A Funnelweb World

The ideal web 2.0 organisation

…. doesn’t exist yet. But if you asked people about the closest one to it, they’d either stare blankly at you and tell you to go away, or maybe say “google”.

As for me, over the past year I’ve worked in three different organisations and their level of web 2.0-friendliness has varied remarkably. More on this below.

But first, what do I define as a “web 2.0 friendly” organisation ?

Well, for starters it’s a place that values empowering staff to make their own decisions around how to do their jobs above enforcing tight controls, rules and security over what they can do. Naturally you need to consider these things - pity help the organisation who doesn’t have strong firewalls these days.

But it’s a place that tries to get the balance right to encourage staff loyalty and stimulate innovation while also managing business risks. A place that actively shows their staff that they both trust and value them whilst also having some safety nets in place if / when things go wrong.

A place that has a very flat structure and comprises self-organising ad hoc groups (rather than organisational divisions / depts) that form the way they think best around business opportunities and then disband when done.

Examples:

- a place that has blogs and wikis for knowledge sharing but minimal guidelines about usage beyond those needed to protect the organisation’s reputation and exposure to risk

- a place that lets employees make their own decisions about the tools they need in order to best do their jobs

- a place that is process-light and provides an environment to encourage doing over talking

- a place that lets employees create their own knowledge sharing structures, groups and systems, e.g. adopting folksonomies and social networking tools for business use

Its probably also a place that is working towards having a SOA - based IT environment, but - relevant to web 2.0 - also makes some of the data in the various services / systems available to staff to mash up as they need to in order to better do their jobs. eg. enabling HR staff to combine data from the HR system about employees with young children with data from the onsite creche system on vacancies, so they can alert the relevant staff about them.

The important thing here is about providing employees with access to a range of data sources and letting them make decisions on what to “mash”.

(now, I am definitely no expert in SOA but as an aside, think about the business possibilities of this - the ability for employees to themselves combine two sets of data of their choosing, from different business systems within the organisation, may finally give SOA the business case IT has been looking for - once it also provides staff with a “mashup platform” to use.)

For me, Conchango has been by far the most web 2.0-friendly organisation I’ve ever worked in.

Wikis, blogs, flat structures, light processes, hands-on approaches to getting things done and so on. Sure there is probably more they could do but the important thing is that they are totally open to doing them: they embrace change.

Second is PwC - but given the massive difference in organisation sizes and the types of risks they face, its hardly surprising. I think PwC is a pretty good web 2.0-friendly organisation, given its history. They at least give change a go and are willing to take measured steps towards the use of web 2.0 tools.

Sadly, Royal Mail comes a sorry last. Anyone who’s worked there would probably agree that they aren’t very web 2.0-friendly at all. Not beyond the people who work in online activities, anyway.

Afraid of change? They haven’t even noticed it happening. Instant Messaging? Say what? Wiki - er, what do you need one of them for…….