Just how revolutionary is the
power of software? Is the modern corporation fully in charge of its
internal changes? Are knowledge workers – influenced greatly by their
experiences on the Web – forcing change against the necessary conservatism of management? And to the extent that this may be the case, how much of
the cause comes from the technology itself?
These
questions arise because respected knowledge thinker Tom Davenport plays
devil’s advocate and says that Enterprise 2.0 simply won’t happen as
generally conceived, because the enterprise won’t give up its
traditional hierarchy.
“Enterprise 2.0 software and the Internet won’t make
organizational hierarchy and politics go away. They won’t make the
ideas of the front-line worker in corporations as influential as those
of the CEO. Most of the barriers that
prevent knowledge from flowing freely in organizations – power
differentials, lack of trust, missing incentives, unsupportive
cultures, and the general busyness of employees today – won’t be
addressed or substantially changed by technology alone.” – Why Enterprise 2.0 Won’t Transform Organizations
In this short and controversial viewpoint
Professor Davenport doesn’t give any collateral reasoning, nor does he
show the state of play with the forces currently impinging on the
modern enterprise.
Luis Suarez does both, in his lengthy
post over at ITtoolbox, where he picks up on this story and adds his
observations, largely in refutation. He notes the key point missed by
Tom, that Enterprise 2.0 is already happening.
“Why not? After all, it is already happening in most
places. I mean, if you look at the rampant rate of adoption of
Enterprise 2.0 within the corporate world it would, at least, make you
wonder if it would stick around for a while, or not. My take is that
pretty much like in the consumer / producer market, things may have
started slow, but they are here to stay.
“I agree that it may not be as influential as that one from the CEO,
but still it will be an important one that would help shake things
bottom-up in such a way that they could transform the way knowledge
workers interact feeling part of that new knowledge-based company they
are rebuilding. Do you think that the CEO is
going to be able to make that switch with one of his influential
speeches? I doubt it. Do you think that a bunch of knowledge workers
can provoke that change from bottom-up? You bet!” – Enterprise 2.0
Luis also illustrates how the barriers of
the former hierarchy are changing shape in direct response to
technology. He cites his post of (synchronistically) just the day
before:
“The key thing in here is that people are empowered
to share what they feel would be worth while sharing with others and
that at some point there would be other folks out there who would be
able to connect with those webloggers because of the content they
share. As simple as that.
“So just because it is not useful to you, it doesn’t
mean it would not be useful for anyone else. We are all entitled to
have a voice and express our own thoughts and ideas in whichever way we
decide to go ahead with whether it will be done for a business reason
or not. It will then be up to others to stick around or not, but don’t
underestimate the power of knowledge sharing by every single knowledge
worker out there, because there is a great chance that you will
eventually bump into different “golden nuggets of information” that you
would be able to reuse at some point and, why not?, find ways to
connect with those different knowledge workers that you may not have
thought possible in the past.” –
How To Build An Enterprise 2.0 Culture – Empowering Everyone to Have a Voice and Starting Small
Luis is a great believer in the bottom-up
approach to creating usable knowledge management systems, as are we at
Dovetail Software. We’ve written extensively about the tacit knowledge
pervading the enterprise that currently goes untapped, and how
knowledge management will come to unlock and utilize this knowledge.
Modern CRM thinking applies the same view to the attitudes and preferences of the customer: today’s CRM
software development is focused strongly on unlocking this “tacit
knowledge” held by the customer. In both case, Web 2.0 technology will
play central roles – in fact, only the technology makes this possible.
To
make another answer to Tom Davenport’s thesis, and as a companion view
to Luis Suarez’s feeling that it’s a people revolution, we’ll quote
ourselves. As we said in a post (synchronistically again) just
yesterday, where we compared Enterprise 2.0 with Web 3.0:
“But Enterprise 2.0 is not a people revolution, it’s
a knowledge revolution. Collaboration is not being made easy simply
because bosses suddenly feel a rush of sympathy for their workers’
desire to hang out with their friends. It’s happening because the
efficient disposition of corporate data is a survival necessity today,
and loosening some of the former hierarchy is a useful part of freeing
information within the enterprise.” – Web 3.0 and Enterprise Knowledge
Having said this, we have to acknowledge the
impact of individuals on the system. Enterprise 2.0 itself, as
conceived in its original theory, is viewed as an inevitable process
brought about by individual workers going outside the enterprise
network to engage with services on the Web network. We learn on the Web
that we can work better, as Luis illustrates:
“That command-and-control attitude is a thing of the
past because, for the first time in a while, knowledge workers are
realising that they are in control themselves of how they work, share
knowledge and collaborate with other fellow colleagues. And as result
of that, they are seeing how their productivity has increased quite a
bit with a whole lot less effort by just helping themselves make those
connections. Yes, the good old motto of working smarter without
necessarily making it harder.” – Enterprise 2.0
So we return to the question, just how
revolutionary is this software being developed today? If the top-down
imperatives are to enable the bottom-up evolution, to create agility
necessary for the survival of the modern enterprise, what weight does
the enabling technology itself deserve in this equation?
We often cite the energizing effect of deploying Dovetail tools in a Clarify install.
Not to belabor this point, but when agents arrive for work in the
morning, and find on their desktops applications that look the same as
the old ones, but that contain a flood of new features and functions, what
happens is that they get excited. What happens is change, as workflows
reshape themselves, and innovation and collaboration become more
possible; customer satisfaction rises, as customers sense the new
confidence in agents, derived from increased ability to process cases.
No
one tells these workers to act this way. No inspiration from even the
most charismatic leader can compel agents to be this energized. What
we’re seeing is the bottom-up change, created from infrastructure
developed by top-down command. This syndrome, of top-down empowering bottom-up, is a viable method of changing the enterprise in its systems and in its culture altogether. It carries risks, but the reward is worth it. This is what’s happening, for the sake
of prosperity and survival, throughout business, across the Web, and
all over the world.
Tomorrow we’ll look at more of these forces at work.
