Alexander Wilms’ article “The Trouble with Web 2.0″ suggests that new patterns for web development and use that work for the public web may not be viable within enterprise environments. I have real issues with some of his interpretations (e.g. he confuses open architectures with open source) and conclusions. When he says that, within the enterprise, “access to data and the means to combine them are restricted by departmental boundaries, technological incompatibilities or data security and protection rules,” he accepts these limitations without considering whether they are barriers to potential value from increased collaboration and knowledge – are firm and restrictive departmental boundaries a good thing? Should systems be more interoperable? Shouldn’t we accept the challenge of increased security burden in order to enhance social interaction and the resulting potential for creativity and innovation? The answer to all of those questions may be no, but shouldn’t we at least consider them?

He suggests issues with the concept of collective intelligence. For instance, “in many interviews end users said that they often prefer to research on the Web instead of using their corporate knowledge resources because they are confused by the complexity of internal search and because the information they can find on the web seems to be more recent.” Isn’t this an argument for improving the usability and currency of internatl resources? He then says of the external web, “the reliability of Web-based information that can be edited by everybody is in doubt when comes to hard legal or medical use. Would you be willing to bet your career on a Wikipedia article?” Forgetting for the moment that Wikipedia does hold up well in comparison to traditional encyclopedias, I don’t think there’s an issue anyway, because the “collective intelligence” jams don’t have to produce “hard legal or medical” information. Even if you agree that user generated content is not generally presumed authoritative, it can still have value as knowledge process, and stimulate creativity.

He says that corporate services tend to have low user commitment, but to me that’s an argument for evangelizing. He suggests that competition within companies produces knowledge hoarding vs sharing behaviors, and he’s right – I’ve seen that firsthand. The question is, how do you promote a different set of values within the corporate environment, so that cooperation is favored over competition, in at least some contexts? A company may lose valuable potential for innovation if leaders within the organization don’t work to support collaboration. Again, this is something we should at least be willing to consider.

He seems to suggest that blogs and wikis shouldn’t be set up because they will inherently invite control “to protect the company interests,” and the eventual attempt to control them will result in opposition and discontent. I would see this as a problem in dysfunctional companies with extreme polarization between management and employees, and an unwillingness to consider a “values upgrade.” Adults can expect other adults to behave responsibly, and there are adult ways to handle differences of opinion about behavior. If you say that employees given a context for open communication will inherently abuse it, I think you’re saying that the resistance is already there. If that’s the case, by facilitating open discussion, you create a context where feelings of resistance can be addressed, rather than suppressed or “controlled.”

He argues that “corporate applications cannot be developed and deployed using a ‘perpetual beta’ mode,” as is the case with consumer applications on the open web (including, incidentally, some that are used by corporations, e.g. Basecamp) because of a concern that “software errors will cause financial damage or threaten the company in other ways.” It seems to me that you could make the distinction within the enterprise between mission-critical financial environments and contexts for communication and collaboration, and develop the latter with less rigor. Also note that “perpetual beta” doesn’t mean “perpetually broken.” It’s not that we’re loose about putting potentially bad code into production, it’s just that the application is never considered complete; the assumption is that there is always room for modification and improvement.

The good news is that the concluding paragraph makes perfect sense –

Web 2.0 patterns will only work if the corporate and even national culture is already responsive to more collaboration and participation or if the implementation is accompanied by other measures to support cultural change. Creating and holding up motivation of users to contribute, seemingly no problem in the WWW with a billion users will be one of the success factors. So corporate Web 2.0 implementation projects have to broaden their scope, have to add structural and cultural change or process redesign to their charter. And those “soft” topics tend not to have easy solutions. So when your IT department or an external consultant excitedly tells you about how they are adding “Web 2.0” to the corporate computing environment: be prepared for a difficult birthing process and adjusting your expectations.

At Social Web Strategies, we consider the enterprise adoption of some level of social web services requires attention to change management – the changes can be complex and challenging, and should be considered carefully, with a clear analysis of the opportunity, as clear as possible an understanding of the potential gains.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 1:02 am and is filed under Social Media, Social Networks, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.