I look at this as an opportunity to talk to the geeks about what’s on the suits’ minds. Given the large and persistent gap between these two communities, some bridge-building should be valuable. I hope you’ll come if you’re interested, or come just to say Hi. The presentation is at 9:30 am on Monday, March 15 in Hilton D (I know that’s early on a Monday morning. Bring your coffee; we’ll start slow). And leave a comment or send me a tweet or email if there’s anything you’d particularly like to talk about at the session.

This is my first time going to SXSW, and I’m excited to see what it’s all about. I’ve heard a ton about it over the years, and am finally going to experience it first hand. I’ll tweet and perhaps blog about what I see and learn there. I’ve heard that it’s a big, sprawling, and often overwhelming environment, so any pointers you can share about how to get the most out of the conference would be much appreciated.

What are the “can’t miss” talks, events, and venues? What parts of SXSW are you most looking forward to? I have to leave shortly after my talk on Monday and so can’t stick around for the music event, but I’m eager to make the most of the experience while I’m there. Which includes, clearly, learning about and getting into all the best parties…    

Leave a comment, please, and give us your tips for making the most out of SXSW. I look forward to seeing you there.

One of my earliest posts on this blog related how difficult it was early in the last decade to keep in touch with the guides I met while I was hiking with my brother Dave in Madagascar. In March of 2006 I wrote:

When we asked how we could get in touch to plan our next trip the answer was usually something like “You can call this number.  It’s my sister’s husband’s brother’s mobile; he’s the only one with a phone…”

I just came back from another trip to Madagascar to visit my brother and his family. We went to the Andasibe park to see the indri (the largest species of lemur) and met an excellent guide named Jose. When Dave asked how he could get in touch with him on future visits, Jose said that he didn’t have a phone.

I was disappointed to hear this. Jose’s answer seemed to indicate a lack of progress on bringing the benefits of information and communications technology (ICT) to the people of the developing world. I started to think that little had changed in the country since I’d last been there, which was a depressing conclusion. I asked him “Why don’t you have a phone?  Wouldn’t it be useful for your job?”

He looked at me as if I were a little slow on the draw. “Of course I have a phone –  I just lost it a while back. I’m going into town to get another one later today. Give me your brother’s number, and I’ll text him as soon as I get my new phone so you’ll have my number, OK?” As he explained this I got the impression that he was sizing me up to make sure I could handle this level of complexity; I had shown myself to be pretty ignorant of communication basics in Madagascar in 2010.

Dave told me that the great majority of Madagascar’s people now live in mobile coverage areas, but that fewer than 20% of the population owns a phone. Even though the Malagasy can buy basic phones for as little as $5, this is still too much for many people in such a poor country. Instead of having monthly calling plans, most customers there purchase small chunks of calling / texting capacity as circumstances dictate and budgets allow.

Researchers report that people in the developing world are willing to skip meals in order to buy more bandwidth. It’s not hard to see why. Until very recently these folk have been living in a hard communications vacuum, and humanity abhors that vacuum. When the oxygen of bandwidth presents itself, people want to breathe it.

Does doing so leave them better off?  Evidence is mounting that it does. An impressive study conducted by Robert Jensen among the fisherman of Kerala, India found that mobile phone adoption reduced price volatility and led to measurable, quantitative benefits for both fishermen and consumers. A follow-on study by Reuben Abraham found that “The free flow of information ensures the fishermen get the opportunity to drive a harder bargain than before.” Work like this supports the strong statement made in a special report by The Economist on mobile phones: “Their spread in poor countries is not just reshaping the industry—it is changing the world.”

My brother Dave is working to accelerate this change. He’s founded a non-profit named Human Network International (HNI), the mission of which is “to afford people opportunities to access and reshape critical development information in sustainable and self-directed ways using information and communication technology.” (I am the chairman of HNI’s board).

In Madagascar HNI has several projects underway in support of this mission. It’s working with Zain, one of the country’s largest carriers, to make basic development information available nationwide using mobile telephones.   The concept is straightforward, but the end result is revolutionary.  Anyone, anywhere and at any time can call an easy to remember, toll free number (321) and, using the telephone keypad, navigate through a menu of information options.  HNI and Zain use interactive voice recording technology to make basic health, agriculture and micro credit information available.  Why is this revolutionary?  Because for the first time, the semi-literate, rural poor of Madagascar can access reliable development information on demand and for free, using a familiar device:  their phone.  Imagine how important this is in an information vacuum.  HNI and Zain are working to make the telephone not only a communication device, but also an information tool for the developing world.

A mother can use this service to find out, for example, what vaccinations her newborn needs.  A farmer can learn how to prepare a nursery for his rice fields.  A rural entrepreneur can find the nearest micro-finance institution branch.  And HNI and Zain have made this a bi-directional communication service, meaning users can ask questions, make suggestions, share ideas andcontribute content.

HNI is also working with other NGOs in the country to help them collect data more quickly and accurately. Aid organizations in the developing world often operate in a near-absence of information about what’s happening day to day in the field; with mobile telephony, this no longer has to be the case. At the end of every day, the organization doing vaccinations, for example, could have each of its health care providers text back to headquarters (or, to be more precise, to a server owned or rented by headquarters) the numbers of vaccinations administered each day, and the age ranges of the children seen.

Further possibilities open up if the mother gives her mobile number to the provider during the vaccination visit and opts in to receive follow-up messages. These could be used to share additional public health messages (“Don’t forget to give your child de-worming medication”) or to let her know when other health services will come through her area. They could also be used to send her a survey asking about the vaccination experience. Many NGOs in the developing world don’t know if their interventions are appreciated or effective for their target populations. They don’t know, in other words, how well they’re serving their customers. A bit of technology can go a long way toward remedying this situation.

As I wrote in my 2009 wrap-up post, I’m largely optimistic as I think about the future, and this is nowhere more true than in the developing world. Madagascar is in the middle of a protracted political crisis. Its economy and people are suffering, and I’m nowhere near naïve enough to think that a bunch of telephones and computers are going to solve all the country’s problems or lift it overnight out of its deep poverty.

But these humble technologies are, I believe, going to improve the lots and the lives of many, many people in that country, and in others. I’m with The Economist – these are mobile marvels, and we can expect a lot of good to come from their continued diffusion throughout the world, and especially at the bottom of the pyramid.

Let me close this post with a question: can you think of anything better for increasing quality of life in the developing world than increasing ICT diffusion and usage? This could be done easily by subsidizing the purchase of devices and bandwidth, and by supporting organizations that help make best use of these assets (How about free phones and/or bandwidth for rural mothers who bring their children to be vaccinated?) I know a bit about technology and just a little bit (largely thanks to my brother) about development. From what I’ve read, learned, and seen the combination of the two is already proving to be extraordinarily powerful, and will only become more so.

So my advice for helping the people of the developing world is simple. Help them acquire technology that lets them help themselves, and that lets others help them. To paraphrase Winston Churchill: give them the ICT tools, and they will finish the job.

Do you agree, or do you think this post is a technologist’s uninformed dreaming? Is ICT diffusion key to the addressing world’s development challenges, or not?  Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

Second, I liked hearing what he had to say on other topics as well. The final three quotes below aren’t directly related to E2.0; I just wanted to include them because I think they’re really sharp.

• Organizational Structure. “I think top-down organizations got started because the bosses either knew more or they had access to more information. None of that applies now. Everybody has access to identical amounts of information.” -I wrote about this in “The Great Decoupling“
• Fostering Collaboration. “a C.E.O. needs to focus more on the platform that enables collaboration… You have to work on the structure of collaboration. How do people get recognized? How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment?” – see this 3-post sequence on Enterprise 2.0 ratings for knowledge workers.
• Peer Effects. “The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart… recognition from their peers is, I think, an extremely strong motivating factor… By creating an atmosphere of collaboration, the people who are consistently right get a huge following, and their work product is talked about by people they’ve never met. It’s fascinating.” – “Three Mantras“
• The Utility of Microblogging. “One thing we use is a Twitter-like system on our intranet called Yammer… because of my title I get to see more senior people. And so then they’ll tell me things — you know, what are their biggest problems, what are their biggest issues, what are their biggest bets. All this information is incredibly valuable. Now, what could I do with that? I’m not going to send that out in a broadcast voice mail to every employee. I’m not even going to write a long e-mail about it to every employee, because even that is almost too formal. But I can write five lines on Yammer, which is about all it takes.” – I wrote about microblogging’s attributes and many uses in  “17 Things We Used to Do.”
• How Command-and-Control Breaks Down. “Early on, I was very command-and-control, very top-down. I felt I was smart, and that my decisions would be better. I was young, and I was willing to work 20 hours a day… The last year I did that, I was away from home 302 nights, not including day trips. I had to fly around all over the place making all the decisions. And I would walk in, make an uninformed decision, get on the next plane, go somewhere else and repeat the process. I look back at that year; I don’t think I got anything done.” – I particularly like Conde’s insight that he was making uninformed decisions when he was working in this mode.
• Micromanagement. “If you start micromanaging people, then the very best ones leave. If the very best people leave, then the people you’ve got left actually require more micromanagement… Pretty soon, you’re running a police state. So micromanagement doesn’t scale because it spirals down. [T]he trick is to get truly world-class people working directly for you so you don’t have to spend a lot of time managing them. I think there’s very little value I can add to my direct reports. So I try to spend time with people two and three levels below because I think I can add value to them.” – Lovely. His job is to develop people, not meddle or second-guess. And he concentrates his efforts a bit lower down in the organization.
• The Importance of Writing Ability.”English is my second language, and I write reasonably well. I don’t see very much excuse for people not to be able to write well. I just don’t.” – I can’t tell you how happy I was to read this

What else did you like about the Conde Interview? Was there anything he said you didn’t like? And what other excellent executive interviews have you come across recently?  Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

I strongly encourage you to look through these comments; they’re a great way to get up to speed on the state of the debate on what’s going on, and what to call it. A number of people made the point that when engaging in marketing, education, sales, and outreach efforts 2.0 advocates need to use language that will resonate with the target audience. To the extent that ’social’ resonates, then, use it by all means, and avoid using it when it doesn’t. I particularly liked Gia Lyons’ image of a tag cloud of marketing words. ‘Social’ is absolutely part of this tag cloud, and in my original post I was cautioning against overusing it, not against using it at all.

A second main thread in the comments concerned how we 2.0 enthusiasts talk about the phenomenon not with those we’re seeking to bring on board, but rather among ourselves. In other words, do we agree that a social revolution is taking place in business today? That corporate hierarchies are being replaced by self-organizing and -governing networks?

If they are, I haven’t seen it. I’ve seen plenty of examples where formal org structures have been supplemented by informal ones (whether tech-enabled or not). It’s also quite common for formal, pre-defined business processes to be supplemented by ad hoc and emergent ones, especially when the formal ones aren’t working perfectly.

Every time this happens, it’s social. But it’s not revolutionary. It’s not even new.

What would be new is a trend of companies throwing out altogether their org charts, management hierarchies, reporting relationships, job titles and descriptions, formal roles and responsibilities, review and promotion processes, and other aspects of classic, old-as-the-hills organizational structure and replacing them with an entirely new social contract. I’ve not seen or heard of a single example of this taking place.

I’ve certainly seen some recent complements to classic org structure. These include Google’s 20% time, Cisco’s deliberate push to become more collaborative, and the abandonment of formal vacation policies by Hubspot, Crowdcast, and Netflix (disclosures at end of post). I think these are innovative, cool, and laudable. They come from enlightened leadership and are made possible in part by modern technology. But none of these companies, as far as I’m aware, has abandoned any of the classic elements of org structure listed in the previous paragraph. None of them, in other words, is using the social as a wholesale substitute for the formal.

I’m aware that Wikipedia has none of these elements (except for a process to promote editors to the ranks of administrator and beyond). But Wikipedia is not a company; it’s a Web collective. When companies start deliberately refashioning themselves as Web collectives I’ll start to believe that there’s a social revolution taking place in business. Until then I’ll keep repeating that Enterprise 2.0 is not THAT big a deal.

Am I missing something? Do you know of existing companies that are throwing out all or most of the aspects of org structure listed above and replacing them with a configuration that’s entirely (or at least largely) amorphous and emergent? I don’t, but I’d love to learn of them.

I love William Gibson’s insight that “the future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.” In my field research I’ve seen a business future in which the social / collaborative / informal / emergent is a larger complement to the impersonal / regimented / formal / planned than it is at present. I think this is a great thing, but I don’t think it’s a social revolution. I’d love to see early indicators of a more revolutionary future if they’re out there. Please show them to us…

(Disclosures: I have no financial interest in Google, Cisco, Hubspot, or Netflix. I am on the advisory board of Crowdcast, and have a small amount of stock in the company. Cisco is a sponsor of the Center for Digital Business at MIT, where I work. Brain Halligan, CEO of Hubspot, is a friend of mine who has invited me to Red Sox games)

As Julien Le Nestour and others have pointed out, this is not something I’ve done. I’ve always considered comments important and actively solicited them in most posts, but have rarely responded directly to them. I’ve considered them a way for folk to air their ideas rather than to engage in a dialogue with me.

I see now that this was shortsighted, and that interacting with commenters is a great way to make a blog more dynamic and valuable for its readers. So my resolution for 2010 is to be a more active responder to what others are saying here. I can’t promise that I’ll reply to every comment, but I will reply to more of them.

How can I best do this? What advice do you have about how to respond well to blog comments? Leave a comment, please; I’ll use it as an opportunity to start practicing… 

And Happy New Year!

A lot of people have had a tough go of it for some time now, and the last year was not a great one (heck, the Yankees even won the World Series). We’ve seen plenty of examples of bad behavior from prominent people, and a lot of victims left behind. We’re also still recovering from the near-collapse of big and important parts of our economy. And we’re facing huge challenges related to climate change, two wars being fought in the Middle East, and (in the US) altering the health care system.

And yet I find myself optimistic as I look ahead. I try not to be blithe or naive, and I know that soulwise, these are trying times. But I believe that we’ll get through them, and that we’ll address with some level of effectiveness the challenges we’re facing.

My optimism has two sources, one general and one more specific. Generally, I think people are good problem solvers, and are more inclined to be helpful than harmful to each other. Combine these two traits and what results is a world where, as the economist Julian Simon phrased it “The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely.”

I realize that sounds incredibly blithe, naive, and at odds with the facts, but my read of the evidence tells me that it’s not. Climate change might well be an important exception to this happy trend and I don’t mean to be cavalier about it, but I’m with Bjorn Lomborg on how to best address it: invest more in basic energy R&D and unleash human creativity on this human-caused problem.

My more specific reason for optimism springs from my work on the impact of technology, and in particular the emergent social software platforms I’ve written about. Thanks to these technologies, the global Internet, and the explosive growth of wireless bandwidth and mobile devices around the world, we’re entering a really interesting period, and one we should be hugely excited about.

To characterize this period, I’ll rely on the writings of Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest, paleontologist, and visionary who died in 1955. Tielhard de Chardin worked to fuse two strains of thought be believed in deeply: Catholic doctrine with the theory of evolution. I won’t even try to summarize his strange and wonderful arguments, except to say that like Simon he was an optimist, and thought that we are on our way to someplace better.

Tielhard de Chardin held that an important step in mankind’s progression was the interconnection of the world’s people, and he was confident that this would take place. In his book The Phenomenon of Man, he wrote

We are faced with a harmonised collectivity of consciousness equivalent to a sort of super-consciousness. The idea is that of the earth not only becoming covered in myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope so as to form, functionally, no more than a single vast grain of thought on the sidereal scale, the plurality of individual reflections grouping themselves together and reinforcing one another in the act of a single unanimous reflection.

In Man’s Place in Nature, he was specific about how this grouping and reinforcing might take place:

And here I am thinking of those astonishing electronic machines (the starting-point and hope of the young science of cybernetics), by which our mental capacity to calculate and combine is reinforced and multiplied by the process and to a degree that herald as astonishing advances in this direction as those that optical science has already produced for our power of vision.

More than fifty years after Tielhard de Chardin’s death, his ‘astonishing electronic machines’ are being deployed all over the world, and our abilities to calculate and combine are being multiplied just as he said they would be.

I am incredibly heartened by this. I give us people enough credit to believe that more good than bad things will come from the ‘harmonized collectivity of consciousness’ we’re creating at present, and that we’ll use it to help overcome the challenges we face. Including the ones we ourselves create.

I’ll end this post with a sentence allegedly uttered by Benjamin Franklin just before he signed the Declaration of Independence: “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” We have better tools for hanging together than we’ve ever had before, and I’m confident that they’ll help us get through our current hard times and on to better ones.

Happy Holidays, all.

• Declare war on the enterprise
• Allow walled gardens to flourish
• Accentuate the negative
• Try to replace email
• Fall in love with features
• Overuse the word ’social’

On the last point, I said this about ’social’ as a descriptor for the technologies of Enterprise 2.0:

“It’s technically accurate… [but] I have rarely come across a word that has more negative connotations to busy, pragmatic line managers inside organizations. The best thing it is is neutral… the worst thing it is is a sign that we’re going to use these tools to waste time, to goof off, to plan happy hour, to do all these social activities. The impression I get from people who make decisions… is ‘I’m not running a social club.  I’m trying to run a business here.’ ” (I accompanied this monologue with a picture intended to convey what flashes through an executive’s mind when he hears the word ’social.’)

I was responding to a newish thread in the Webwide conversation about enterprise use of emergent social software platforms (ESSPs). I came across it in a post by Stowe Boyd:

In particular, Web 2.0 as a phenomenon is strongly tied to social tools — social networking, social media, and so on — in which the individual is primary, and asymmetric networks of relationships with other individuals form the principal mechanism for connection and information flow…

We need to switch our attention to the shifting nature of work itself, and how business needs to be reconsidered in a rapidly changing world (which includes a revolutionary social Web, notably)…

So, I have come to believe that this is the place where companies need to focus their attention: socializing the business, not adoption of Web 2.0.

And in the mission statement of the newly-formed Dachis Group:

Social Business Design is the intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture. The goal: improving value exchange among constituents.

Blogger and do-er Euan Semple posted that he’s in favor of ’social business’ as both a movement and a term, and describes my “Enterprise 2.0″ as “too narrow, too corporate and too managerial”

Which would sting if it weren’t accurate. My definition is narrow, corporate, and managerial, and I’m glad to have it labeled as such. I think it’s both prudent and responsible to be circumspect about one’s claims, and I think it’s neither to assert that the old rules of society, culture, or business no longer apply because of the appearance of a network, some software that sits of top of it, and a large number of (primarily younger) people who like using it. As I wrote a little while back, Enterprise 2.0 is not THAT big a deal.

But whether or not it’s a big deal, it’s not going to be ANY deal until ESSPs and their attendant practices make their way inside organizations. And the point I was trying to make in my talk, and the one I still believe, is that keying the message / sales pitch / marketing / education effort around the word ’social’ is a bad idea.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff evidently agrees with this. According to an article in The Industry Standard:

Salesforce was careful to position [its new offering] Chatter as a collaboration tool, not a “social this or social that” because there’s such a glut of social networking tools, [Benioff] said, and customers are more willing to pay for collaboration software.

“We really want to talk about collaboration, because that really is a budget item for our customers,” Benioff said…

Another Salesforce co-founder, Executive Vice President of Technology Parker Harris, also stayed on message with the collaboration concept in a talk with ZDNet editors (see video below). “I think about our platform as a collaboration platform,” Harris said. “You’re building applications to collaborate around data in the enterprise on a trusted system.”

The article points out that Chatter at present looks very much like Facebook-ish social software, but Benioff and his colleagues were taking pains to describe it and its value using narrow, corporate, managerial words. Does anyone want to make the case that these guys don’t know how to convince organizations to adopt new tools?

What do you think? Is social a helpful or harmful word when talking to enterprises and their managers about the new digital tools and the business practices that make use of them?  Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

DARPA announced that on December 5 it would float ten large red balloons in fixed locations throughout the United States. The first team that submitted to the Agency the correct longitudes and latitudes for all ten balloons would win the $40,000 contest, which would be active for seven days.

It took the MIT team only nine hours to find all ten balloons.

Like most other groups that entered the contest, the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team recruited a country-wide network of spotters; the goal, obviously, was to make this network as large and geographically distributed as possible. It also needed to be robust against spammers, saboteurs, and others who would submit false spottings in order to confuse a team.

So how do you quickly build a large, dispersed, sufficiently motivated, and fault-tolerant network of balloon finders? The MIT team’s approach was brilliant. It relied on the Web and its social networking utilities like Facebook and Twitter (duh), on multilevel and relatively high-powered financial incentives, and on a clever tracking mechanism.

Here are quotes from the team’s site explaining how it worked:

The first is a talk hosted by Harvard’s Berkman Center (where I’m a fellow) and held on Monday, December 7 at 6 pm in Harvard Law School’s Pound Hall, room 102. The event is open to the public, but registration is required. I plan to talk about the book for about 15 minutes, then answer questions and see what people want to talk about for the rest of the time. The book will be available for purchase at this event.

Then I’ll be a guest on Hubspot TV, the Web’s most entertaining live show about all things at the intersection of marketing, social media, and technology. The show takes place at 4 pm on Friday, December 18, and Hubspot invites all comers to its offices for Hubspot TV tapings.

I’d give a preview, but I have no idea what to expect. The shows hosts Karen Rubin and Mike Volpe do a great job mixing things up and keeping the webcast lively. I imagine getting interviewed by them is a bit like facing Charlie Rose and Terry Gross on crank. So I’m just going to show up and roll with it; I expect it’ll be a very….  emergent experience.

Hope to see you at at least one of these events; it would be great to hear what’s on your mind about Enterprise 2.0.

One other note: Frogpond’s Martin Koser has been ‘live reading’ Enterprise 2.0 on the Web and Twitter. I’ve heard of live blogging at conferences, of course, but live reading is new to me. Check it out and let us know what you think of the phenomena.

And then I got inspiration from Greg Lloyd, President and co-founder of Traction Software and longtime technologist. In addition to running his company Greg finds time to write a great blog, and his post after the conference was called “Enterprise 2.0 Schism.”

In it, he likens the current E2.0 controversies to a religious schism, and divides the community into three sects: Strict Proletarians, who believe it’s all about the people, Strict Technarians, who believe it’s all about the technologies, and Strict Druckerians, who “believe that “2.0″ should be considered a modifier of Enterprise rather than an allusion to mere Web 2.0 technology…”

Lloyd writes with a light touch and is clearly being a bit tongue in cheek, but he’s also making a smart and serious point. Two of them, in fact. The first is that advocates of Enterprise 2.0 really do believe different things about the phenomenon, and these differences matter. His second point is an argument for the Druckerian point of view: that the use of emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) is going to change organizations so much that a new version number is warranted.

This got me thinking about what I believed. I’ve been using “Enterprise 2.0” in Lloyd’s Technarian sense — as a reference to the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and approaches by enterprises. And do I also believe that such adoption is going to change companies? Sure –    virtually all technology adoptions do, to some extent. Do I believe that it’s going to change them enough to require a new version number?

Nope. I just think that’s too strong a claim. Let me try to explain why.

I yield to almost no one in my belief about the power and utility of ESSPs, but I just don’t think they’re going to transform the structure or purpose of the enterprise. As I wrote earlier, I don’t see E2.0’s tools, approaches, and philosophies making obsolete managers, hierarchies, org charts, and formal cross functional business processes.

It’s a rainy fall day in Boston, and after a wet walk into work I’m sitting here realizing that I need new boots. So maybe later today I’ll call up L.L. Bean and order a pair of Maine Hunting Shoes (Suave? No. Dry?  Yes.). I’ll talk to a customer service rep who will enter my order into an enterprise system. This system spans the call center, the warehouse, the credit card company and, in all likelihood, the marketing department. The people working in each of these areas have relatively stable job titles and descriptions that are tied to pay and benefits. And they all have bosses who manage and develop people, put together plans and budgets, and take responsibility for performance and improvement.

None of this is going to be swept away or rendered obsolete by the advent of ESSPs, even after they’re fully deployed and embraced. We can tell stories about how the new tools enable amorphous / gestalt / collectivist forms of organization that have no set structures and make their way through the environment much like slime molds do, but these stories are pure speculation, grounded in hope rather than reality or experience. They’re a type of cyberpunk science fiction (as an aside, I find it really interesting and telling that the best cyberpunk, like Neuromancer and Snow Crash, conjures up worlds where big formal organizations are more dominant, not less.).

I want to be clear: Lloyd’s post is fantastic: grounded and very thoughtful. He’s not in the enterprise-as-slime-mold camp. And I definitely agree with him that Enterprise 2.0 is a big deal. So what’s the right way to describe its impact?

Here’s my take: ESSPs will have about as big an impact on the informal processes of the organization as large-scale commercial enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, Supply Chain, etc.) have had on the formal processes.

This is not a conservative statement. Enterprise systems have been a huge deal for organizations. They’ve turned reengineering from a whiteboard exercise into an unignorable reality for many, many companies. And Drucker was right when he said that “Reengineering is new, and it has to be done.”

It’s not a coincidence that productivity in the US really accelerated starting in the mid 1990s, just as enterprise systems started spreading, and accelerated most in the industries that spent the most on IT. And a great study by Erik Brynjolfsson, DJ Wu, and Sinan Aral which I wrote about here, found strong evidence that ERP adoption leads to performance improvement.

I believe that Enterprise 2.0 will be as big a deal for corporate performance and productivity. I believe this because I believe that the informal organization is as important as the formal one for getting work done (do you agree?) and that we have historically had lousy technologies for supporting the work of the informal organization (especially outside our immediate circle of strong ties). With the arrival of ESSPs, the tools available to the informal / emergent organization have gone from lousy to excellent, just like commercial enterprise systems advanced the formal organization’s toolkit from lousy to excellent.

So while I don’t think that the impact of ESSP’s is profound enough to warrant a new version number for the enterprise, I do think that we’re on the brink of a sustained period of corporate innovation, improvement, and productivity growth enabled by these new tools. I take some comfort from the fact that some very sharp and experienced corporate leaders like Cisco’s John Chambers seem to feel the same.

Do you?  In your opinion, what’s the right way to think about the broad impact of ESSPs? Will they lead to Enterprise, version 2.0, or just to Enterprise 2.0? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.