My question is simple: if we are going to think about our organizations as cities, what can we learn from people who “design” cities for a living? Those “designers” are called planners and their profession is planning. Who are they? What do they do? How do they plan?

For those of us who are look at social technologies as being situated in organisations that we treat as complex human systems, the design of urban environments presents some interesting parallels with the domain of social business design. As introduction to this idea, Gordon's post about his joint presentation with Thomas Vander Wal at E2Conf Santa Clara 2011 is well worth reading (and looking at). There is plenty of follow up reading in the post too.

Claudio Ciborra’s “From Thinking to Tinkering: The Grassroots of Strategic Information Systems” (in The Information Society 8: 297-309) is still (or even more) relevant today, as it was in 1992. Here are some of his ideas:

• Cherish local knowledge and everyday experience
• Value open experimentation, prototyping by end-users and design tinkering
• Establish systematic serendipity, don’t aim for sequential execution in systems design
• Strive on emergence, except failure

Sounds still familiar, right?

Yes.

Rather than starting with the assumption that 2.0 (or social) is the answer to anything and try to make the enterprise fit in, he starts with the opposite approach. He starts with problems and ends with a solution that appears to be enterprise 2.0. Like it or not but enterprises are organized on processes that are essential and vital and this won’t change. I’m to talking about the caricature of processes we’re being inflicted to make it too easy to hold them up to public ridicule. but what they should be. Caseau makes it clear that processes should be as light as possible to be manageable, as agile as possible to be improvable. Hence the importance of lean management. Things become really interesting when enterprise 2.0, rather than being seen as a danger for steadiness and processes appears than being a lever that serves agility and innovation. In this context, conversational systems support ongoing learning, innovation and ongoing improvement.

From Bertrand Duperrin's review of Yves Caseau's book on Enterprise 2.0.

I like the reference to lean management (I've talked about "Lean Operations" myself), although in some circles there is a natural skepticism that this this is a codeword for cost cutting and down sizing. That's not what I mean when I talk about lean and I don't think Caseau does either. Being light, lean and agile is also what I think Andrew McAfee's original paper on Enterprise 2.0 was all about too.

Naturally, if you are skeptical about "lean", you might ask what we mean by light and agile? Well, here is a starting point: 

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
• Working [products and services] over comprehensive documentation.
• Customer [participation] over contract negotiation.
• Responding to change over following a plan.

Misguided social business advice urges us to automate and digitize whatever we can that might make work more efficient.

It puts new digital architecture on top of old digital architecture. It tries to separate content from process, as though process were content-agnostic.

Wise social business advice has a generative orientation. It has a creative flavor.

Wise social business advice starts with the questions like: “What more can we contribute together, to each other?
What tools can we use to foster and support these contributions”?

CV Harquail mythbusts seven different problems with superficial thinking and approaches to social business. Each is worth reading, but the point quoted above particularly caught my attention. I think the same concern should be directed at the similarly misguided and reductionist goal of creating more efficient 'digital workplaces'. Simply layering, integrating or flattening digital architectures ignores the sociotechnical relationship between technology, people and how (and why) we organise.

My comment appears to have been caught in the spam trap on the ThoughtFarmer blog, so here it is:

Nice post – this is a good time to be having this discussion. However, while we’re referencing past definitions I might point you at my 2005 post on the “intranet imperative”:

http://chieftech.blogspot.com/2005/06/intranet-imperative-part-1.html

Also, Digital Workplace (which I’ve heard coming out of the old school intranet community, while others are talking about Social Business and Enterprise 2.0) reminds me very of much of Forrester’s Information Workplace concept from about the same time – see:

http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/information_workplace_will_redefine_worl...

Personally I have no problem with the term ‘intranet’ but its worth exploring other terminology to generate discussion and understand what is changing.

Thoughts?

Some great follow up reading to my Intranet2011 presentation. Intranet managers appear to think in very black and white terms - its either a social intranet or its not, and they may or may not 'control' it. But as Dion highlights here, we have broad options. In fact, we've always had options but we now have even more choice for dealing with brownfield environments and organisational complexity, as the platforms and architectures have matured over time.

We’ve got a whole lot of intranet goodness happening this coming month…

Cross posted from the Headshift | Dachis Group Asia Pacific blog. See the original post for details about: 

• The 2.0 Adoption Council briefing on 10th May;
• Intranets2011 on 11th & 12th May (I'm presenting); and
• The Intranet Innovation Awards are open for submissions until 31st May.