- or “The Sentient Enterprise”, as it prefers to be known.
We are once again going through one of those periods where developments in the consumer space are outstripping progress in the enterprise. This last happened with WiFi. Network architecture and security constraints inhibited the spread of wireless capabilities within enterprises and arguably still do. The consumer, unfettered by these restrictions, saw the benefits of WiFi in the home and widespread consumer adoption led to new ideas on how to use the technology, better equipment and of course accelerated sales. I believe that the same is happening with social media and social networking technologies today. It’s time for the enterprise to play catch-up again.
Ah, but is there a need for “all this social stuff” within the organisation? Yes, in the same way as there was a need for the telegraph, computers and the Internet. Communication, information and its understanding are fundamental to the development of communities and societies and we need the skills and mechanisms to make sense of it all. In this so called Information Age we have become very, very good at creating information but not quite so good finding it again and using it in the context of our current situation or task. Thirty one billion Google searches in a month (September 2010) is a most explicit example of our struggle to make sense of the vastness of the information on the World Wide Web and a Facebook population of over 500 million (2011), of whom 50 % log-in every day, brings a whole new dimension to the word “community”.
The social networking applications such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have made bold inroads into providing ways to allow information to flow more freely between individuals, reinforcing social networks and building communities at a pace that is almost unimaginable. Out of this has emerged a new sense of individual presence that is increasingly virtual as well as physical. Web connected devices and applications are providing many innovative ways to find relevant information and to interconnect individuals and groups in multi-channel interactions. For example, over 150 years of YouTube video is watched on Facebook daily and 400 “tweets” per minute contain a YouTube link. Increasingly these information items and our interactions with them also have both an awareness of our usage context and physical location (e.g. I’m at work and I’m looking for information related to my role or I’m in the park with friends looking for a nearby restaurant). In 2010 the Gartner Group identified “context-aware-computing” as one of the top disruptive trends of the next decade.
Sadly, these changes are happening in spite of organisations and not because of them. For example, many large enterprises in both the commercial and public sector now have Facebook sites that are absolutely nothing to with the internal HR or IT department but are rather an expression of their employees’ need to connect socially and electronically as a community. This is surely an indication that organisations need to capitalise on the benefits of this socialisation and also to recognise employees for their valuable contributions to information sharing, rather than banishing such activities to the Internet.
The social interactions that occur in any workplace, whether it is discussions around the water cooler, meeting for coffee or lunch or chatting on the way to the car park are part of the vital interaction that makes people work better together and keeps them better informed about their own role and roles and views of others. These conversations typically provide additional context to other workplace information and interactions, as well as providing an opportunity for purely social contact between colleagues. This informed and informal dialogue augments the more formal information exchanges in meetings, e-mails and even telephone conversations. All of this creates context awareness or what the military have long referred to as “situational awareness”. This is the desired state necessary to manage high-tempo, information-rich and geographically- dispersed operational situations. The tempo of business today, the deluge of information available to support decision making and the interconnectedness of organisations suggest that improving situational awareness should be a key consideration in any competitive commercial market and an enabler to excellence in public sector service delivery. Encouraging the development of social networks and tools will make a significant contribution towards achieving this state of awareness. At the forefront of these changes should be organisations with high-tempo, information-rich environments. For example, financial market analysis, process control situations and emergency services should all be candidates for early adoption.
However, many large organisations are still struggling to move beyond e-mail. The deployment of Instant Messaging, video streaming or personal /group websites for collaboration, still typically needs a major study, a rash of consultants and some serious budget analysis. All of this adds up to a lot of time and a lot of money. Is it any wonder that many of the social media and social networking technologies that are rampant in the consumer space are still struggling for a foothold in the enterprise? Progress “behind the firewall” is looking increasingly pedestrian, or should I say unaware. It’s time for a new approach.
The rapid growth of ubiquitous digital communications, net connected devices and applications owes much to the Web 2.0 development and architectural paradigm. The shift from client-server to services orientation architectures, software as a service, rich internet applications, content re-purposing, fractional updates, mashups, participative collaboration etc. are all based on design and implementation patterns that stress business led capabilities, simple, clean and rapid deployments, extensive code re-use and frictionless integration[1]. It is this approach that is fuelling the rapid rise of many innovative e-commerce platforms, information retrieval capabilities such as Google, YouTube, the highly dynamic news sites and of course the social interaction phenomenon provided by the Facebook, Twitter and others.
The mantra needs to be “think big, start small, deliver quick”. Start by thinking where the biggest benefits might be realised, consider a small experiment and explore the use of established applications where ideally your users will have some experience already. For example, introducing intra-enterprise micro-blogging (i.e. a “Twitter” application such as Yammer) can dramatically improve situational awareness in a sales team or a wiki (i.e. a “Wikipedia” application such as MediaWiki) can help share and multiply the problem solving capacity of a team of paramedics. Find enthusiastic users with a real need, address any security concerns pragmatically based on a realistic threat assessment and manage the deployment with the innovative thinkers in the IT department. Deploying such capabilities within the enterprise is not as daunting as the IT department might make them out to be. Get it done quickly so that your users see real, tangible benefits soon. Build on your success with further small, rapid iterations. Don’t forget to address the functional and organisational impacts as well. For example, increasing context awareness through rapidly broadcast information or encouraging informal information sharing can be seen as threatening by rigid management hierarchies. Small successes will engender enthusiasm and confidence in the approach at all levels and help to break the enterprise out of its over analysed, long timescale, high cost system development habit.
The implications of improved information access and interaction are already all around us. Dramatically improved information retrieval and the ability to use that information purposefully through formal and informal interaction in ever changing communities, bound together for as long as required by common purpose, but unhindered by location must become the norm within organisations. Web based capabilities must be more quickly re-purposed and re-used within organisations to enable them to catch-up again. Whassup [2]?
[1] For and excellent overview see: Web 2.0 Architectures. Governor, Hinchcliffe and Nickull. 2009. O’Reilly Media
[2] Whassup? was a commercial campaign for Anheuser-Busch Budweiser beer from 1999 to 2002. The first spot aired during Monday Night Football, December 20, 1999. The ad campaign was run worldwide and became a pop culture phenomenon. The phrase itself is a corruption of the phrase “What’s up?” Source: Wikipedia.org “Whassup” is a simple request to update situational awareness.
