Enterprise 2.0 in a nutshell or knot?

I’ve seen Slates, I’ve read about flatnesses. I’ve gone to the conferences, read the focused and tangentially-related books, pored over blogs, tested software until my arms were numb and my eyes were blistered and observed and participated in the work of large organizations until I looked like I belonged there.

I’ve seen the term social software go from useless to descriptive to hyped to misunderstood to nearly devoid of meaning and I’ve seen its first uttering – social – define 2005–2009 the way marketing defined the ’70s, finance defined the ’80s and design/innovation framed 1995–2006 (or thereabouts).

Since “social” is being used so much, Jive has come up with the Social Business Imperative (get the worthwhile PDF by registering) while others are trying to stand out from the pack (and believe me, a pack it is) by saying that social is all well and good, but collaboration networks are what you want. What we want, in fact, is a bit of reliable information and best practices on how to make social software add value in organizations.

Get a certificate?

A few programs are popping up here and there to teach us how this all works. AIIM has an interesting, if unintentionally hilarious offering that calls forums “enterprise 1.5″ technology. No seriously, let me quote them:

• […] Enterprise 1.0: email, forums, chat rooms, bulletin boards, web/tele/videoconferencing, and static web
• […] Enterprise 1.5: web services, IM, SMS, collaboration filtering, social networking, social networking analysis, portals, and dynamic web
• […]  Enterprise 2.0: participate web, tagging, mashups, blogs, wikis, feeds, podcasting, and social voting, bookmarking and ranking

It may well be that AIIM has some very interesting insights to share, but it’s hard to trust whatever advice they give completely when they manage to invent a term such as Enterprise 1.5. After all, Enterprise 2.0 is still just a word with a plethora of meanings, not a well-defined concept. Telling people about Enterprise 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0 opens the door to Enterprise 2.1 service pack 3 revision 1. These are ideas for discussion, not patterns to be implemented without thought or care.

A class worth its cost?

The University of Michigan’s School of Information seems to be doing a better job of teaching what we can do with these new tools. Just take a look at what you could have learned at their three-day course, entitled Making social computing work in your enterprise held a few weeks ago.

Core conceptual ideas

• Everyone can be a source as well as a consumer of information
• People’s choices of actions as well as their words are good sources of information
• Effective socio-technical systems involve the design not only of technical features, but also social features such as incentives and norms

Central questions

• Which technology features are most useful for meeting business goals?
• What organizational and social interventions should accompany technology rollout so as to encourage productive use?
• What metrics should be used to assess the potential value of an Enterprise 2.0 project, and to manage the project on an ongoing basis?

Note that only one buzzword was used in the list above. Interestingly, none of the instructors are well-known in the E2 space (two are from NewsGator, btw). Personally I’m not sold on the correlation between being known and knowing how to make constructive use of social software in organizations big and enormous.

That’s the point, by the way, to make social software work for you, in whatever way is most efficient given where you are and what you have to deal with. I have seen cases of people getting huge dividends from very simple and inexpensive deployments of social software, but the truly large benefits require a more thorough approach.