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.

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.

Despite government departments continuously striving to be more innovative and efficient in their operations, they do not have a consistent approach to process improvement and making better use of public funds to deliver more frontline services to communities.

Increasingly, local, state and federal government agencies across Australia are now embracing the multi-faceted benefits of adopting a ‘Lean Thinking’ approach to process improvement and process waste minimisation.

The correct application of Lean Thinking methods, tools and techniques will empower organisations to achieve a number of objectives, including efficiencies, effectiveness, optimisation or service delivery and contribution to savings targets proactively rather than reactively

Great timing with this article, as I've mentioned before that 'Lean Thinking' is one value stream that a social workplace supports. This applies to for- and not-for-profit organisations alike.

The problem with most people who utter profound inanities about "networks versus hierarchies" is that they have almost no understanding of either. So they turn organizational designs into moral values. But they're not. They're structures that enable communication, management, and operational execution. To conflate values with organizational design is sheer intellectual laziness

I agree entirely with the sentiment, with a few caveats:

• Don't confuse the messenger (with their moral arguments) with the actual change agent; and
• Its not a choice between network or hierarchy - the network is already there.

It is also important to consider technology in the equation, as it shapes what is possible in terms of organisational design.

Perhaps a better way of thinking about 'simpler' organisations is to think in terms of lean management, rather than assuming we are always trying to flatten as the primary objective. We are simply trying to remove bottlenecks in business processes, using simple human-centred processes that ignore the now increasingly artificial constraints of hierarchical-based information systems.

In doing so we do recognise that organisations are complex. And as systems thinking taught me, we need to be open to new perspectives. So I'm not going to shoot the messengers just yet.