The Red Sox weren't the only players on fire last week in Boston. At the Seaport hotel, our consultants, clients, and industry thought leaders engaged in lively debate on the meaning and impact of enterprise 2.0. The subject of the summit - Reinventing the Enterprise - was taken up through a variety of case studies, keynote addresses, and a spirited panel discussion. Check back here soon for the video clips! (And thanks, Andy McAfee, for serving as agent provocateur.)
Some key points raised during the discussion included:
1. Employees should be trusted to do the right thing. Andrew McAfee took up this point, echoing a position taken earlier in the day by Jimmy Wales. Jimmy's supporting anecdote is an apt one - one doesn't put cages around tables in restaurants to keep folks from stabbing each other with their knives; rather one depends on civility and learned behaviors. Although I agree with this in theory and practice, Rob Koplowitz provided a much needed subtle slant - one takes the knives away from children. He didn't mean to equate employees to children but rather highlight different levels of understanding and ability with new tools. Michael Idinopulos leveled out the debate with the insightful comment about there being a necessary distinction between discussion and decision. In other words, let discussion happen freely amongst employees but don't mistake open discussion for a mandate of consensus decision making. Instead clearly communicate how discussion will be incorporated into a final decision making process.
2. Traditional tools like email and document authoring software have unwittingly become like blogs and wikis - just less easy to leverage as collaboration tools because of some old paradigms. Adam Grohs, a technology director at AA|RF, made this point to the panel, and Dion Hinchcliffe, took it up in his recent ZDnet post. Apart from the technology and platform issue taken up by Dion, I believe that Adam (and subsequently Michael Idinopulos) pointed to a key employee issue - don't worry about what your might do with new tools because it's happening already with old ones. Both issues (i.e. vis-a-vis technology platform and employee behavior) form the basis of my upcoming white paper on the desktop re-imagined. I argue for "enabling content" regardless of presentation layer and promoting online / offline content synchronization.
3. People are people and technology needs to be simple, i.e. make work easier. This important humanistic point was taken up several times by Olivier Pierini, our client from Ford Motor Company, and Bob Lord, President of AA|RF. From this perspective, at the end of the day, people need to communicate, in a humanistic fashion, regardless of all the technological hoopla.
To this last point, I'm curious - in the workplace context, do you think Enterprise 2.0 is facilitating productive discussion or is it more signal than noise? I know this topic is often debated, but I never get enough of it.
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