a great article, and resonates with a post I published recently on the same topic. Unfortunately most people still focus more effort on the technology because it’s something they can control and understand, People and behaviours is the difficult part of the equation!

http://steve-dale.net/2012/10/25/social-collaboration-its-the-people-not-the-technology-stupid/

Good to hear from you. Technology is one part but it is the part that allows collaboration to scale across a large enterprise and the part that allows the support of many of the behaviors which enterprises are trying to change. One size fits all never works but I also believe that you can’t become a collaborative organization without the necessary technology support to enable behavior.

Thanks for the comment!

Always good to hear from you.

Of course technology alone is not sufficient but neither is just a focus on behaviors. Both are required and both have changed and will continue to change over time.

Near-real time communication, the number of people potentially and actually involved in any act, and availability of an effectively unlimited shared, persistent, searchable record of discourse on everyone’s phone, tablet or desk enables uniquely scalable patterns of communication.

The challenge is how people and organizations use these capabilities. I don’t think iall new patterns of behavior are emergent (in the sense of Aristotle’s tadpoles being generated from mud). They are evolved, improvised on the fly, and created – top down as well as bottom up. Organizations have always had their own patterns of communication, collaboration and power relationships.

Doug Engelbart describes the relationship between changing human systems and technology as “Co-evolution”. I think that’s a good framework. Your choice of technology and its capabilities will have a big but not entirely predictable effect on the evolution of human systems and vice versa over time.

The co-evolution of the Web’s technology (particularly global-scale search) and the social and business systems enabled by the Web is the best example I can think of. You couldn’t hope to duplicate the effects of the Web with older technology as I wrote in a tongue in cheek post on technology vs. culture vs. management:

“Without the enabling technology of the Web, plus search engines and other affordances based on Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s innovation, the Strict Proletarian would find it difficult to fit the inhabitants of McAfee’s inner, middle and outer rings into the same room, get them to participate in the same conference call, or exhibit their “emergent” behaviors using typewriters, copy machines, faxes and email. Speed, scale and connection patterns matter and the technology that spans these barriers is neither trivial nor insignificant to the phenomena Strict Proletarians value.”

Enterprise 2.0 Schism
http://traction.tractionsoftware.com/traction/permalink/Blog1163
http://traction.tractionsoftware.com/traction/permalink/Blog1163

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