He doesn't sound confused to me

JP Rangaswami speaks of what people really do in the enterprise and how technology can and should assist those human needs. Some sound bites:

“…it is only a matter of time before enterprise software consists of only four types of application: publishing, search, fulfillment and conversation.”

“In an enterprise these relationships are usually to do with the department the person belongs to, and the reporting line. What utter tosh. Those are not relationships. They are irritants. Irritants apparently required in order for people to allocate costs and profits accurately….I am prepared to change my mind on this, the day I meet a customer who cares about what department I work in or whom I report to.”

“…people appear to ‘work’ by doing four things:

They look proactively for information. They search for things.
They receive information because they said they were interested in receiving that information. They subscribe to things.
They talk to each other using various forms of communication: letter, e-mail, audio, video, text, IM, blog, wiki, twitter, whatever. They are even known occasionally to talk to each other face to face without use of technology.
And they transact business as a result. Within the enterprise. In the extended enterprise and partners and supply chain. With customers.

People do all this now. But we do not have the tools to do the job well.”

Thank you, JP for addressing what’s been missing in much the Enterprise 2.o talk of late, that being the question of “why?”. For a long time it seemed like there were two vectors driving the conversation:

a) Pro: “Look at all this AJAX-y goodness! We must bolt this on to our ERP so it doesn’t appear to be so hard to use!”

b) Con: “People are cats, they are unloyal and must be herded. Do not give them freedom to go outside the box (pun intended) or we shall introduce Risk.”

JP highlights the reason social computing has taken off – people are social and desire community. In the enterprise that means we want to work together in a fluid, on-demand manner. Nothing provided in of standard office productivity tool suite does that. They’re fine for turning concepts into artifacts, like insects in amber, but interchange is asynchronous and awkward at best. We fought for IM behind the firewall ten years ago and it’s still unusual to find widespread use.

In my workplace people form virtual teams around projects. Organizationally we’re pretty flat except for natural team groupings around core competencies like graphics, usability, technology, etc. A natural pattern has emerged where folks on a project tend to take over an available space – usually conference rooms – and cluster together so they have proximity to share ideas while their heads are stuck in their laptops creating the artifacts that emerge from their interaction. The fellow whose office is next to mine hasn’t been in it in 6 weeks. They sometimes bring graphics, products and designs into the room that reflect the project that end up being the cave paintings representing their new environment and their recent hunts as they share stories around the virtual fire.

OK – maybe that’s kind of stretching it to the poetic, the point is people require freedom to congregate and bounce off each other if they are going to produce excellence. Malcolm Gladwell holds that modern genius emerges more from collaboration than from the lone insightful person (video here).

I’ve know of an organization whose 3-year plan includes a key feature – Employee Development. Yet they have no training and development resources at the corporate level, and precious few in the businesses. This disconnect is where we find the enterprise; they truly want employees to collaborate. Yet the best tools: audio, video, text, IM, blog, wiki, twitter…are often unavailable or even banned for fear that the cats will be distracted into mere chit-chat.

As I write I see that Michael has asked for thoughts about how social computing tools can play inside the firewall. Consider this a start. I’ll say that the first critical aspect for social computing success in the enterprise would be to ‘trust…but verify’.

More later.