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Safari­com is rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing what cur­rency means in Kenya with M-PESA. A true, rad­i­cal inno­va­tor, in an indus­try char­ac­ter­ized by many fos­silized play­ers in devel­oped coun­tries. Will I ever see an “Enter­prise 2.0″ case study on Safari­com? Yes, if they deploy a wiki, social net­work­ing plat­form, etc. Oth­er­wise, no. How crazy is that? Their com­bi­na­tion of IT tools, cul­ture, orga­ni­za­tional design, etc. achieves rad­i­cal inno­va­tion. Yet, this com­bi­na­tion is of no inter­est for the wider E2.0 com­mu­nity (at least not that I know of). Why? Because they don’t use, in a dis­closed way, tools labelled “2.0″.

Enter­prise 2.0 is fun­da­men­tally defined with the tools used, but decor­re­lated from per­for­mance. It’s time to recen­ter it.

Ask any one in the so-called “Entre­prise 2.0″ sphere what is an E2.0 case study, and you’ll get this: how orga­ni­za­tion A imple­ments tech­nol­ogy B. Even if it’s GM imple­ment­ing wikis (hon­estly, WTF?). Well, the case stud­ies I would like to see are more like this: what new/E2.0 tech­nolo­gies, blended with which orga­ni­za­tional design, are used by rad­i­cal inno­va­tors like Safari­com, who is redefin­ing cur­rency in Kenya? And if the answer is noth­ing, or at least noth­ing explic­itly labelled 2.0, you’ve found your­self a very inter­est­ing ques­tion­ing path.

More­over, imple­ment­ing all the E2.0 tools in the world won’t save obso­lete orga­ni­za­tions There are 2 major ways in which E2.0 imple­men­ta­tions could mean­ing­fully change the des­tiny of obso­lete organizations:

1. rev­o­lu­tion­ize, hence boost, their orga­ni­za­tional per­for­mance at a high-enough level that they change the playing-filed in terms of pro­duc­tiv­ity (GM pro­duc­ing the same cars at 1/3 of the costs, while not awe­some, would surely save it)
2. they do not affect their vision sig­nif­i­cantly enough, steer­ing the orga­ni­za­tion towards awe­some goals, and away from its industrial-era objectives

Sadly, E2.0 appli­ca­tions alone haven’t demon­strated these effects, mostly because all the pieces of the puz­zle have to evolve to set any real change in motion.

So how should we focus our research efforts? The inter­sec­tion path between new tech­nolo­gies and new orga­ni­za­tional forms is still the focal point, but it must be approached from two dif­fer­ent angles.

The new orga­ni­za­tional pos­si­bil­i­ties opened up by new tech­nolo­gies. Going from the new tech­nolo­gies to orga­ni­za­tional per­for­mance is still fun­da­men­tal. We need to look at the cur­rent tools avail­able, the future one, and think about new, more effi­cient orga­ni­za­tional forms. These forms would improve coor­di­na­tion and effi­ciency, through the use of the lat­est tech­nolo­gies. At a high level, this is what hap­pened when tech­nol­ogy made it pos­si­ble to trans­mit reli­ably infor­ma­tion in India about, say, your tax returns, and have them processed there. New orga­ni­za­tional forms appeared to take advan­tage of these new tech­nolo­gies. So, this is one way in the inter­ac­tion, what usu­ally lack is the other.

What IT tools excel­lent orga­ni­za­tions would ben­e­fit from? This is tak­ing the other side of the lens and ask­ing: we have orga­ni­za­tions that are per­form­ing at an amaz­ing level; let’s under­stand these mech­a­nisms, and maybe see what IT appli­ca­tions, exist­ing or pos­si­ble to design, would fur­ther enhance their per­for­mance. For a def­i­n­i­tion of excel­lent, Umair’s Awe­some­ness con­cept is a very good start­ing point. Whether those tools are E2.0 labelled tools, or not, nobody shoud care less.

The real nucleus of “Enter­prise 2.0″ is, or should be, whole­some orga­ni­za­tional per­for­mance (or awe­some­ness, call it what you want). Not just about imple­men­ta­tions of tools labelled E2.0. The con­tin­ued focus on the tools only serve to dis­credit the “sphere”.

Photo credit: gun­nar­cam­ner