My next Cutter Executive Update takes a look at the relationship between incoming social networking technology and organizational structure. This technology has been entering the workplace for the past several years, and falls generally under the headings of “Web 2.0” and “Enterprise 2.0”. It includes communications and collaboration tools such as wikis and blogs, instant messaging and texting, plus telepresence and video conferencing. These tools have become popular with students and new entrants to the workforce, and are gradually infiltrating the office in the same casual way in which the PC first arrived.
Social networking tools have combined with current business and technology trends favoring collaboration. Collaboration is seen as fundamental to innovation, essential to growth and an imperative at a time when business processes and technology are becoming increasingly complex. Decision making and ordinary business processes frequently now require input from multiple groups within an organization. The new tools enhance this trend and are capable of speeding it radically.
As collaboration tools and methodologies continue to grow in importance, organizations will be forced to change. The traditional “command and control” management style which has characterized business must change. Trends over the past 30 years have pushed for increased empowerment of workers and more distributed decision-making with fewer intervening layers of management. These trends are likely to continue. We can expect some of the following:
– Flattening of organizational structure.
– Increasing pressure for optimized innovation processes.
– Increasing modularity of business structures.
– Growing importance of collaboration skills as a criterion for advancement.
– Management strategy changing from control to facilitation.
– Need to provide rules for collaboration that ensure security and control of intellectual property.
– Improved process coordination and better accumulation of group knowledge
There are a lot of other areas that are likely to change, as well. The good news is that social networking tools can actually facilitate organizational change by providing a conduit for opinion and information. The bad news is, of course, that control issues and best practices for taking advantage of these technologies have yet to be fully established.
This Update is available from Cutter Consortium (http://cutter.com).
March 3, 2009 at 10:28 pm
Yes, I would tend to agree. A lot of these things are coming in beneath the radar from people who use them at home–particularly, the next generation of digital natives. There is a parallel with the personal computer, which entered the workplace in much the same manner. It was initially thought that the PC would probably not affect the work environment very much….(!!!)
March 3, 2009 at 8:34 am
Thanks for this. I think that one of the drivers for business at the moment is that many of us are using more sophisticated collaborative tools outside work than we can at work. The pressure to implement or allow use of web2.0 tool in the work place will and is coming from the workers as much or more than from the managers.