What is a New Human Enterprise?

Firestoker News by Jevon @ 8:49 pm

Stowe Boyd recently emailed us to ask about what we are doing with Firestoker. He is the exchange:

Stowe: What do you mean by Enterprise 2.0 ?

Jevon: We started building a tool we called “Sandbox” over three years ago when we saw that a consulting client of ours was ready to change some big parts of how they do business. They are a reasonably large organization with thousands of people spread across North America, and they were starting to get bogged down trying to make decisions from head office.

They went from Enterprise 1.0 to 2.0 [New human Enterprise -j] by providing a space for all of their employees and contractors to share and learn from each other. They had used other tools before, expensive ERP and CRM tools, but those tools kept them in Enterprise 1.0, and that didn’t change their bottom line.

From a business standpoint, we see Enterprise 2.0 as being about a shift in how you treat decision-making and innovation. We have read the academic papers and read the magazine articles, but until we built a tool that allowed this level of collaboration and decentralization, we didn’t have a way to put it into practice.

Stowe: You mention “socially-focused collaboration” in the job posting I saw in your recent email. Could you elaborate?

Jevon: “socially-focused collaboration” is one of the core exercises of becoming “Enterprise 2.0″ . In the last few years the consumer web has undergone a dramatic change thanks to a new world of innovations known we have come to call “web 2.0″. Blogging and all the other easy-to-use, user-generated content technologies have resulted in a major change in how many users expect to participate on the web.

Simultaneously, other innovations in harnessing mass intelligence including tagging, social networking, and standards like RSS have made it easier to filter all of this new content. Each of these social media tools has made it easier for consumers to connect to the content and people that matter to them.

We have seen a major gap in thinking about internal collaboration within the enterprise, and we have begun to address that need through the use of these tools. What we are attempting to do with the Firestoker project is to build out, piece by piece, an integrated and web-base social media platform that helps businesses small and large solve everyday business problems. With each tool we roll out, the overall ambition is to enable every participant to be better informed, better connected or better able to efficiently collaborate on particular daily work activities.

There are a few definitions of Enterprise 2.0 floating around right now, but we believe that it is more about that central shift than anything else.

Stowe: What enterprise issues does the planned project address?

Jevon: I wrote a blog entry in 2003 I called “Break the Silence” (reposted: firestoker.com/blog/archives/4 ) where I said:

The exchange of ideas in many present day organizations is quite dysfunctional. The mere act of sharing an idea between levels on the hierarchy is akin to a direct command, and sharing ideas on the peer level will often result in complete silence around the table. We develop “spirals of silence” in which we create norms, procedures and ideologies all centered around having a gentlemanly silence.

and that was one of the first bits of pain we identified. Knowledge isn’t the only thing that is lost inside most organizations. Ambition, Empathy, and Passion are all things that are even harder to capture. It is interesting that one of the side effects of creating a more socially connected workplace is not only the prospect of higher productivity but also greater employee loyalty and a higher level of commitment to the collective mission.

Static intranets and traditional tools of emails and manuals published pdfs have their place, but humans also have a need to DO. To create, to change, to understand. By incorporating some of the tools of our Web 2.0 world, and we focus them a little more on these natural and human needs, then we hope that we can really drive new efficiencies and enable innovative thinking within the enterprise.