Snowden on Social Media

Several items on social media appeared this week on Cognitive Edge:

• A new podcast and set of slides on the use of social media in what some are calling Enterprise 2.0. Well worth reviewing:
  http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/dave/2008/11/km_asia_keynote_on_social_comp.php
• A subsequent conversation about IT's tendency toward centralized Complicated systems in a domain that's inherently Complex:
  http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/dave/2008/11/the_major_obstacle_to_the_adop.php
• And, an interesting discussion about social computing and IT by the current guest blogger (Keith Fortowsky):
  http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/guest/2008/11/serious_play_in_a_complex_part_1.php#more

Here's my summary:

IT is about Simple & Complicated stuff (Cynefin), and social computing is about Complex (Cynefin) stuff.

So, IT tends to inadvertently stifle social computing by over-constraining it. As a result, it does not catalyze the kind of exploratory activities that characterize social computing.

The case may be overstated, but I think the basic concern has some merit.

This discussion seems to hint at a wider concern: large organizations are inherently bureaucratic and (mostly unintentionally) uneasy about relatively unconstrained activities. If you can't measure it, how do you know if it's worth it? How do you compute & monitor ROI?

This implies that social computing in a large organization is a bit oil-and-water...perhaps more of a challenge than it would seem at first glance. If social media is as revolutionary as some think it is, this aspect of it points toward a level of internal turmoil in large organizations that is unprecedented since their widespread emergence over 100 years ago....along with a change in structure so fundamental that it calls forth a new label. Identity crisis is just the jumping-off point.