Social Computing: From LifeStyle to Workstyle (Collaborative Thinking)

This week I will be presenting at the The ECAR Symposium 2006 event in Phoenix, AZ. The topic will be "Social Computing: From LifeStyle To WorkStyle" and will focus on some of the more interesting trends I've found in the social software space. While much of the media focus is on the technology, I've been more interested in examining aspects related to organizational dynamics and the manner in which such software can enable more effective social scaffolding within enterprises. To over-generalize the consumer market:

People begin to use socially-oriented sites for their own purposes
They end up sharing content more easily with friends, family and so on
Along the way they discover that they can find information and activities that are of interest more rapidly
And in doing so, continue to connect with other people, forming relationships, communities, etc.
Which persuades them to create, customize, and extend their own social environment which in turn…
Encourages reciprocation; adding value back across their associated networks, groups and communities

You can find similar communication, information sharing and collaboration patterns within enterprises around a variety of activities and work practices within business processes, projects or cross-functional communities.

The other interesting item is that the technology manifest typically defined as social software (blogs, wikis, and such) are really not exclusive to a particular tool (yes, that means IBM and Microsoft can play in this domain). To me at least, what we are seeing is the emergence of better set of design criteria for people-centric software that existed before with the key elements being:

Collective user experience*
Informal, serendipitous interactions*
Group and network connectivity via attention data
Self-organizing participation
Network-influenced findability*
Community-determined credibility
Spaces that become places
Multiple personas
Recombinant*
Intrinsic to lifestyle*

Where "*" are attributes I had written about earlier this year in a paper published to Burton Group clients on social software. The others are more recent.

The trends here are undeniable (recent Business Week story and McKinsey article):

The need to improve productivity, performance, growth, and innovation is forcing organizations to be more externalized and interconnected
The transformation from hierarchical, top-down organizations to flatter, networked organizations is pushing decision making to the edge rather than retaining it within centralized structures
The evolving demographic makeup of the workforce, blurring lines between work and lifestyle, and technology convergence are causing a collision between consumer and enterprise use of technology

And organizations will have to change behaviors. Some of my beliefs:

Senior leadership of any enterprise will adopt more socially oriented work models, organizational practices, and management methods designed to more clearly value the role, influence and contributions of workers
Policy makers must reflect on the risks and governance implications associated with socially-oriented systems
IT decision makers must re-assess everything from design methods, and development practices to the software used for communication, information sharing and collaboration

And as always, social computing and social software are no excuse for a lack of due diligence when it comes to: