In the early days of Enterprise 2.0 (mid-2000s) enterprise social software was good at toolkit-style functionality. Blogs and wikis gave people useful frameworks and reference materials for doing bespoke tasks. But there wasn’t much functionality for businesses that run a lot of routinized process.

These early tools appealed to high-end consultancies, law firms, PR agencies, and tech startups, which lean towards more bespoke activities. I suspect that’s where people first got the idea that enterprise social software was for “knowledge workers.”

But social software has changed, and changed fast. In the past year, business has started to embrace social software for more routinized processes as well.

Michael Idinopulos highlights an important misconception that enterprise social software is only useful for certain industries or white collar professionals. I agree also that associating these technologies tightly with the concept of the knowledge worker also adds confusion (for the record, I've never agreed that Enterprise 2.0 was the evolution of KM).

I've certainly come across a number of examples in my own work this year that break that traditional view of where and how we apply these technologies. But, I also think we have barely scratched the surface.

I draw encouragement from the non-profit sector where we can more easily see evidence of service (re)design and social innovation at work. Examples such as the LIFE Programme and Patchwork show there is potential for a much richer dynamic that can impact the fundamentals of how we use IT to support people inside critical or complex business processes when they are working at scale. In fact, this goes beyond Idinopulos' call to integrate the common enterprise social software patterns of activity stream and wikis - the focus is really about humanising IT systems.

Just as they are emerging in the non-profit sector, there are opportunities for the profit making enterprise to do the same in their respective domains. But they will only get there if we address the underlying misconceptions about social software and narrowing the use case to supporting the classic, office-based knowledge worker.

The other day I blogged about 3 Intranet Truths.

Looking at my first Intranet Truth ("No two intranets are the same. If they are, you are doing something wrong - stop benchmarking and start leading") its worth reflecting on the first two themes from Step Two Design's Intranet Innovations 2011 awards:

• A culture of continuous improvement; and
• Innovations that are based on very simple ideas

One of the examples they share that embodies these themes is computer animation house, Framestore:

The intranet team created a tool to project manage the visual effects they produce for movies such as the Harry Potter series. Built in-house and displaying data from a third party system, the company’s artists can access tabbed views of complex data about every scene and shot.

Framestore's success isn't based on nice to have features or "best practices" blindly copied from others, but by designing an intranet solution specifically for their users. If you want to replicate their success, show leadership by focusing on learning from their method not their design.

You will also see this same mindset in the way Headshift | Dachis Group approaches our projects, including examples such as Reynolds Porter Chamberlain.

In this new RSAnimate, renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist explains how our 'divided brain' has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society. Taken from a lecture given by Iain McGilchrist as part of the RSA's free public events programme.

McGilchrist explains that its not really about the idea of the left and right sides of the brain, rather about how we understand the relationship between rational and intuitive mind.

A study has found that the hustle and bustle of modern offices can lead to a 32% drop in workers well being and reduce their productivity by 15%.

They have found that open plan offices create unwanted activity in the brains of workers that can get in the way of them doing the task at hand.

Open plan offices were first introduced in the 1950s and quickly became a popular as a way of laying out offices.

Having a clean and sterile desk can also leave employees with smaller brains, scientists claim.

The findings are revealed in a programme made for Channel 4, The Secret Life of Buildings, to be broadcast on Monday.

This type of research, IMHO, has implications for both our online and physical workplaces. Implementing a sterile, impersonal intranet is probably as bad as a clean desk policy.

But for physical workspaces at least, why does it always have to be one or other - open plan OR individual offices, work from the office OR work from home?

Worth watching. Hat tip to Ajit Verghese.

At last week’s E2.0 conference in Boston, I was surprised and pleased by the way my “in-the-flow” phrase has gained common currency.

I was also surprised, but less pleased, by some of the “best practices” I heard flying around. Whether in keynotes, sessions, or just hallway conversations, I heard a lot of claims of dubious merit, claims like:

• Start with a small pilot and let it grow virally
• Invest heavily in community management, because a community is only as successful as its managers
• Workers won’t use social software without personal incentives
• Workers who don’t belong to the Facebook Generation don’t “get” social software.
• Social software adoption requires a culture of collaboration
• You shouldn’t launch collaborative tools without a collaboration strategy

There’s a common theme behind all this advice: You should be scared of launching enterprise social software, because achieving adoption is really hard, really time-consuming, and really expensive.

Sorry friends, but I’m calling Bullshit.

I had to read Michael Idinopulos' post a couple of times to make sure I understood it.

Basically - in a round about way - he is describing two things:

• The complex nature of organisations. 
• That social business tools work, because they help people get work done 'in-the-flow'.

I agree entirely - and this makes the AHA case study a great example.

But lets address this issue of organisational complexity.

Sometimes a simple intervention - like introducing a new technology - can make an immediate impact. But we don't actually know why, although we can observe the benefits when it works. Do the same again in a different situation and you take a gamble on the outcome. For systems of engagement, this is the problem of copying macro level case studies when change actually happens at the micro level of individual groups and individuals. Sometimes it only takes an influential blocker, a critical system that doesn't integrate well, a policy that can't be side stepped or a group that has already picked their own solution - suddenly the dynamic changes.

I use those words deliberately, because the character of some organisations is to be conservative, others are prepared to to be more reckless. Smart organisations take a design-led middle ground. They don't follow knee jerk reactions to new technology, but they don't fall for shallow thinking either.

To help make that point, here are some different case studies (I'm focusing on enterprise microblogging, as there is a level of commonality between them - but this also follows on from some earlier posts):

• Yammer at Suncorp - the viral adoption pattern.
• tibbr at CIBER - tried a couple of solutions, before finding what worked for them.
• Yammer at a small medical practice - hit a technology challenge.
• Chatter at Den-Mat - ran into people and skills issues. 

Each of these examples had a different journey (Micro), but each had a positive story to tell (Macro).

Incidentally, the CIO behind the case study that Idinopulos described has written a detailed post describing the "15 Key Steps for Successful Implementation". This isn't simple, but the steps make it less complex; and its all about finding that fit so that users can get into the flow easily.

In an article published in the journal Nature, West and Bettencourt found that up to 85 per cent of the character of a city is determined simply by its size. Only about 15 per cent - perhaps 20 per cent at most - of a city's character is distinctive, and that is often aesthetic or determined by a natural feature such as a harbour, river or mountain range.

''The majority of the organisation, functionality, even maybe its structure and dynamics is, to a large extent, determined, amazingly, independent of the details of the city,'' West says.

This magical 85 per cent is made up of what West... calls ''social networks'' - the clustering of human beings and the social interactions and hierarchies that flow from them. Basically, whenever a bunch of people get together in an urbanised, or even low-density sub-urbanised, form, they operate in a largely uniform way, regardless of culture.

...

''You see the same phenomenon, repeated continuously at all scales,'' West says. ''The history, geography, culture, locality, much of the urban planning, is transcended by these network principles, which tell you it is roughly this 85 per cent level that is pretty much the coarse grain of the city. But there is this 10 to 15 per cent left over, and that is something the mayors and city fathers, designers, architects can influence.''

Organisations, I suspect, are like this too. 85% is all about scale and avoiding bad management practices that break the dynamics of the natural social networks that exist, but only something unique or by working on the remainder will bring innovation, differentiation and better performance.

Cross-posted from the Headshift Asia Pacific blog - this is a follow up to Dion's recent post on ebizQ about collaboration.

Image Credit: ©2011 Headshift | Dachis Group.

I listened to this podcast on the plane back from Singapore overnight. From the BBC World Service page for this episode:

Peter Day has his 'thinking hat' on for this edition when he hears from two academics from the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, Canada.

Dr. Hilary Austen and Professor Roger Martin will be discussing design thinking and artistry in business.

Austen is the author of Artistry Unleashed: A Guide to Pursuing Great Performance in Work and Life. It looks at the ability to harness originality and mastery to enhance performance and help solve today's most demanding problems. And Roger Martin has written extensively on design and believes we rely far too exclusively on analytical thinking.

It looks like there is some interesting follow up reading in the Rotman Magazine, for later.

When people talk about Social Business Design, I find they spend a lot of time focused on the “Social Business” aspect but less on the concept of “Design”. But what do we mean by design? The Design of Business by Roger L. Martin goes some way to help answer this question.

Initially, at least, this book reads more like an extended essay. But give it a chance as I found it gradually builds up to a useful crescendo that builds on the foundational concepts outlined earlier on in the book.

At its core, Martin provides a background on the organisational psychological of traditional analytical thinking, which favours reliability over validity. There is good reason for this, particularly in large or complex organisations, as there is danger is relying on intuition alone.

The “knowledge funnel” is presented as a concept for explaining how organisational knowledge - which might be a product or a process - moves through stages from Mystery, Heuristic and then Algorithm.

The trick, according to Martin, is to look at design thinking as a way to seek balance between rigid analytical thinking and risky intuition. Through design thinking and the skill of abductive reasoning, organisations can remain progressive and innovative. In effect, they can continuously feed the knowledge funnel with new ideas that challenge existing ideas that have stabilised into business as usual.

Personally, I found this funnel concept a little simplistic - it serves it purpose in the context of the book, but its probably worthwhile going off to dip into the ideas of people like Gary Klein and Dave Snowden before you start dropping the funnel into every day business conversation.

However, I did enjoy the Research in Motion (RIM) case study, which provides us with the perfect quote:

“Design isn’t just about making things beautiful; it’s also about making things work beautifully.”

I think its a nice idea that we can think of Social Business Design as being about making organisations work “beautifully”.

In the final chapter - sub-titled, Developing Yourself as a Design Thinker - you finally understand why it was worth working through all the background information. Martin employs a model from his previous book, The Opposable Mind, which he uses to describe the design thinker’s personal knowledge system. He then addresses how to work as design thinker with other colleagues who are not design thinkers.

So the final message from Martin appears to be that it is really the design thinkers who are able to successfully navigate the reliability corridors of their organisation that are the real source of competitive advantage, rather than design thinking alone.

If you are interested in discussing open strategy, the challenges of open leadership and becoming a social business then please join us at the Headshift | Dachis Group Social Business Summit - Over 4 weeks - across 4 continents - 4 Summits will be convened. Sydney,  2 March -  Austin, 10 March -  London, 24 March - Singapore, 6 April.