chieftech’s blog

Hopefully I won't be accused of being a troll, because I'm not hiding behind anonymity here on this blog. However, I can't find any way to sugar coat this: I found this book both disappointing and frustrating.

Disappointing because my expectations had been built up by the promotion surrounding the author and this book. Frustrating because the critical thinking I was expecting lacked clarity and depth.

This doesn't mean there aren't some interesting ideas in the book. Certainly, we should explore issues such as how the Internet affects our ability to be creative (and earn a living from being creative), and how it changes how we think and behave. But I'm simply not convinced by the author's arguments (or rather, the way they are articulated in this book). Also, while the main thrust of Lanier's manifesto is focused on the impact of information technology on dumbing down and control of how we create and exchange meaning, I think he fails to address another important aspect of people and culture, being relationships.

If anything I formed the impression that far from being unhappy with the digital world, the author is simply disappointed with the industrial revolution that is taking place online. He says on many occasions that he isn't anti-Web - in fact his concluding argument attempts to demonstrate that point - but his nostalgia for the past is obvious. His problem then is perhaps that the Web has suddenly been invaded by the Proles*. And perhaps that is the core of the warning in this book that you will need to answer for yourself - has 1984 come to pass or is this just another conspiracy novel?

BTW Compared to the book, Lanier's essay on Digital Maoism is worth reading.

*Yes, the irony of linking to Wikipedia is noted :-)

This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey is the first ever that examines the role of the internet and cell phones in the way that people interact with those in their core social network. Our key findings challenge previous research and commonplace fears about the harmful social impact of new technology

Well worth reading. Its just shows that our relationship with technology is often a lot more complex that it first appears.

The authors of this short piece on collaboration propose 12 categories of knowledge worker that they have matched to different collaboration technologies that have defined as being well suited, adequate or ill suited.

I'm a little worried about some of the suggested technologies (they recommend fax machines for some, but why not scan-to-email?) and I think you need to be careful to rule out a tool that is marked as ill suited for collaboration as it might still have application to that knowledge worker *outside* the domain of collaboration itself. However, even thinking about the 12 categories does help to raise awareness that different knowledge workers have different collaboration needs, and that's a good thing!

They also 10 forms of waste in collaboration, which might be a great starting point for putting together a business case to support collaboration with technology.

In this other post, Stewart Mader digs out the old McAfee-Davenport debate and concludes:

So Tom’s right — the absence of technology isn’t the only reason that organizations are hierarchical. The people in charge of those organizations organized them that way because it’s what they understood how to do. And Andrew’s right — today’s ubiquitous technologies that we use in all facets of our lives are different from the earlier tools that had a specific place and use.

I thought I would dig a little deeper and take a look at the history of the railways in the US for some insights into the history of these hierarchical structures we take for granted. These course materials from UC San Diego provide an overview of this history and they say:

The earliest railroads used the same simple form of business organization that almost all other businesses used at that time – the unified or entrepreneurial form of organization. This was the traditional owner-controlled facility in which the owner made the day-to-day operational decisions and set long term goals.

....

In the 1850s Daniel McCallum of the Erie Railroad perfected the operations department (responsible for moving trains and obtaining freight and traffic business) and devised the system of information flows using the telegraph. He was the first to clearly define the duties and responsibilities of the executive and administrative officers on a large railroad and to spell out the lines of authority and communication between the various officers of the road. Part of this scheme was a detailed system of information that flowed upward through the organization using the telegraph.

(Emphasis added)

I think technology has played a role in shaping organisational structure. However, the catalyst for change includes other managerial drivers, such as the need to manage scale (including a literal train wreck) and volumes of transactions, combined with the availability of an appropriate technology.

Considering Gartner is quoted as saying that "as much as 60% of an organization’s processes are unstructured – and probably also unmonitored, unmanaged, unknown and unruly" (hat tip to Sig) it sounds like we still haven't quite solved that management challenge as perfectly as the org charts might suggest. Enter new social computing technologies that offer the chance to help bridge that last effectiveness gap.

The question is, are you going to wait for your own organisational train wreck before you do something about it?

McAfee's definition of Enterprise 2.0 is flawed. It is missing what made the social web to the social web - the people, not the technology.

I'm not sure this is entirely true, however it may be that the term coined by McAfee doesn't reflect how people want to use it or where they want to place emphasis. For example, in McAfee's 2006 paper he does say:

These new digital platforms for generating, sharing and refining information are already popular on the Internet, where they’re collectively labeled “Web 2.0” technologies. I use the term “Enterprise 2.0”to focus only on those platforms that companies can buy or build in order to make visible the practices and outputs of their knowledge workers.

I think that depending on the organisation, the organisational change related to Enterprise 2.0 is really either a reflection of the latent demand ("we need better tools!") or a disruption of existing industrial era hierarchical information flows ("Information is power!"). At the time McAfee warned us about the latter, but didn't really explore the demand side of the former.

However, its important to remember that McAfee placed Enterprise 2.0 in the context of improving the productivity of knowledge workers in the light of the failure of the previous generation of collaboration, information management and knowledge management tools (rather than organisational change because of some external driver). In a way I see McAfee's work as an extension of Tom Davenports ideas about Human-Centered Information Management from way back in 1994. The people are there, because people and the social web are really at the centre of the information systems we create - so lets give them tools that reflect that.

However, recasting Enterprise 2.0 as something that is just about people and organisational change is a different matter entirely. I have no problem with the subject matter, but I do wonder where the plain old discourse on the topic of "management" in our digital era ends and the buzz word of "Enterprise 2.0" begins. If instead we remove out expectations of McAfee and re-frame this discussion as a management issue it does serve as a reminder that this stuff is complex - the technology, organisational and people elements are related, not separate - and one size will never fit all.

The major impediment to the growth of intranets is not technical but the lack of an economic imperative and corporate culture. People fail to recognize that groupware or collaborative functions needs a sociotechnological infrastructure," Coleman added, noting that cultural issues should be dealt with up front.

Before you go crazy retweeting this article, check the original - it was published in 1996. The Coleman quoted is David Coleman from a company called Collaborative Strategies - and they have been in business since 1990 and are still going today.