Web 2 and organisation types
June 26th, 2008 | by admin | 297 views
I’ve been interested in web 2.0 tools and technologies for a while now, but to date I haven’t really delved into the ways that organisations make use of them and in particular, the organisational changes they drive.
So I thought I’d use this blog to jot down my thoughts as they develop and if anyone happens to read it, hope its been of interest to you. I guess there have been loads of books written on the subject by people who are much more authoritative on the area than me - if you know of any good ones, let me know!
Reading Wikipatterns recently, and Wikinomics before that, really set me thinking about the way businesses use web 2.0. (I’m taking baby steps at thinking this through so bear with me!) And having done the rounds of a few workplaces over the past year I’ve seen some interesting examples and reactions to the new technologies.
It made me realise that where web 2.0 is concerned there are (at least) three main types of organisations:
1 - those who treat their staff and customers as adults: they trust their staff and customers to use the tools sensibly, not to abuse them, and I guess they generally think positively when it comes to allowing their use. They might have company Facebook pages like this for their customers etc to join, virtual places in Second Life (like Michelin apparently do) for staff training, they probably have fairly unregulated internal wikis, unrestricted web access and maybe they allow staff to simply install the tools they need (IM, webmail, etc.) to do their jobs and have their own internal / external blogs if they want to.
I would imagine these places to be where you’d find things like the use of Agile methodologies (that welcome changes in requirements), family friendly policies that trust people to work when, where and how they do best, and flat org structures that encourage leaderless cross-functional teams to self-organise around problems. They trust their staff, they trust their customers - and I guess they trust in the quality of their brand.
These are probably the sorts of places that Generation X and their next lot are most likely to want to work in.
2 - those who treat their staff and customers like unpredictable teenagers - anxiously trusting them, only because they feel they need to, but being prepared should they misbehave (almost expecting them to) and hence having some controls and restrictions in place. They probably allow limited instant messaging use, allow web browsing (but restrict access to some sites, such as Facebook) and although they have an internal wiki, probably have loads of rules and guidelines for how they should be used.
With a bit of luck, and the right management, these orgs should hopefully turn into type 1’s as they build their trust.
3 - those who treat their staff as children who if given the chance to misbehave, will do. They almost certainly don’t have a wiki (what’s a wiki), don’t allow Instant Messaging outside the organisation, look nervously upon blogs, don’t understand RSS, mashups or social networks and don’t feel they need to.
They are probably very hierarchical, measure their staff on their inputs (working hours) rather than on their outputs and have lots of nervous IT managers trying to keep the lid on web 2 use.
I imagine that these will eventually die on the vine as generation X’ers and so on are probably unlikely to want to work for them.
Over the past year, I’ve worked with each type of organisation, and I’ll write more later about how they vary and what it feels like to work there.
