Read this awesome post: From Social Tools to Social Business by Lee Bryant.
“For me, the key issue is whether or not you believe software alone is sufficient to engineer fundamental business change. In some cases, perhaps it can; but in general, simply grafting new tools and systems onto existing business culture and practices is unlikely to result in the change we are looking to achieve.
Traditionally, this has been addressed through the idea of adoption of tools – a secondary process of persuasion, education and engagement that is required to get people using new software. But tool use in itself is not a meaningful outcome. What many Enterprise 2.0 practitioners mean when they talk about adoption is the adoption of new ways of working, but there is not a direct and inevitable link between this and tool use if the underlying context of business process does not change.”
You must read the whole thing, but in the post Lee asks,
“So if social business design goes beyond the implementation of social software to make organisational design more socially calibrated, with all the potential for greater efficiency, agility and value creation that implies, then where do we begin?”
He goes on to describe four archetypes of social business design, which are “ways of thinking about some of the key features of social computing”, and how to apply them to business strategy and then implementation. The four archetypes are:
* Ecosystem: assessing the health of your networks, identifying structural holes and other issues that prevent people finding and connecting with each other to get things done. Typically involves social networks analysis and measurement, but also standard workflow and task-fulfilment analysis.
* Hivemind: looking at how well these networks are harnessing informal knowledge sharing and collective intelligence, and whether or not customers and partners are involved in this process of creating meaning. Examples of tools in this area include social bookmarking, Digg-type ratings and even collaborative wiki spaces.
* Dynamic Signals: looking at how to make hidden data visible and make sharing a by-product of action to create ambient awareness of what others in the business are doing. Internal twitter-type tools are useful here for real-time signals, as well as good old RSS feeds and others. These types of dynamic feedback are key to evolutionary improvement and innovation, as we have seen in the social web.
* Metafilter: helping people cope with information overload and turn signals into actionable insights, and improving findability using social networks. Simple examples might include social search, personal dashboards or alerting systems. We think this area will increase in importance as more and more social tools achieve adoption.
In other words: organizational structures and processes, knowledge management, communication, and business intelligence – seen through the lens of online community and social activity, aligned to strategic and business objectives, and implemented practically.
“There are real and immediate benefits to be achieved by giving people and groups smarter, simpler social tools that they can use to get their job done, and this can light little fires of emergent behaviour that are so important in stimulating change and showing what can be done. Top-down and bottom-up are not mutually exclusive. We need to work at both ends simultaneously and create more feedback loops between them.”
Yeah, baby! Love it.
Tagged: quote, strategic thinking, strategy, systems thinking
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5 responses to "Quote of the week: “Tool use in itself is not a meaningful outcome.†"
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Quote of the week: “Tool use in itself is not a meaningful outcome.†— SocialFish http://bit.ly/cCN7Zd
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So true Maddie! RT Quote of the week: “Tool use in itself is not a meaningful outcome.†— SocialFish http://bit.ly/cCN7Zd /via @maddiegrant
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