My colleague John Mancini has re-awakened my awareness/interest in SlideShare among other, well, slide-sharing services... and somehow in my Enterprise 2.0 research today, I ran across the following presentation by Stephen Collins, called "Liberate Your Control Freaks - driving social computing adoption in business." Embedded below, but should your RSS reader or e-mail mechanics not like the embedded presentation, it is also linked via the title above.
Tricky business to create presentations that still make sense when not delivered at all by a speaker - and this does a nice job, as do the recent ECM Guru presentations (one, two, three - as of this writing) that John Mancini has done.
As for the content - love the title, and clearly it's meant to grab your attention. As a Seth Godin fan, and ex-songwriter, I must say I approve!
However, Social computing, collaboration, collective intelligence, knowledge management, etc. - none of this is new folks, and this "culture of participation" idea that is getting so much attention in the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 world isn't new either - it's how humans are wired! To interact, collaborate, *and* also function independently (I hope - but then again, I put much stock in personal responsibility - I fear I'm in the minority there).
I'm not saying I disagree with the basic premise (I actually greatly agree with The Cluetrain Manifesto, The Wisdom of Crowds, and similar books/rants), but personally, I think the message in this presentation is just a little too much of "drinking the Enterprise 2.0 Kool-Aid" - because providing the tools to interact is a separate beast from actually getting people TO interact. It's Knowledge Management all over again - same with Enterprise Portals, Instant Messaging, etc..
Enabling participation is one thing, participating is another - and understanding and leveraging the many levels of participation (completely passive reading, ranking/rating, commenting, trackback-ing [makes for an awkward verb, eh?], discussing, etc..) - and while none of this is new, the level and scale at which the technology underneath this can be rolled out, is in a different game now. Throwing technology has never been the answer, and even if these solutions are "free" (i.e. open source), change doesn't just happen all by itself, it's a slog, and needs significant hand-holding.
More on this as the days and months roll by - but I have to say (again) that the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference here in Boston felt a lot more real/substantive than the last four or so years in actually putting the "enterprise" angle back into the light-weight, low-cost, more-inclusive, models of the solutions coming from a blogging or wiki-oriented approach. It's rapidly becoming a much more interesting discussion on many levels.
Yee haa! Join the discussion - it's about to become a lot more interesting folks!
Dan, you're absolutely right that none of the ideas I put forth in the presentation are anything new. Far from it.
However, in organisations where top-down control and bureaucracy are the norm, the notion of people collaborating and working openly are terrifyingly rare.
The consulting I do on KM, collaboration and the like is often greeted with a deep vein of cynicism from management whose approach is about command and control and drip feeding of information to other parts of business only when it's needed. We all know this doesn't work and damages organisations and the people in them, but it's remarkably common.
Posted by: Stephen Collins | July 07, 2007 at 09:08 PM
Stephen - we're on similar pages, if not the exact same page.
I do agree that openness, transparency, and collaboration are definitely not the norm - but, they are becoming increasingly visible and viable techniques.
And while top-down, command and control thinking may not *always* work, the wisdom of crowds can also sometimes be madness.
There is a ton to talk about on every side of these issues - and I'm very glad to have stumbled onto your work. Even though the "digerati" have long been bored by blogging, social tools, etc., there is still a good 99% of the planet that has no idea what any of this is about, let alone what it means to them in their working lives.
Once we get our radio show fired up, perhaps we'll have you on, and we can explore this some more "live" - and with an audience, if we're lucky enough to engage the masses.
Best,
Dan
Posted by: Dan Keldsen | July 09, 2007 at 12:38 AM
Can't wait to get my hands on this show then - these are exactly the (adoption, change management et al.) issues that are bothering me too ...
And I guess that there's a big audience out there, that is bored with web 2.0 (ie. the digerati) but that's eager to learn more about bringing these concepts into the corporate world.
Posted by: Martin Koser | July 10, 2007 at 01:47 PM