The Enterprise In A Networked World

I truly enjoy reading most everything Dana publishes and this article really falls into that category so follow the link and read it for yourself. I do not pretend to understand everything Dana writes about since I do not have a background in ethnography. But there are findings that correlate to things I do focus on concerning  organizational dynamics and social computing as applied to enterprise environments.

Below, I specifically call out three excerpts from her article as "points to ponder" - I added the underlined/italicized to what I thought were some key points, as well as a brief opinion after each excerpt:

While I groan whenever the buzzword "digital native" is jockeyed about, I also know that there is salience to this term. It is not a term that demarcates a generation, but a state of experience. The term is referencing those who understand that the world is networked, that cultures exist beyond geographical coordinates, and that mediating technologies allow cultures to flourish in new ways. Digital natives are not invested in "life on the screen" or "going virtual" but on using technology as an artifact that allows them to negotiate culture. In other words, a "digital native" understands that there is no such thing as "going online" but rather, what is important is the way in which people move between geographically-organized interactions and network-organized interactions. To them, it's all about the networks, even if those networks have coherent geographical boundaries.

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Often when I talk to enterprise strategists, we devolve far too quickly into a product discussion. The tone of my commentary regarding SharePoint was in part influenced by the extreme product-centric view the authors adopted regarding social networking (which is just so incredibly short-sighted). Of course, it's not just Microsoft, most vendors see their own platform as owning (a.k.a. "fencing in") the networking experience of its participants. The truth is, as JP Rangaswami points out in this blog post, it's about the ecosystem, not just the platform. Vendors should be called out when the attempt to deliver products that result in perimeters around their own platforms that create artificial boundaries in terms of social relationships. It is naive for a vendor to position its product as the cocoon for someone's social network - "come live in my walled garden" is not exactly the rallying cry for a next generation workplace or thinking in terms of "a new world of work". 

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Going native in a networked world is extremely difficult. What makes the experiences of say teens so vibrant is cluster effects. They're using the technologies with their friends. It's not about them and the machine. It's about them and their friends interacting through the machine. One of the things that I figured out really quickly is that having a profile did me absolutely no good. I needed to have friends who would interact with me so that I would get what it was like to experience the technology as a mediating force. Thus, I have dragged my friends kicking and screaming into using these tools just so that I could get it. Using these tools in my own social framework is not the same as experiencing what teens experience, but I needed to feel the social awkwardness, the consequences of power relations, the gulp factor when a comment was taken out of context, and the uh-ohs involved in expressing information in a persistent and searchable manner in the face of broad audiences. And this required my friends to be involved.

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The perspective Dana shares here is also relevant to the enterprise. I just finished a road trip recently and visited with several organizations. Often people talk about social networks and communities without a clear understanding of the cultural dynamics within the company or the social frameworks of their workers. "We want a corporate Facebook" is becoming a common term. Often I find myself in a top-down view of how management feels that they know how workers would benefit from social applications. That might be interesting from a "I know what's good for you" perspective but it misses a key point. There will be many more informal social networks that there are formal or semi-formal ones (in fact, they already exist and have always existed). The notion that social networks should be formalized was one of the concerns I had regarding a recent McKinsey Article that I raised in a recent post. When it comes to "corporate social networking", to paraphrase Dana, "It's not about employees and the enterprise. It's about employees and their co-workers interacting through social applications". There are formalized networks that management can facilitate (e.g., alumni networks, retiree networks, professional support networks) and that's perfectly fine. Indeed, it can be tremendously valuable and transformational. But is also equally important to realize that not all networks should be made formal - there are those that should remain informal, opaque or even unseen - and that's ok - create the right environment, or ecosystem - and these semi-visible or invisible networks will deliver value to formal business activities.

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The next challenge for me was trying to understand how interactions moved between spaces. While cyberculture dreams were all about a life fully lived online, most people do not experience that and thus you cannot simply watch from an online vantage point. Seeing a teen's life through the lens of MySpace is akin to seeing their life through their time in school. It does get you part way there and it is important, but since I wanted to understand how social technologies fit into teens' lives, I knew I needed to go further.

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The key point here is that the design of social applications will require a different approach with different skills than other types of systems IT organizations have delivered in the past. There is a greater need for expertise within project teams that are knowledgeable about ethnography, anthropology, and research methods such as  contextual inquiry. The need to understand the online/offline transitions and the need to understand the interplay between work and lifestyle are important considerations as people become more mobile, the workplace becomes more virtual and an employees work "day" (no longer a 9-5 in-the-office structure) includes the interweaving of business and personal activities.   

"Choose Your Own Ethnography: In Search of (Un)Mediated Life"