This is a BRILLIANT point and quite possibly the most important one in the realm of implementing Enterprise 2.0.
McAfee talks about getting requests to evaluate specific products for their 2.0-newness...he rejects that as an empty exercise and instead checks the deployment environment for how it maps to measures of "freeform, frictionless and emergent."
He is spot on target when he argues that not ALL enterprise systems have to be or should be freeform but there should be SOME system "in which employees and other constituencies could come together as equals to decide what topics were important for the company, and how to attack them."
This also rings too true; "Too many corporate collaboration environments that I’ve observed, in contrast, come up short on the frictionless and freeform criteria. They make it far too difficult for prospective users to contribute, and they persist in slotting people into pre-assigned roles based largely on the formal org chart. In many cases they also impede emergence by having many small and mutually inaccessible environments, instead of one big one." Oh yeah.
Why do we keep spending money on these systems, deploy them and the do absolutely NONE of the organizational design and change management work necessary to have them work successfully in the enterprise. I tell people every time I talk about this that these systems are not culturally neutral - they attack hierarchies of information command and control and traditional ideas of 'expertise.' Its always amazing that even when we do bring IT to the table, we never think to bring HR but we'll prattle on about how this will change the way people work but we won't act like we might have to change the way they are rated and assessed. Sheesh.
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