It seems that the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform was foreseeable. The workmen on the platform saw a lot of problems with the technique, but were afraid to inform the management of Transocean (owner of the platform). I won’t judge about the company and reasons of the accident (but I am very sad about it), but it shows that you can avoid problems with the right communication culture.

To discuss the advantages of Enterprise 2.0 we are talking about motivation and better processes, but rarely about prevention of problems which can harm a company strongly.

At first glance it seems to be profitable to keep some topics secret or setting pressure on employees to be quiet, but most of the times it isn’t. Cultivation an open communication culture will help to avoid such bad management decisions. Such problems guiding to a disaster will pop up earlier and needs to be fixed before a catastrophe will happen. Sometimes one person with the right knowledge or idea can help a company to survive, if a disaster can be avoided. This person can avoid it, but need a voice which can be heard by enough people.

It’s not possible to install an open culture without the right tools. In bigger companies it can be done by brown bag meetings. Enterprise 2.0 offers the right tools, but the more important part is to adopt it the right way. Things like training are needed, but it’s an important factor to involve the top management. They must support it. It’s in their own interest. Nobody is perfect. Using the wisdom of the crowd will be the attribute of successful companies in future. Enterprise 2.0 does support it perfectly.

While cleaning up my inbox I stumbled upon some old mail conversations of our advisory board regarding a dogmatic discussion about whether Enterprise 2.0 is an "evolution" or "revolution". From my last post on the classification of use case it becomes clear that I am very much on the "evolutionary" side of the discussion when it comes to how to fit the social applications into the enterprise application stack. But on the organisational dimension of the discussion I very much agree on the arguments that successful E2.0 initiatives need a reframing of the organisational structure of the enterprise. But instead of bothering you with my opinion I would like to point out some of the great statements from the discussions of our advisory board.

The discussion all started with a statement of Mark Masterson regarding the missed aspect of integrating social applications with the enterprise business solutions:

As I’ve said elsewhere , I think that we spend much too much time talking about implementing social networking software silos ("build a wiki, and they will come"), and much too little about baking SNS into existing domain and task specific systems. Bjoern, you suggest something quite similar in your recent post , where you speak about this under the "Being Complementary and Integrative" bullet point.
I have elsewhere made the argument that one way to approach the problem would be to marry up SNS functionality with BPM software (read it here ). But not everyone is convinced that this is a good idea — there are some who responded to that (and other, similar ideas elsewhere) that BPM would be
poison for SNS — that the structured processes a BPMS implies are anathema to collaboration, never the twain shall meet.

In response to this Lee Bryant brought up the point that just enhancing the excisting processes with a layer of interaction to support crossfunctional sharing of knowledge and collaboration is not enough because a complete reframing of the idea of the organisational structure is needed in order to be successful in Enterprise 2.0 initiatives.

Existing businesses have structure and they have process, but as Mark says, the problem lies in trying to automate or de-humanise process, rather than with the idea of process itself. In terms of structure, a  question on my mind is how we can re-design businesses and organisations around the ideas of flow, aggregation, networks and collaboration, rather than just think about how we can work within the existing structures that we find in large businesses today. For example, looking at the segmentation you have applied to the audience  and tracks, I find it interesting to note that Intranet and ECM departments should simply not exist. Arguably, neither should central knowledge functions, which are better located within lines of  business. So the question is, what are the organisational design implications of E2.0 tools, techniques and ideas?

Last but not least I want to include the propositions of Bertrand Duperrin on this - whom I would put on the "evolutionary" side of this discussion as he proposed foremost a "rethinking" of some key corporate values in order to really foster the network effects of social applications in or above the "flow":

1. think in terms of system (dynamic flows) rather than organization (set org-chart)
2. Think "global improvement" (macro vision) rather than "functional optimization" (micro vision)
3. Think "increase performance" rather than "cost reduction"
4. Think "pull" (listen to the client’s voice..and client may be internal) rather than "push" (offer and product approach)
5. Think "individual" (what he is, what he knows, what he likes) and not "function" (what he has, what he must do, his status)
6. Think "ongoing experimentation" (permanent beta with quick retro-action loops) rather than according to the "test/validation/production/generalization".
7. Think "immediate generalization" (in order to make it possible for unexpected things to emerge) rather than "progressive generalization" (because it contradicts the economic benefits driven by the network effects)
8. Replace "think" by  "act" in the previous points
9. Don’t use hierarchy as a substitute for trust.

So - what do you think on this? What are your experiences? At the E2.0 SUMMIT will be addressing this discussion with different sessions - to really get a in depth understanding of it and eventually to provide some strategic implications. In order to enhance this discussion upfront I would be very interested about your opinions and views on this.

GULP, a german platform bringing together IT projects and freelancers, took a survey on the latest tech trends according to Gartner.

You can view the results over at their blog in German, IT project managers (dark blue) and freelancers (light blue) were asked to qualify each trend as a bubble or serious technology. The answer “bubble“ is always above, serious technology below.

You see a clear positive statement towards Desktop virtualizing, Unified Communications and Business Intelligence. Mashups and Enterprise 2.0 are seen as bubble.
So the result matches the well known attitude in conservative IT departments.

Convincing the IT is still an issue and more Enterprise 2.0 examples with a clear ROI are welcome.

During the last few days a lot of discussing has happened behind the stage of the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT - and it is triggering more worthwhile posts as well. As the idea of the E2.0 SUMMIT on Oct 6-8th is to represent a community and expertise hub for the European Enterprise 2.0 community this is a great thing to have, we really want to reflect the common Enterprise 2.0 discussions (especially from an European point of view).

So as we’ve been working on the scope and concept of the SUMMIT with several members of the advisory board - who were very active in contributing ideas and overall evaluating the topic list we’ve been devising. Calling on this round of experts in the field is only natural: We want the event to be attractive for both thought-leaders and practitioners, and we want to attract all the essential players of the E 2.0 industry. So we called on our “trusted” circle of people to provide the feedback we need and add ideas.

By now we can tell you that we’re finished with putting up the structure and scope side of the agenda for the October 6-8 event in Frankfurt. You may have a sneak preview here - now we are entering the stage of staffing the panels with the right people. So from the big picture the event structures as follows:

• Day 1 / Oct 6th: WikiCamp ‘09 (besides the regular workshop day)
• Day 2 / Oct 7th: plenum sessions in the morning, then fourparallel panel sessions (each 50mins - means 4×3 panels on Day 2)
• Day 3 / Oct 8th: 3 parallel panel sessions in the morning (each 50mins - means 3×3 panels on Day 3) plus 2 plenum sessions in the afternoon

So in total we’ve got 5 plenum sessions and 21 single track sessions for the E 2.0 SUMMIT. Each of these tracks is designed to be of interest to a distinct set of people, and tries to avoid conflicts with thematically related parts. Additionally we’ve included some industry panels (telco & banks), and several open
space orientated sessions.

For the “trusted” circle of experts feedback we can say that the biggest topic of the behind the scenes discussions was the dichotomy between orderly processes (read BPM) and the fuzzy world of Social Software (read Enterprise 2.0), how to deal with it, and basically how to tackle the topic at the conference. So while we all shared understanding a nice thread evolved that covered things like:

• How do we prevent that social software works out to be just another “silo” (”build a wiki, and they will come”)?
• How can we integrate social software into existing domains, usage arenas and task specific systems?
• What are the best ways to start with social software in the enterprise?
• How do we ensure that social software implementations turn out to be “complementary and integrative”? Is it a good idea to marry up SNS functionality with BPM software

Especially the last point triggered a lively discussion, whether the structured processes that go with BPM (and its systems) are preventing collaboration. Granted, this discussion isn’t of interest to everybody, but it has an audience beyond (enterprise) information architects and systems people for sure. Especially, it’s a question that arrives sooner or later in a corporations travels towards Enterprise 2.0, and members of various departments should listen:

• people (well, hailing from companies and/or departments) that are interested in improving specific business processes (e.g. quality assurance, customer service knowledge, etc.), and IT people who need to integrate legacy systems with Web 2.0
• communications department - they are interested in improving communications (and being more conversational needs more flexible processes, not more structure and control)
• Intranet & ECM management teams - interested in enhancing existing activities with Web 2.0 elements, so they need insights into when and where to ease process policies, and when and where to control things more tightly
• knowledge management and e-learning people - interested in better knowledge sharing, like w.g. leveraging collective intelligence (which needs altered processes as well, probably more flexible ones)/actions
• business development is fundamentally interested in changing the company (for more innovation, for better/more outcome/output or for cost reduction, for innovative business models, etc.) - all with heavy process implications
• overall the management board and people dealing with strategic planning …

To cater for these needs we have structured the conference into four main parts that shall

1. facilitate visionary and forward-looking discussions about collaborative performance of Enterprise 2.0
2. support the emergence of strategic discussions, like e.g. whether open innovation is an interesting arena for Enterprise 2.0 (we think it is!)
3. provide “hands-on” best-practice discussions and
4. provide space for more technology- and tool-oriented implementation discussions.

So connecting Enterprise 2.0 towards BPM will be a part of the conference discussions, especially in the panel “Best-Practices for Process Management 2.0″ and - in a more abstract way - in the panel “New Models for the Enterprise: Being Open, Collaborative & Disruptive”. I guess we will find time and space to discuss how to make our corporations more adaptive and flexible, or as Lee Bryant said it “how can we re-design businesses and organisations around the ideas of flow, aggregation, networks and collaboration?”.

Recent conversations about Enterprise 2.0 have, it seems to me, become increasingly focused on return on investment (ROI). This is a rational consequence of any number of factors — in order to deploy these technologies in any sensible fashion, it is necessary to demonstrate that doing so will bring a return on the investment needed that is greater than its cost. If we accept that, in the recent past, much of the activity surrounding the meme has been of an experimental nature (where there is, by definition, a high tolerance for risk), and also accept that many of these experiments, within the context of their constraints, have been successful, then we can expect that these results will begin to move the meme into the mainstream. This clearly seems to be happening. Insofar as it is, the meme thereby now commands some degree of management attention, so this increased focus on ROI is both correct and obviously understandable.

But…

Preparing an argument about the ROI of E2.0 that is both true and logically consistent is no simple task. That’s not because we don’t have enough case studies — it’s not because we don’t have enough data. It’s not because we can’t quantify benefits, or assign costs properly (well, actually, it is, but not in the sense that most people usually mean, in my experience). It’s because, most of the time, we’re using words incorrectly.

Words are a big deal. People mostly use them without (much) conscious thought, and therefore, underestimate them. That’s unfortunate, because they are the primary tools of thought, and choosing the right ones essentially determines whether our thoughts are robust, or not.

A huge part of any conversation about ROI is the underlying economy of the organisation in which the investment is taking place. And for various reasons, this economy is often misunderstood, ignored, obfuscated or just plain badly described. That fact, in turn, means that subsequent conversations about problems dependent upon it have an imperfect basis — a conversation about ROI in this context is a conversation about a house built on quicksand. It will sink.

And to the extent that many people are not even aware of the quicksand — not aware of all of the misunderstandings and incorrect assumptions about the underlying economy of the organisation — they often fail to perceive that the house is sinking until it’s gone. This leads to a certain degree of bewilderment, eventually, when they go searching for it on the plains of the organisational economic quicksand, in vain.

I’m not an economist. Even if I wanted to try and describe the abstract economy of an enterprise in this post (which I do not, lacking the patience for it — be grateful, reader!), I could not. I lack the words to do so. But I can, for whatever reason, perceive these economies, so what I can do is offer some examples of them at work. Perhaps, if you are not yet aware of them, this will help you perceive them as well. If you are aware of them, then the examples may help clarify my argument here.

Consider the common example of a governance board. Let us assume that we are dealing with a very large organisation — one for which the term “enterprise” would not seem a poor fit — it has 20k employees and revenues of several billion dollars. This organisation has set a high level, strategic goal to “control costs”. Moreover, it has iteratively specified that goal to mean, among many other things, “attempt to maximise reuse of assets”, a goal which, in a further iteration, has then been specified to mean (or correlate to) the following goal for the IT organisation: “conform to a documented enterprise architecture”. This latter goal, finally, is achieved by attempting to rationalise the use of IT assets across the organisation. The entire enterprise will use one and the same email system, for example: the scenario where two (more or less otherwise) independent business units each use their own, differing email systems will not be allowed. The “governance board” is a tool to achieve this goal — once established, all new IT efforts must be subjected to its scrutiny, and the members of this board are tasked with enforcing this goal.

Hmm. But like the House of ROI, this too is built on the quicksand of the enterprise’s economy. What does that mean? Consider this further development of the scenario: shortly after being established, the board finds itself overwhelmed. At any given time, there are hundreds, even thousands of efforts, initiatives, projects and whatnot, across the enterprise, that need to be scrutinised for compliance with this goal. The board cannot keep up. So, typically, the response to this reality is this: the board sets a price. It sets a gatekeeper rule that says something like: “Any project with a projected cost of more the $X must be approved by this board”. Projects that cost less, do not. This is a simple risk management strategy, on its surface, and on that surface, perfectly sensible. The load on the governance board is reduced to something it can cope with, but the organisation is nevertheless confident that the goal is being managed, balanced with the risk associated with a particular effort.

Below that tidy surface, though, the economic quicksand upon which it sits is the context for fascinating effects. Among other things, what happens is that the marketplace of potential projects, within the organisation, reacts to the price. Let’s assume, for the sake of developing the scenario to its conclusion, that you are the new project manager of an attempt to roll out an implementation of an enterprise wide social networking platform. One of the criteria that you will be judged on (where both those criteria and the process of judging people by them are part of the mysterious economy!) is the amount of time you take to complete this task. You examine the overall mechanism, and notice two things: one, the scope of your project is large, and two, it will cost enough that it will trigger the governance board process. “Hmm,” you think, “what does that mean? What impact will this have on my project plan?” So you go take a look at what the governance board is doing, and discover two things that, from your perspective, are appalling. First, you learn that the duration of the process of approval — the time it takes for the board to review your project and issue a “go” or “no go” — is 6 work weeks. Second, you learn that there is a queue of projects waiting for approval — the soonest point in time that your project could be evaluated, even with the newly implemented “fast track” mechanism for “strategic projects”, is two months from now.

You know instantly that this is unacceptable. For one thing, the governance board review is part of the initial setup process — you need a “go” from them to proceed to implementation. The only way to work those 3.5 months of delay into your schedule is if you continue to work on the project while waiting — delegate the governance board to its own, parallel stream. But that means assuming full responsibility for the risk — if you’ve called it wrong (or failed to make a convincing enough case), and the board says “no go”, you will have committed resources and expended funds in vain. That’s not likely to lead to a glowing appraisal for you.

So you look at the price tag for the governance board process, and begin figuring out how to break your project up into multiple, smaller ones, such that they will not be subject to the process. You react to the price.

Consider another, real world example: in a large organisation I know of, there is an ongoing effort to move IT efforts, across the enterprise, in a direction that conforms with a fairly rigidly defined service oriented architecture (SOA). One of the stumbling blocks to doing this is expertise — the people who understand the SOA, as defined by and for this enterprise, are not numerous, and individual projects need only transient access to them, typically. The organisation responded to these factors by establishing a “SOA Centre of Excellence (COE)”, where it clustered the experts. The intent is / was to “hire out” the COE’s expertise to individual projects. However, the COE is sinking into the quicksand, a year or so later — its services rarely invoked, the SOA it is tasked to evangelise largely ignored and absent from the organisation’s new and ongoing efforts. How did this happen? Why did it happen? It’s the economy, stupid. A key economic concept is one of incentives — pricing is all about negotiating them. From the start, because of the high fixed costs (mostly personnel) associated with the COE, the “cost” of using its services was widely perceived as being higher than the benefits derived (which were not seen as being significant in the immediate, small-scale context of most projects). This amounted to a disincentive.

Some time after inception, the organisation, frustrated by the lack of uptake of the COE, did the following two things: one, it changed the governance board process. For any project of a cost above $X, it added a mandatory step to the review process — the SOA COE had to review the project and determine if it was “SOA relevant”. Number two, and further, if it did determine that a project was “SOA relevant”, that project was then obligated to purchase a unit of the COE’s services, to ensure that subsequent designs and whatnot were “SOA compliant”.

This change — which quickly became known as the “SOA tax” — had an interesting, and entirely rational result. It caused the complete destruction of the SOA COE. Projects began to actively attempt to not be “SOA relevant” (to avoid paying the tax) — whether, in some absolute sense, they really were, or not. This, in turn, accelerated the funding problems that these measures had been intended to solve, so that within a year, the COE had effectively been dismantled.

I have literally been in situations where I have seen agitated project managers turn to a hapless architect and say “You! Go through all 260 of these documents, and remove or obscure everything that might even slightly resemble the word SOA! Do it now!” And I have also seen those same sorts of managers, deep in panic mode, literally tearing a project up into bizarre, otherwise completely nonsensical chunks, merely to ensure that each chunk was small enough to avoid some such gatekeeper price tag.

These behaviours, however, are completely rational within the context of the overall enterprise economy.

So, what does this have to do with Enterprise 2.0? Well, like SOA, E2.0 is a meme that explicitly, deliberately attempts to cross silo walls. Indeed, like SOA, E2.0 derives the bulk of its value as a function of its success in doing just that. For that reason, and again like SOA, it is supremely sensitive to the vagaries of the true enterprise economy. Sensitive in a way, and to a degree, that a meme with a smaller scope (”let’s do CRM for the sales guys” defines a very small subset of the overall enterprise economy) is not. This is the truth that underlies all of the various discussions of “top down vs. bottom up”, “executive sponsorship” and whatnot.

Thus, the precise meaning of the words you are using is of utmost importance: when you speak of “ROI”, if you are not doing so with a meaning for the words “return”, or “investment”, that is broad enough to include things like the ways participants are judged (rewarded) or the various mysterious costs (like the price of the governance board, or the SOA tax) of the enterprise economy, then you are probably engaged in a futile exercise. If you think that ROI is a matter of getting some numbers into an Excel spreadsheet, then you are probably building a house on a foundation of economic quicksand. It will likely sink, and that would be unfortunate.

Postscript: I was inspired to write this post by two other blog posts, recently read. The first, an excellent screed by Venkatesh Rao about the myth of “culture change” in large organisations (”There is no such thing as culture change“), speaks about linking E2.0 efforts to real incentives within the context of an organisation’s structures and behaviours. The second, which I found as a consequence of the reactions to my comments on the first, via the typical torturous path of weak ties, is a blog post by Paula Thornton called “Crossing the chasm” (search (Ctrl-F) her post for “small is the new black”, which made me laugh out loud). The twisted intersection of those posts, in my (twisted) mind, led to writing this one. If you are one of those strange folk who have actually read this far, I strongly encourage you to click through and read these posts as well. Venkat’s, in particular, would make a great panel at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit. Also in this same vein, and highly recommended, are Venkat’s series of posts about his “cloudworker” meme, in particular, “Cloudworker Economics“.

Preceeding the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT (you know, Oct 7. & 8. in Frankfurt) Björn and I are planning to host a BarCamp-style meetup of Wiki-consultants, -developers, -users and all people generally interested in enterprise wikis. Given that Oct 6 is pre-conference workshop day anyway we’ve thought that WikiCamp ‘09 is a nice and fitting name. That said, we’re organising a nice venue and will look for all the necessary gadgets like beamers, working wifi etc. (and I guess we’ll also find some sponsored catering). Ideally a diverse mix of people from the german (and international) wiki community will then get together, and take the opportunity of an idea and/or concept development day, where:

• the people behind various wiki engines can meet up, interact and network
• lessons learned can be exchanged and told, bridging the experiences of both wiki practitioners and consultants
• we’ll discuss the future role of wikis in the context of Enterprise 2.0
• we’re open for more ideas, hints, wishes and proposals, … (go ahead now, voice your ideas in the comments, what do you think?)

Update: Here’s the WikiCamp’09 wiki, to collect and systematize ideas.

1.) What is your name?

Gil Yehuda

2.) Who are you and what are you doing?

I’m an independent consultant – which is a fancy way of saying that I’m in between jobs right now. Most recently I was the Forrester Analyst who covered Enterprise 2.0 for Information and Knowledge Management clients.

Prior to that I was an Enterprise Architect at Fidelity Investments, where I implemented E2.0 tools and behaviors in some of their larger business units.

3.) How did you get to the E2.0 topic?

When I was an Enterprise Architect, I realized that I had tons of responsibility but no authority. I also discovered that no matter how much I knew about my field, there was always someone who knew more than me. So rather than trying to be the smartest and the most powerful architect – something I knew I’d never be – I chose to be the most helpful and socially-connected architect. I put together a virtual organization using social networking tools and this transformed the relationships between the development, architecture, and engineering groups. We proved to be more agile and less expensive. Then other groups sought my help to copy the model for their initiatives. Later I learned that I was following the E2.0 themes, so I dove in to learn more about the field that I was instinctually drawn to.

4.) What is your understanding of the core concept of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

At its core, E2.0 is a shift in mindset and behavior. In many cases, the new behaviors need to be supported by new tools.

I see three phases to the E2.0 idea. In the first, organizations realize that facilitating knowledge exchange between employees who are connected by weak-tie relationships is an essential part of running a modern scalable business. In the second phase, Enterprises reach outside of the corporate walls for cooperation with customers and partners. In the third, we lose the name “E2.0” and just say “this is who we work with and how we work.”

5.) What are the main potentials of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

The success of many modern corporations is based primarily on the effective use of their knowledge economy. Their knowledge economy is composed of knowledge, people, and the effective exchange of knowledge and people. The E2.0 idea seeks to provide companies with the tools and behaviors that facilitate a knowledge economy using the proven successes of the Web 2.0 Internet. In the most basic sense, E2.0 is not an optional set of tools that companies can choose to budget for, or defer. Businesses will eventually adopt the behaviors that E2.0 supports at its core, or will fail
to compete with those who do.

6.) What are the main challenges and threats of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

I see three main challenges to the idea:
1. Timing is essential to the success of an E2.0 initiative. Most organizations start too late.
2. E2.0 must acknowledge that companies have to follow rules, regulations, and risk management processes. Unfortunately, these rule are often used to stifle innovation rather protect interests.
3. Lack of technology integration is a barrier. Companies want E2.0 tools to fit within their infrastructure and leverage their existing investments in enterprise software.

7.) Please give us three tags that describe your person and work best?

Insightful, Collaborative, Passionate

8.) Please give us three links to articles/contributions that describe your views best?

In addition to the papers that I wrote for Forrester clients on the Forrester site, I’d include these three articles, one of which I wrote:

• Predicting the battle over collaboration infrastructure in 2009
• Forrester on the Future of Enterprise 2.0 Technologies
• The Rules of Engagement in Community

9.) Please give us three names of colleagues that you would refer to as brother-in-spirit?

What a difficult question — only three names?! There are so many. OK, I’ll try.

1. Jessica Lipnack
2. Bill Ives
3. Rachel Happe

Besides my german language summary at frogpond I suppose it’s important to compile some impressions for the non-german speaking Enterprise 2.0 community. And when one of your keynote speakers travelled all the way from London to Cologne it’s even more timely. I already did my best in twitter-translating the german-language talks for him (neat if you have companies like Vodafone among the best practices that present in German but sport english slides). Yes, David Terrar triggered off the conference day with a well-received talk on community building in the Enterprise. See the embedded slideshow below on “How to build vibrant communities”.

While I knew David before (we first met at the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 in Varese, but didn’t find any time then), I enjoyed it a lot to have time for discussions this time - and we’ve had great conversations both at the pre-conference dinner and on conference day itself. He and Thomas Koch of Kongressmedia made me miss a good part of the afternoon starting session.

And here’s the Harvard video of John Chambers David mentions (seen also at Oliver Marks):

YouTube Direkt

Or France, or Japan, or Brazil? Or, indeed, anywhere that is not an “Anglo/Saxon” culture? Now, wait, wait — before you flame on! (or worse), hear me out. It’s hard to talk about the issue I want to raise here without raising some emotional reactions as well — often rather heated ones. That’s understandable, but it may also hinder us from having a conversation about a very interesting topic.

Important caveat number one, therefore, is the one I raised in my very first sentence — despite my (deliberately) provocative headline, I think that what I’m about to speculate about applies to some degree in any society that that is not a progeny of England (and even that formulation will be fighting words for some in the USA, Canada, Oz, New Zealand and particularly Ireland or Scotland — but I am thinking in almost biological terms, here. You may well dislike your parents, but you can’t change who they are). I will use Germany as the basis for my speculation, because it’s the non-Anglo/Saxon culture I know best, and not because I want to pick on Germany or Germans in particular. I love Germany — it is my home; my wife, daughter, large parts of my family, and many close friends are all German. But I do believe that certain aspects of German culture, and their implications with respect to social software, can be used to illustrate points about a broader theme, and so I will use them to try to do so. OK?

This is slippery, and dangerous terrain, and it is essentially impossible to venture out onto it without falling, and making a fool of oneself. I will surely be no exception here. But I am convinced that there is something important lurking out on those dangerous plains, and I think we would all be well served by finding some way to call attention to it. What is Anglo/Saxon culture? What is German culture? How do they differ? Frankly, I’m no expert in such matters, and not really qualified to voice an opinion on them, in many people’s eyes. But I will now proceed to forthrightly go ahead and do so anyway.

And therein lies a fascinating difference between the two cultures: Anglo/Saxon culture encourages — even lionises — such acts. German culture does not.

Now, having said that, here comes important caveat number two: there is no such thing as absolute truth, and there are certainly no absolute truths with regard to sociology or politics or cultural differences. These are not binary states, of which I speak, but points near the median of a very analogue — Gaussian — distribution. For every rule, there is an exception, and indeed, the exceptions sometimes make the rule. Etc. I understand and acknowledge that. However, there is nevertheless value to be found in examining the median in such distributions, and when I say “German culture does not”, that’s what I am aspiring to do. OK?

It may be impossible to ever come up with “the” definition of something as amorphous as a human society or culture, but any fool can see immediately, upon leaving the one she was born into, and visiting another, that they exist. And that they have differences. These differences are typically expressed as stereotypes and prejudices, many of which are the product of nothing more than ignorance (and often, its correlate, fear). But some of these stereotypes will have a kernel of something approximating truth at their core.

Thus, for example, in 1758, the Württembergischer publisher Karl Friedrich Moser wrote: “Every nation has its principal motive. In Germany, it is obedience; in England, freedom; in Holland, trade; in France, the honour of the King”. This is an absurd exaggeration, verging on hyperbole, and particularly in the modern world, one which many Germans would vigourously object to — and rightly so. To the latter point, and despite that, I might respond by doing the following: let us fast forward the lens of our attention to the early 1970s. And turn that lens on the anarchist and terrorist elements that surrounded people like Baader and Meinhof. Even before violence became a tragic element of the student protests in the late 1960’s, there was an element of distrust and frustration with the established order that took the form of an outright contempt of reason — a disdain for Wissenschaft, and a belief in the instincts of the Basis (the collective) as a useful guide to behaviour, as opposed to reason. These sorts of ideas are the clear and unmistakable descendants of German Romanticism of the late 18th and early 19th century. And the contrast between these stereotypes — the idea of an extreme affinity for obedience versus the inchoate Sehnsucht and open contempt for reason embodied by Romanticism — is profoundly illustrative of the complexity of German culture. This is a culture that produced both the Prussian hierarchies of Bismarck’s Ämte, and the theories of Karl Marx. It has a long, complex and unique history, of which one quite prominent thread is an ongoing, recurring struggle between the needs and desires of the individual, and those of the group in which that individual resides.

The history of Anglo/Saxon culture contains such a thread as well. It is not necessary — or even useful — to engage in a conversation about the merits of these two contrasting threads. All that I wish to do is make the following point: in each of the two cultures, the thread exists, and they are different from one another. The history of the the struggle between the individual and his society is a different story in Anglo/Saxon culture than it is in German culture. And the product of these respective threads — the day to day realities in which we now find ourselves — are also different.

To what extent, then, can we expect that practices regarding social software, as developed and espoused by an English-speaking, Anglo/Saxon culture, to be a seamless fit in a German-speaking culture? I think it must be obvious by now that I think the answer is: to no extent at all. Indeed, to the extent that software of any kind embodies social and cultural norms, to what extent is it reasonable to expect that the design of a software artefact produced in an Anglo/Saxon culture will be optimal in a German one? Again, I think the answer is clear: it is not at all reasonable to expect such a thing.

On the other hand, we live in a “globalised” age, one where every culture is exposed to many of the same influences, to an extent never before known in the history of our species. Communication technologies — particularly television and the Internet — are the enablers of this. No culture now exists, on the planet, that has not been exposed, to some degree, to Baywatch. Many cultures — and certainly all of the more affluent cultures — have their own version of Big Brother — in Germany, this past month, the local version of the British reality show “I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!” was watched by an extraordinary number of people.

And lurking within that observation, I think, is the essence of a problem currently confronted — and as far as I can tell, largely unacknowledged — by social software systems in general, and certainly Enterprise 2.0 punditry in particular. Most of the social software currently “in play” in the market, and certainly virtually all of the commentary on the themes it provokes (like Enterprise 2.0) are products of Anglo/Saxon cultures — representative of Anglo/Saxon thinking. This is an understandable consequence of their provenance, perhaps, but it is nonetheless insufficient. Just as “I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!” can only be successful in Germany in a version that is German in nature (and then it can be very successful indeed), we are in need of an articulation of Enterprise 2.0 that is German in nature. And one that is Spanish, one that is Japanese, Russian, Chinese and so forth. Lacking such an articulation, we are likely to find ourselves lost in the quagmire of discussions that purport to be about “das Ding an sich”, but which are (also) about differences between two cultures. We need to tease those two thing apart from one another — such that, hopefully, we can concentrate solely on talking about “das Ding an sich”.

And to those Germans reading this who are now shaking their heads, perhaps annoyed, perhaps merely perplexed (and perhaps both), and thinking, “Why? Why do we need such a thing? What value is there in the Anglo/Saxon definition of ‘Enterprise 2.0′ that could possibly prompt me to want a German version of it?”, I would say the following. As someone who is in the rare position of being able to read something like Andrew McAfee’s definition of Enterprise 2.0, and “see” it with both the eyes of a native Anglo/Saxon, and (to some debatable but undeniable extent) the eyes of a German, I say to you: if there is a concept that is more uniquely, perfectly German than the one of “emergent structure”, implied by McAfee’s theory, then I would like to hear about it. ;D

So what would a German version of Enterprise 2.0 look like? What would it entail? Well, I’m not sure. But this forum is as good a place as any to debate and define it. Certainly, there are some obvious characteristics — German social software will need to have a slightly different relationship to hierarchies, authority and expertise than Anglo/Saxon software will. And German social software will have to take into explicit account both such “soft” factors, as well as the “hard” realities of everyday existence — such as German laws, customs and norms regarding things like privacy. But I am sure of one thing — without it, social software will not “work” in Germany. Or anywhere else.

What do you think?

Lots of information have been already distributed through out the net about the Enterprise 2.0 FORUM / Cologne, that took place already nearly two weeks ago. Now we finished cutting and setting up all the recorded video materials - so here we go with the presentation of Suw Charman-Anderson talking about the “adoption strategy for social software”.

Well - actually she was talking about “training a cat” - and how the cat will not do anything without a reward for doing it. So as the first key point of successfully adopting social software she advised to think about a rewarding system. Further aspects she is talking about were

• the importance of identifying the problem on the day-to-day work of the individual that can be solved by social software
• the user-centric adoption as bottom-up approach that has more potential to be successful than the top-down approach
• the need of a leadership by engagement - I would do the reference towards Rod Beckstrom’s catalyst personnas
• for the implementation of social software projects she proposes a “trojan mice” aproach in the means of small projects introduced into the ongoing organisation (to grow securely)

Many more interesting advices may be taken from the video:

Video

Actually the importance of the rewarding system was also a big issues being discussed in the open space session. (I am just working on a transcript of the discussions - will translate this also to English soon!)

There are two aspects regarding the rewarding system I’d like to share with you:

1. the grade of participation in social software projects must be part of the evaluation by the objective agreement
2. participation in social software projects must be transparent to be socially acknowledged (means the need for activity streams!).

What advices do you have on this?