Dear E2.0 People And Management Gurus
I enjoyed Dennis Howlett’s recent rant, rubbishing Enterprise 2.0 as ‘a crock’. He is bang on in his criticism that E2.0 advocates largely ignore issues in deploying E2.0 structures and technologies in corporates and sectors subject to public corporate responsibilities. It is a bit much though to dismiss the E2.0 movement as having any validity. Dennis says, “Examine the basics and look back at history.”
Looking Back At History
The E2.0 movement is just another manifestation of a shift to new forms of work organisation. We were here twenty years ago, as traditional manufacturers wrestled with the process, organisational, structural and cultural upheavals in making the transition to adopt lean manufacturing, TQM, TPM, Continuous Improvement, and JIT. Then the limiting factors were in complying with safety-critical rather than financial and legal responsibilities. Different contexts, remarkably similar issues.
This is what the E2.0 advocates are missing:
- There is a continuing and overwhelming plethora of national research available into policy debates over work and working life issues, for example the Swedish Worklife 2000 Programme co‐incided with the Swedish presidency of the European Union, plus a series of Norwegian and Finnish programmes. In the UK, and off the top of my head, the large‐scale 1998 and 2004 Work Employment and Relations Surveys provide detailed data on UK workplace trends, barrers and enablers, as did the six year long and involving twenty two universities, ESRC‐funded Future of Work research programme.
- An abundance of EU-funded, collaborative research among European countries. This is just one that I was part of, MOSAIC, which explored social, physical and technological aspects of mobile working. I project managed a twenty six partner research project into new forms of work for the UK Work Organisation Network. There are loads of case studies from that research and many others on the UK WON website.
- Finally there are the case studies buried deep within academic journals, written in unreadable style and riddled with jargon. Underneath all that, there is just so much insight that might help us as we grapple with making the transition to contextually appropriate E2.0 structures and working practices.
Dennis asks for case studies. This one from EMC is a cracker. It is an honest account of struggle, involving the same old, same old management and cultural resistance. You have no idea how familiar it all sounded.
Hi, Anne Marie. You probably already know what I think, more or less.
Why do I keep getting the sense that in some important parallel ways, we are seeing the same dynamics as became evident with all the massive ERP installations of the 90’s and first half of the 00’s. The sociology and the people dynamics are at best an afterthought, what’s the ROI, we’re not gonna do anything real about changing structure, culture, dynamics, etc., etc.
Somewhere, sometime, somehow, I (still) believe it will become evident that the application of OD principles into the everyday management of people and processes will become the new management, the next (2.0) real and substantively different version of the whole enterprise.
But you knew I thought that, didn’t you ?
Yes, Jon. I did know you thought that
Both of us sound like Ancient Mariners, and with our glittering eyes stopping one in three to warn them of impending doom!
I really like “somewhere, sometime, somehow, I (still) believe it will become evident that the application of OD principles into the everyday management of people and processes will become the new management, the next (2.0) real and substantively different version of the whole enterprise.”
I am not so hopeful or optimistic about a transition to a new management paradigm.
I wrote a post a while back about discovery. The tack that I am taking in my business is to find companies interested in going on a journey of discovery. They are willing to find out more about process and networked views of management, willing to experiment to the advantage of both their business and people.