This post is a timely reality check for a number of posts i’ve been reading across the web recently.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the approaches people have taken, the technology people talk about and the people involved in achieving success.

My current thinking which is still evolving is actually leading towards moving away from people and technology and moving more towards leadership and empowerment. This HBR article on empowerment is a really good example in my view of one of the underlying issues you raise http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/12/people_are_not_your_greatest_a.html

I also think that large enterprise solutions are no longer appropriate in any sense of the word within a local authority, given the direction of travel we are heading in…It requires more agile solutions and lots of them, more choice, more open standards to allow people to be productive.

In terms of collaboration, your point about “fear to let go” is a key one and one which i think is more than a cultural one but actually impacts on how we define roles and responsibilities within HR. For example we don’t employ people on their ability to collaborate, we employ people on their ability to do a specific job or task…Whilst most people recognise that collaboration can benefit individuals, teams and services it isn’t explicitly designed into roles and we are not developing and empowering people to seek out those opportunities.

One of the best learnings we had from our blue kiwi pilot a few years ago was that, whilst people valued the capability to share and collaborate – there were issues raised that a corporate solution would never solve any problems as it would miss the mark across the board and most people preferred existing networks they were already part of…so how could we integrate with them.

I’m interested to read your future posts on this topic and i’m also going to write some thoughts on this myself.

Carl

Some of us (me included) have been preaching the gospel of viral growth of things like Yammer for a while now – or more rightly, the gospel of “for God’s sake don’t make it obligatory”. Nagging in the back of the mind, however, have always been two thoughts: how can you be sure to keep hod of all those who signed up in viral solidarity, and what do you do to get to those who never did, and possibly never will?

I think there is scope for a decent session about all of this ay #ukgovcamp, but it’s great to see that the thoughts are already being pushed out there.

FWIW, I think the key word is “collaborative”, and Anne uses that very word. Everyone on a network needs to feel that they are contributing, sharing, being listened to, being shared, and all the things that, in any world, not just an on-line one, we’d regard as “collaboration”. Fail to tackle that and you will get wastage. People may not resign from the network, but they are very likely to simply stop following threads etc. That’s a double whammy for the network, because it becomes not only the zealous talking amongst themselves, but also kidding themselves that the network has critical mass within the organisation, without taking into account the increasing number of members who are simply nodding off.

I’ve no recipe for “how” just yet, though.

That said, when it comes to collaborative technology there are huge issues to balance around enterprise development – how democratic, naturally spontaneous adoption blends with a useful, collective sense of critical mass that can make the most of the productivity and benefits on offer. And that’s my point really, that enterprise adoption isn’t so much a technical issue as a cultural one.

Without some intuitive sense of ‘the way we do things around here’ there’s not that much to buy into and very little collective identity that gives any social organisation shape and form. The evolution of enterprise technology can itself be a collective one, because as we know people tend to go where the others are and fragmentation only has a very limited value. What’s missing is that ‘management’ is so very often a process not a dialogue. The clunk of the technology, I think, only reflects a too heavy-handed nature of the management styles that create them. I’d start there.

I see this as being a backlash against the trend of corporate to become a machine rather than a tool. A machine is something that we serve in order to keep it running, while tools are things that we select, adapt and use to help us do our work. The locking down of the work PC or network makes it more like a machine and less like a tool.