Jiri’s Notepad

One of the subjects I am really into is social software and its use for business purpose. Last August, I wished “to hear a bit more about how other companies that pioneered the use of social software […] to see how are the things going”. Going through my backlog of bookmarks, I came across few articles on the self-same subject.

Firstly it is Tom Davenport who reports that after a year after ‘going live’, Intellipedia, one of the most interesting and wide-reaching corporate social software projects, has been used by around 10%. Is this little or much? Viewed from a viewpoint of the total number of employees it is probably not enough, from another angle it is a great success because the notorious difficulty of making cultural changes to increase knowledge sharing.

Incidentally, Andrew McAfee who was at the same conference as Tom Davenport, asked panelists in a discussion about blockers in the implementation of collaboration tools. What he found out is worth noting:

I didn’t hear any of you point the finger at the managers in your organizations. Were you just being polite, or are they really not getting in the way of Enterprise 2.0? The new social software platforms are a bureaucrat’s worst nightmare because they remove his ability to filter information, or control its flow. I’d expect, then, that each of you would have some examples of managers overtly or covertly trying to stop the spread and use of these tools. Are you telling me this hasn’t happened?… That is in fact what they were telling me, and I didn’t get the impression that they were just being diplomatic”

Based on this I’m guessing here that most of these middle managers see the software as pretty irrelevant. The social and collaborative software has a potential to disrupt the established order, but I am guessing the early adopters may have changed the way they work, but 10% is probably not enough to create the tipping point without some major top down changes in corporate culture. Having said that there is still bound to be lots of space for some fantastic point innovations.