On Tools and Goals

Dennis Howlett takes a refreshingly skeptical swipe at Enterprise 2.0 and social media in this post.

My initial reaction was that new information tools are likely to a certain amount of organizational confusion...especially when the tools are potentially as powerful and disruptive as those associated with electronic collaboration.

Typically, there will be early adopters who see tremendous potential...and spend lots of energy creating "visions" and trying to sell them. Often these visions have little concrete connection to a real-world need; they instead tend to talk about the amazing attributes of the tools.

Leaders and users in the real world predictably react with some skepticism. While they may agree that the claimed attributes are desirable (e.g., speeds knowledge transfer), they're compensated based on (a) how they do an existing job better, and (b) whether they develop new (profitable) jobs.

Unless the visionaries can provide a detailed plan for how the new tool to address one or both of these needs in a specific business context, the tool is not likely to attract much support.

Howlett's take is that organizations (which pursuing specific goals like making a profit) are still trying to figure out whether/how social media fits into their day-to-day business activities. It's a phase I've come to think of as "playing around" with a new tool to try to figure out what it's good for (and not good for). Most organizations don't have much experience with "playing around" with new IT collaboration tools...but I wonder if this may be an expertise they need to develop.