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

This will be a short and to the point post. I have sought to explain how this blog is (kind of) organized (see here). In the process, I have changed a bit the organization, and have now to comply with it :) So let me do a few posts that need to be there while not really bringing new content, for the majority that is.

One of the fundamental shifts brought by the emergence of the Internet as a common tool used by individuals is that the costs of interaction has fallen to zero. Umair Haque is one of the best references in this domain, and characterizes this new context as a world of “cheap, ubiquitous interactions”, or said otherwise a “hyperconnected” world.

At first through virtual rudimentary Bulletin-Boards, the Internet has enabled increasingly efficient, cheap and deep interactions. What started through mailing-lists or on ICQ, continued on forums, and evolved into tools like Facebook, Dopplr, and an infinite variety of means for individuals to find, connect, and interact with other individuals on nearly every possible topics or collective endeavors.

Of course, such a radical shift had many consequences. They range from radical transparency to the decay of brands. You may think that this shift has occurred a long-time ago and has now being incorporated in every domain: strategy, marketing, etc. You would be right for the first point, but unfortunately quite wrong on the second. We’ll delve into this in subsequent posts.

An obvious illustration would be how industrial-era organizations are seizing on these existing technological capabilities to improve their internal efficiency. Most aren’t, and the unrealized potential is simply mind-blowing. What is needed is a complete rethinking of organizations as institutions, with all dimensions redefined to take into account these shifts.

Umair has been banging on all of this brilliantly for several years now, if you are interested in this topic (and I would argue that you should), he’s now blogging at Harvard Business Publishing.

That’s also why I will step up my blogging and try to post more regularly here and elsewhere. This is a defining moment and I feel the need to go deeper about the opportunities opening up. All the old schemes are being or going to get crushed in the foreseeable future. Yet, while a lot of people have anticipated this and few have shed light on what’s next, 95% of it remains unknown. And this is fascinating.

As Umair reminds us in his latest missive—on sustainability but applicable to all areas:

Every piece of literature seems to assume everything will return to normal at some point; that any corporate strategising around sustainability can assume those same constructs that have stood until now. But they’re not standing at the moment and there’s more than a chance that we’re witnessing the irreparable breakdown of the current model.

And as it turns out, Schumpeter is again of help here:

Analytic effort is of necessity preceded by a preanalytic cognitive actthat supplies the raw material for the analytic effort. […] This preanalytic cognitive act will be called Vision.

What we need, at the core and in every discipline, is to change and renew the vision that limit our endeavors, because the old one is being dismantled more and more by the day, no matter what focus you take. Reading Umair can help.

Source of the quote: History of Economic Analysis, 1954