level I think especially). It’s probably a matter of media channel too …

One of the books that was discussed quite a lot was Andrew McAfee’s book “Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges” (Disclosure: I am going to write a detailed review soon, after all I was given the book by Andrew’s agent at HBS Publishing knowing that I’m a blogger and would probably write about it – no further arrangements have been made and I am writing my honest opinions anyway). Apparently he signed and sold hundreds of them at last weeks Enterprise 2.0 conference, the stacks look impressive for sure (see the photo by Dion Hinchcliffe who managed to be among the first in line …)

Next up with various recommendations from various people was Morton Hansen’s book “Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Build Common Ground, and Reap Big Results” – funny how everybody thinks this might be interesting for me

I should probably check it out as well, but I may have to wait until my trip to the U.S. for Lotussphere to lay my hands upon one.
…

Frank Schoenefeld’s book “Praxisleitfaden Enterprise 2.0. Wettbewerbsfähig durch neue Formen der Zusammenarbeit, Kundenbindung und Innovation. Basiswissen zum erfolgreichen Einsatz von Web 2.0-Technologien” is one german language entry into this field, at the SUMMIT he said that there may be an english translation coming up … (Disclosure again: I was given the book by Frank Schoenefeld, all other rules and remarks stay the same as above …)

Last one in the list of “newly published” paperworks is the 20Adoption Council‘s first report on how to “roll out e20 in a large enterprise”. Sounds interesting too, and I should ask Susan or Gil about it sometime soon …

The 2.0 Adoption Council is conducting ground-breaking research on its members. As each member is screened for eligible membership in the Council, our data set is among the best in the business for early adoption of 2.0 technologies and practices.

[...] Who should buy this report?

• CEOs, CIOs, and CFOs now engaged in or planning an 2.0 strategy and execution
• Companies competing or partnering with 2.0 platform and solution vendors
• IT managers charged with providing 2.0 capabilities to their enterprise workforce
• Vendors developing community management strategies for their customers
• KM, HR, R&D managers interested in how to leverage 2.0 for the enterprise
• Venture capitalists, analysts, investment bankers, and advisors in the 2.0 consulting arena [this sounds pretty much like me, huh?].

PS. another meme I thought a bit present at the SUMMIT was “social business design”. One personal reason for this was the presentation by Jeff Dachis at the E2Conf in San Francisco I listened into the week before, another one Lee Bryant’s presentation on new forms of leadership in decentralized organizations (where he employed Dachis Group visualizations of social business design archetypes) and last reason’s Dion’s observation in both masterclass and closing note that it’s about competitive advantages (and those are the focus and goal of business model innovation and design) primarily when we deal with Enterprise 2.0.

That said I thought it cool to link to some more books on my reading list, as much from the design thinking as from the business model innovation sphere. Beginning with Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value by Thomas Lockwood which was recommended to me at the SUMMIT, then it’s A Fine Line: How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business by Hartmut Esslinger and Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and inspires Innovation by Tim Brown of Ideo up on the slate.

And last but not least it’s The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the next competitive advantage by Roger Martin where it’s time to add another disclaimer: I am going to write a detailed review soon, after all I was given the book by Roger’s agent at HBS Publishing knowing that I’m a blogger and would probably write about it – no further arrangements have been made and I am writing my honest opinions anyway (be it at my other blog Business Model Innovation and Design or here).

Well, after I’ve finished my little series on E20SUMMIT learnings, part 4 coming soon.

Enterprise 2.0, properly implemented, can create a barrier to exit.

[...] it can help companies retain valuable knowledge workers by weaving social bonds into the fabric of the workplace.

“People think twice about leaving and giving up all that”

Sounds a bit like “silk bondage” replacing the iron cask of lifetime-employment – but I wouldn’t be so negative, would I? It’s probably more about designing a workplace people enjoy and allowing the growth of employee’s social capital is good business practice with (hard to calculate but substantial) side benefits. Preserving functioning teams (and collaborative networks) by keeping people from leaving for good is one good benefit, OK.

Yet I wonder how this ties in with a caring for work-life balance – nurturing human-relations to colleagues, partners and bosses is vital, but this isn’t the social life of people alone. Entertaining a campus cafeteria, pet barber shop and sports facilities might be good for people with work-related friends mostly, but this is worrying me a bit. What’s your take, am I too negative and “german” again?

Why do some teams fail to use their members’ knowledge effectively, even after they have correctly identified each other’s expertise? This paper identifies performance pressure as a critical barrier to effective knowledge utilization. Performance pressure creates threat rigidity effects in teams, meaning that they default to using the expertise of high-status members while becoming less effective at using team members with deep client knowledge. Using a multimethod field study across two professional service firms to refine and test the proposed model, I  lso find that only the use of client-specific expertise (not the expertise of high-status members) enhances client-rated performance. This paper thus reveals a paradox affecting teams’ use of members’ knowledge: the more important the project, the less effective the team. This paper contributes to the emerging literature linking team-level expertise utilization (instead of just recognition) with performance outcomes and also adds a novel, team-level perspective to the literature on inter-firm relations.

This is close to being an organizational collaboration pathology – huh? Now, it’s clear that having some slack time to build up social capital is essential (for building up trust and more – we’re talking of forming, norming, storming phases in teams) while in reality teams don’t always get that time (it’s a fast-paced multi-project world after all).

But putting on the heat on teams with an overblown performance focus seems to aggravate effects we know by the name of group think (and the related fall-back to well-established patterns when the going gets rough). And group norms kill creativity:

Unfortunately groups only rarely foment great ideas because people in them are powerfully shaped by group norms: the unwritten rules which describe how individuals in a group ‘are’ and how they ‘ought’ to behave. Norms influence what people believe is right and wrong just as surely as real laws, but with none of the permanence or transparency of written regulations…the unwritten rules of the group, therefore, determined what its members considered creative. In effect groups had redefined creativity as conformity.

Now what role may social software play in this situation? I agree that just mimicking Xing or LinkedIn in the hope of supporting and facilitation intra-company knowledge networks is bound to fail (and more, it’s following a flawed paradigm, social networks in companies should be understood as emergent properties of this complex social system we call organization). Designing the knowledge environments (and tools) for smart and action-oriented workers tasked with creative jobs is not easy (and very dependent of actual context too), letting the connections between interdependent teams simply emerge is a challenge. Just think of the various relations we entertain to people not in our actual company network (freelancers, alumni, competitors and complementors, partners, …), these are complex systems too:

Now, I am trying to pursue an open ended and flexible approach to both talks and was thus looking around for some nifty visualizations to provide some additional structuring without being too restrictive (yes, I was shortly pondering the use of wordles too) . Honestly, there are a lot of nice looking social media whatever visualizations – including David Armano’s take on social business design which I bookmarked then and which served me as kind of starting point:

Basically it’s a visualization that guides us onto good questions, and a lot of room for improvisation in an adaptive workshop setting too: What would businesses be like if they were truly social?:

Imagine if a company like GM, was at the core “social”. Not just participating in “social media”—but through every part of their business ecosystem, were connected—plugged into a collective consciousness made up of ALL their constituents, from employees to consumers to dealers, to assembly line work[er]s etc. What if big organizations worked the way individuals now do. We’re actively using cloud services, mobile, networks and applications that offer real time dynamic signals vs. inefficient and static e-mail exchanges. In short, imagine if what makes “Web.2.0″ revolutionary was applied to every facet of an organization transforming how we work, collaborate and communicate? We think this is possible. And we’re calling it “social business design“.

I really like that approach, for one it’s probably one small step closer to some kind of nice and “easy as it gets to explain” consultancy “products” (probably neede for the Enterprise 2.0 field to flourish, see comments #2 and#4 at the link, alas german language), second it’s incorporating a good part of the fuzzy social stuff we all know is important into the concept, while not talking tools:

[there are four] archetypes of Social Business Design:

Ecosystem - a community of connections
Hivemind - the socially calibrated mindset of individuals
Dynamic Signal – the constant multi-faceted means of collaboration
Metafilter- a method of finding signals in vast amounts of noise

Think informal social networks and their role for the real workings of organizations. Or think of the importance of “social capital”. So while some differentiation and clarification is still necessary, this may be an interesting social media (implementation) heuristic (aka “consultant’s product”).

OK, for posts on the concept see these interrelated posts (this seems to be the Dachis team together with David and Jeff Dachis, of course):

Peter Kim: Reflections on Social Business
Kate Niederhoffer: Social Business Design: a social psychologist’s take
Jevon MacDonald: Taking the Leap: Social Business Design

Especially Jevon is expanding on the intricate tasks that arise when companies become more (inter-)active, ie. matters of organization. Lately he’s been posting Understanding the role of Enterprise 2.0 and moving towards a Social Business and then Social Business Design and the Real Time Enterprise (now I get the underlying pattern behind all those scattered posts, Jevon – all the best for the dachis team).

Tomorrow and the day after I will be in Düsseldorf for the 2009 DNUG (german Notes user association) conference – this time the topic is „The Innovative Enterprise – Generating Value in a Smarter World“ (yes, we’re talking about a smarter planet here, too). Two disclaimers: I got invited by IBM to this event, and IBM is a customer of mine – anyway all tweets and blog posts are still my own opinions and all, you know the deal.

Well, I guess that the Web 2.0 (heck, Enterprise 2.0) will permeate all keynotes, workshops and even the networking (geek) talk. Definitely looking forward to this, especially to see and hear more about the more general vision “smarter working”, but also what Kevin Cavanaugh, long time IBM manager will say about composite applications (mashing up mashups?), what’s the business with Linux desktops, Lotus collaboration approaches, cloud computing vs. on premise, integration et al.

Some other highlights of the program on Tuesday (some of them on conflicting time slots, alas):

• Ich weiß, dass ich nicht weiß… Philosophische und literarische Denkanstöße für Entscheidungen in Zeiten des Kapitalismus (Florian Lier, GMI KG) – sounds interesting, huh? philosophical and literary “thinking triggers” for decisions in times of capitalism … (on Tuesday)
• Studie: IBM WebSphere, SAP, Open Source Ergebnis der Fraunhofer Studie über moderne IT-Plattformen für Geschäftsprozessmanagement und Portale, with Norbert Weißenberg (Fraunhofer-Institut für Software- und Systemtechnik), Timo Bücker (Bücker GmbH) – results of a study analysing business process management suites and portals (I guess WebSphere and Open Source are in there for a reason)
• Einsatz von Social Software in Unternehmen – Erfahrungen und Gestaltungsvorschläge Prof. Dr. Michael Koch (Universität der Bundeswehr München) – corporate uses of social software …
• Vom Web 2.0 zur Enterprise 2.0 – Bedeutung für die Führung und das Organisationsdesign Stefan Taing (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) – organizational implications of Enterprise 2.0 – leadership and organizational design
• Verbreitung von Social Software in Unternehmen: Die Erreichung der kritischen Masse Philip Räth (European Business School) – my pet theme, implementation, adoption patterns, success factors of getting Enterprise 2.0 into the corporate mindset (we will see if it’s a question of critical mass after all, my well-documented take is that it’s rather a question of perceived and realized benefit)
  

On Wednesday it’s a day of workshops for me (well, sometimes you have to integrate with Sharepoint), preceeded by keynotes:

• Keynote Speech: Lotus Online Collaboration – Experience the Possibilities
• Podiumsdiskussion: Enterprise 2.0 – Vom Mitmach-Web zum Mitmach-Unternehmen?
• Keynote Speech: Smarter Work – informierter, effizienter, produktiver arbeiten with Martin Jetter (IBM Deutschland GmbH)

With Craig Hepburn of OpenText I talked about social capital, how email is for old people, locating and leveraging knowledge in the organizations, how OpenText is understanding the Enterprise 2.0 market and how they’re tailoring their offerings.

Bummer that both lighting and the noisy surroundings at CeBIT Hall 6 prohibited a better video quality, still it’s all about content isn’t it?

[...] the subject matter tracks of the show  [...] are something of a jumble: landscape & strategy, design & user experience, development, media & marketing, finance, performance & scaling. The these tracks are all over the place. What is their umbrella theme?

then underlies it with a quote from Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organization, pp. 67-68:

Because social effects lag behind technological ones by decades, real revolutions don’t involve an orderly transition from point A to point B. Rather, they go through a long period of chaos and only then reach B. In that chaotic period, the old systems get broken long before the new ones become stable.

and concludes that this rumble jumble agenda is just perfectly normal:

[...] at the expo we can begin [to] experience the interrelationships of the many parts of the tracks into the ecology of our connected future.

Well, I guess so, still, some understanding and guidance is needed, and as that’s the most noble job of consultants I will try to shed a little light onto the program of the Web 2.0 Expo Berlin in one of my next posts (if it’s only for my own purposes and those readers who feel at home in this “ecology of our connected future”). Btw, in the past I wrote some posts on the greater topic of business ecosystems at my other blog. Brwose them if you like.

There’s another pre-conference interview (”Fallbeispiel: dbWiki – Umsetzung eines unternehmensinternen Lexikons mit Web 2.0 Technologie“) at the Enterprise 2.0 Forum site. Again it’s german language only, so here’s a short english language summary and brief analysis of the key points discussed.

This time Joachim Niemeier spoke with Dr. Matthias Büger, Vice President, Group Technology and Operations and Jamil Ouaj, GTO Communications of Deutsche Bank AG.

Topics of the conversation included:

• the understanding of Enterprise 2.0 at Deutsche Bank, i.e. the focus of E 2.0 efforts – these include supporting collaboration between employees, and enhancing the social capital inside the company and in relation to partners and customers.
• perceived benefits of Enterprise 2.0 – basically, leveraging and effectively using knowledge in social networks and communities. They pointed out that contributors can build up authority and expand their personal network in the bank, strengthening the employer (well, rather community of colleagues)-employee relationship. Well, I think that rationale is a little bit awkward. While I certainly can see the point I guess that for employees it’s important that their professional networks aren’t confined by the narrow limits of one organization (they’re no life-timers, are they?). And I am seeing more and more “natural optimizers of personal professional value” – these people value and master relationships no matter what company the other nodes are in, companies need to loosen up their borders anyway and they’re doing it in other places too (see bullet point #1 above)
• Organizational barriers of Enterprise 2.0 (namely a lack of willingness, motivation and preparedness, like e.g. overly bureaucratic structures) and how to deal with them. Yes, it’s about fitting an ambitious concept into a context that’s not ready. Their basic advice is sound – fitting Enterprise 2.0 initiatives into the overall strategic setting. I found it more interesting that he called for a more rigorous project management than usual, but that’s probably due to the nature of the beast. Banks they put so much attention on risk management, governance and diligence that it seems hard to approach things differently. See, while I hold project management dear, I also like the light-weight aspects of Enterprise 2.0 and the swiftness it brings. Hence I would rather argue for the creativity and agility of “planned and controlled experimentation” than the security of coordination meetings, processes and all (“Abstimmungsrunden und Teilprozessen”).
• finally, their wishes for the upcoming conference. This is something I fully join in: “let’s discuss this space, but leave the hype behind”

The Social Software Hype Cycle highlights the most important technologies that support rich social interactions. Use our assessment of their business relevance and maturity to guide your investment decisions.

It’s especially nice to see that wikis are finally entering the plateau of productivity (after having traversed the phases of technology trigger, peak of inflated expectations, trough of disillusionment and the slope of enlightenment), followed closely by Idea Management:

Two related technologies and trends that will reach the plateau in two to five years are Social Networking platforms and Microblogging. Good, we need more companies evaluating what role these communication sites and models can play in collaboration environments. Besides I really like Gartners analysis that firms should consider Web 2.0 (read Enterprise 2.0) if they want to drive forward business transformation. Noted are possible advances in the generation of intellectual capital and more effective decision-making, but I would also add more effective innovation management. But still a thorough analysis of needs is a good thing to have:

“The main message of the hype cycle is that organisations need to make sure that when they adopt technologies early, they do so for the right reasons – because it is aligned with an area where it is important for them to innovate, not because everyone is doing it”

More in the 2008 Gartner Hype Cycle Special Report podcast (mp3)

Let me add my two cents to the discussion, interpreting and expanding on one point I found especially interesting: His observation that just because students and young people are avid users of social networking applications, this has (at least for the time being) no direct business implications.

From my perspective today the students know a lot of tools and services as StudiVZ or Facebook; but IMO it is not clear to many students how these tools can be used effectively within organisations; therefore I believe that the students nowadays are not any further then the enterprises; but this generation will add some more pressure towards the enterprises in order to use social software tools – though they will not enrich the enterprise with some kind of application expertise.

Well, corresponds with my own experiences with students, derived e.g. from supporting a slew of university courses and related events with innovative e-learning and social media tools. Despite the successes we’ve had I hold that only some of todays students are “real digital natives (TM)”. Granted, most are accustomed to all kinds of services, and they use the internet as normal part of their daily lifes. But that doesn’t mean that

• they know how to leverage these experiences for business purposes,
• nor are they “naturally” active and creative web-people, and so I doubt that they all will (again oh so naturally) turn out to be active, creative and efficient participants in (business-oriented) Enterprise 2.0 intranets, social networks etc.

And so, while the pressure on companies to alter organizational cultures, processes and routines is surely mounting by Enterprise 2.0, it’s not alone young people entering the workforce that are causing this. Let’s keep this: age and gender are really bad indicators for “digital nativeness”, easy as they seem to be.

One might even argue that it’s rather people like Frank – well-educated, -networked and experienced knowledge workers – that are raising the pressure. Perhaps it’s the retirement of the baby boomers that should get most companies to think about Enterprise 2.0 – i.e. how to retain the considerable tacit knowledge and social capital these people have, how to enhance and retain their productivity (they’re going to work for another 30 years, don’t they?) and how to ensure that these knowledgeable people stay with us when other companies offer so much more flexibility, openness, transparency – i.e. have become Enterprises 2.0?

What do you think? I am not sure if this is a worthwhile discussion to have – and I sure am not interested in a long discussion about definitions and the like – but for understanding target groups for Enterprise 2.0 initiatives this might be interesting?

Social capital theory nicely explained, that is, citing Bill:

Dr. Nan Lin,  professor of Sociology at Duke University, defines social capital as the ability to locate and mobilize resources within your network. It’s not just who you know, it’s who will actually invest effort to help you towards your goals.

In this video, Common Craft teaches the basics of social capital theory. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear aspects of Nan Lin’s social capital model, Ronald Burt’s structural holes theory, and Mark Granovetter’s “strength of weak ties.” [...]

- people is the thing that doesn’t change – it depends on your structures, on the ways work is organized, the choreography, the inner workings etc.
- we need to think simultaneously about technologies *and* organizations, these are intertwined, no thing like Ceteris Paribus here (it’s ans AND BOTH world)
- Jenny had some concerns with the Davenport/McAfee debate, like that it omits discussion about value creation principles – again people and the structures they’re working in

Some remarks on Enterprise 2.0 SLATES, then she’s looking at Organizational Network Analysis, referring to Valdis Krebs, Rob Cross, Patti Anklam and Nancy White (crazy, I follow these people too on a regular basis). Mentions the Dunbar number, Metcalfe’s law etc.

SNA reveals informal networks, which thrive in parallel to the formal, visible structure. Yes, this allows for completely different perspectives on the social world inside organizations, on influence groups, leverage points and patterns of interaction.

Jenny offers some more insights on the importance of choosing metrics right, like when measuring only the activity of wiki edits doesn’t really provide insight – you have to look behind the history of these edits, the changing alliances in the argument, etc.

To wrap it up, this is messy, complex stuff, the most interesting things are happening in the spaces in between. The notion of network thinking is a demanding discipline, perhaps one reason that able organizational development consultants are rare in this space, yet enhancing or leveraging social capital in the enterprise is a hugely important task.

This has been one of my highlights for the conference, sadly I have been bugged in between by annoying internet connection problems, so this writeup is rather sparse. Anyway, I will exchange some words with Jenny later on, there’s a get-together scheduled at the end of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit, some beers are definitely doomed …

Thanks in part to younger workers, more companies are using social computing tools to aid collaboration and to foster innovation and growth.
[...]
The information and communication technologies that are transforming media, culture, and the economy are also reshaping how companies and employees function. New social computing tools such as wikis and blogs put unprecedented communication power in the hands of employees.

I would hold that this is no question of age, but of disposition, i.e. willingness to participate, to share and to commit ourselves, it’s a people issue from the start, it’s a big task, yet the goal is worthwhile:

Clear goals, structure, discipline, and leadership in the organization will remain as important as ever and perhaps more so as self-organization and peer production emerge as organizing principles for the workplace. The difference today is that these qualities can emerge organically as employees seize the new tools to collaborate across departmental and organizational boundaries, and, yes, “the power of human capital” can be unleashed.

When knowledge management (KM) practices, tools, and architectures burst onto the scene in the mid-1990s, they looked a lot like the old economy businesses that built them, hierarchical and workflow-driven. Now, Social Computing tools are flattening those architectures and extending the reach of KM well beyond the walls of the conventional enterprise to touch customers and business partners. Information and KM professionals are becoming knowledge facilitators, and they must get smart fast to capitalize on this trend. Although disruptive, Social Computing will transform KM, shifting the emphasis from repositories, which are hard to build and maintain, to more intuitive, tacit knowledge sharing. Social Computing is becoming the new KM, moving it from an often too academic exercise into the real world of people sharing knowledge and expertise with each other naturally, without even thinking about it.

Overall I am glad that Forrester Research is pushing this specific application of social software, as this is good news for social software and knowledge management consultants like frogpond.

But I would elaborate on their argument, basically because when many past knowledge-management projects and initiatives did not work out as planned, they did so rarely because methods or tools lacked.

For social software to turn out successful, it can’t be sufficient to ponder, propose and promote (new) methods and tools.

What is also needed is appropriate groundwork and background, i.e. paradigms and principles that guide the selection and usage of methods and tools, and insight into the nature of complex organizational systems. Emergence, connectivity and adaptivity are traits of organizational systems that are supported and leveraged by social software – good for organizational knowledge management but not restricted to it.

If you’re eager to know more and are looking for social software support and consulting assistance, contact me.