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.

Nicholas Carr thinks these kinds of techno-utopian videos are creepy. I'm not sure about that, although both of these videos are some what homogeneous and perhaps a little 'antiseptic' - but they are marketing pieces, not true works of science fiction. They actually remind me of rather badly thought out 'perfect' user journeys. If you want something a little grundgy, try William Gibson.

For more on Microsoft's vision, see their Office Labs site.

In the aftermath of the credit crunch people are thinking about the way banks work, the way financial markets operate, and the values and purposes of the companies that use those markets.

And some of the big management thinkers are beginning to put forward ideas that challenge many of the assumptions that have dominated the way business has worked for the past several decades.

In this progamme Peter Day hears from management guru Gary Hamel and gets his thoughts on the future of capitalism.

I only just got around to listening to this podcast, an interview with Gary Hamel. The title is perhaps a bit misleading, although Hamel did make me pause for thought in light of the #occupywallstreet movement. Is this what he meant by consumers mobilising?

However, this podcast actually contains a broader discussion about the difference between business in the 20th Century and the needs of the 21st Century. This isn't just about "Capitalism", but actually about why and how organisations are organised and managed. The active role of the citizen-consumer is also important and themes such sustainable profitability.

Critically he highlights the challenges this creates for large, legacy organisations built on 20th Century management principles. The practice of management is firmly in the sights of Hamel and he doesn't think academic management theorists will have the answers we need.

He mentions the example of The Morning Star Company, where:

"Our company is operated by colleagues without titles or a hierarchy of unilateral authority. Authority relative to other colleagues' activities is lateral, with our Mission as the guiding principle of action. Although we have grown significantly, we would like to maintain a culture of individual responsibility and self-management. A colleague's influence and success at Lucero Farms is relative to such colleague's integrity, competency, effort, persistence and straight-forward persuasiveness."

This, he suggests, is a model of management for the 21st Century.

Thinking about this example, if you step back for a moment to reflect on the technology changes and human events going on around us right now, then they suddenly stop being isolated phenomenon and instead you realise they are all taking place on the same backdrop.

According to the lead researcher, Dr Christina Boedker, high-performing workplaces are up to 12 per cent more productive and three times more profitable.

...

The management practices that do best, according to the study, are being highly responsive to changes in customers' and suppliers' circumstances, encouraging high employee participation in decision-making, achieving on-the-job learning through mentoring and job rotation, making effective use of information and technology and attracting and retaining high quality people.

Ross Gittins, Australia's respected and clear thinking economics columnist for the SMH, reports on the government sponsored research into productivity by the Society of Knowledge Economics (SKE).

Ross notes that only 15 per cent of the research sample exhibit the characteristics of such "enlightened" business practices. I imagine that the other 85% are still waiting for bottom line ROI on the minutiae of individual practices, tools or technologies to be proved - symptom or cause do you think?

UPDATE: Here is the actual report. Hat tip to Nicky.

The Kindle Fire's reasonable price, together with the potential of widespread Android app support, makes the device an enticing option, especially for families who want to give a tablet to the kids without having to blast through five bills. The Kindle Fire is clearly first and foremost an entertainment-consumption companion to Amazon's services. The ability to install apps and do anything more with the tablet--handling email, sharing photos, and the like--really feels like a secondary operation. At that point it makes me wonder whether the Kindle Fire is truly a “tablet” or just a content-playback machine with some extra smarts.

In many ways, the Kindle Fire isn't trying to beat the iPad or the Android-tablet masses at their own game. The Kindle Fire is doing its own thing, and going after a totally different audience.

Amazon's refreshed Kindle e-reader product line has definitely caught my eye this week. In particular, despite its possible limitations, the new Andriod-based full colour Fire (but sans e-ink) "reader" looks like it really could shake up the overall tablet market. I have a family who love to read and its certainly feasible to imagine kitting the family out with the lower priced Kindles (we already have one). Unfortunately, the Fire at this stage will be available from November but only in the US.

Incidentally, there have been a lot of comments that the Fire looks like RIM's Playbook - apparently its because Amazon enlisted the assistance of the same manufacturer. A few people have also raised concerned about Amazon's Silk Browser, but I can't really see any difference (in terms of privacy risk) from other caching, social networking and other proxy services that already exist. If you don't like the Amazon Web Services (AWS) based acceleration feature, just switch it off or buy a different device :-)

Watch the videos. Then read my post over on the Headshift | Dachis Group Asia Pacific blog.

E2.0 tools today are typically not integrated with the rest of a company’s applications. So the unstructured / emergent / social work happens in a totally different digital environment than the structured / pre-defined / formal work. Orders get filled using the ERP system, while conversations about why the order’s not getting filled happen in email, IM, a wiki, and so on.

For some purposes, this is OK. Narrating your work via blogs or microblogs so that others can find you and access your expertise is a great standalone use case, as is narrating your ignorance —   asking questions to the enterprise as a whole without guessing in advance who will know the answer.

But most informal collaboration, I bet, happens ‘close to’ the formal work of the enterprise. So the digital environments that support the formal and informal work should also be very close to each other, either within the same application or across tightly integrated ones. Data and decisions (“OK, go ahead and increase the customer’s credit limit so we can ship the order”) should be able to flow easily between the systems for formal and informal work. This is not a new point, but it bears repeating for exactly the reasons Laurie mentions. Unless and until this happens, E2.0 is much less than it could be.

Yes, its easy to drink too much social 'Kool Aid'. But that applies as much to the process centric view, as it does to focusing only on the "social, humane, people-centric" perspective.

My point about the impact of electricity on industry still stands. Hard nosed contextual collaboration built around a bad or inefficient business process is only stop-gap measure (if even that), but is probably easier to sell in the short-term. This kind of digital Taylorism is bad not because it ignores the soft stuff, but because the pseudo-science of scientific management was debunked a long time ago.

Part of the problem is that we still get confused by the differences between ideas such as user-driven computing, lightweight enterprise IT approaches, creating good user experience in enterprise apps and social software. Each offers benefits and there is a strong relationship between these four, but they aren't mutually inclusive all of the time.

For example, improving a process might not be so much about contextual collaboration but could simply be about applying lighter Web inspired IT solutions to enterprise problems. I remember seeing this example of a shipping company having a bottom line impact with Enterprise RSS back in 2008.

A good follow on article to my earlier post, although the ideas aren't particularly new - however, it does show that the technologies for creating flexible work environments are getting (and will get) better and better.