More on the Hyper-linked Organization

Posted on 07. Jan, 2010 by Gautam in Ideas, Trends

JP at Confused of Calcutta is musing about what the Facebookisation of the Enterprise means for IT departments. Here are some of the posts we have done at 2020 Social on the same issue: How to Build a social organization and Making of the Social Organization

As he says:

Was I talking about Facebook? Or was I talking about the IT department

Which brings me to my final point. Facebook does not invest in the edge apps, build them, host them, amend them. They don’t support them, maintain them, back them up. I think IT departments would do well to learn from this. Let the people at the edge build what they want, within a 21st century enabling framework. They know what they want better than any IT department can. What the IT department should do is their utmost to guarantee safety and security of access, privacy and confidentiality, search and subscription tools, scheduling tools, data migration tools, visualisation and mashing tools, prioritisation and ranking tools.

Here’s what I think: 

The biggest benefits of the “Facebookisation” is higher employee engagement – hence it is not the IT department that would take a step ahead with that – but the Ops, Strategy and HR groups that would be asking the IT department to follow FB’s lead to create a truly hyper-linked organizaton.

The other big benefit (and this would need to be taken a call by Org Design and CEOs) is do the other systems and processes in the organization support the openness and transparency that the Facebookisation would bring. – if people are rewarded for individual behavior and if the Peformance system does not incentivise a culture of sharing and connecting – the phenomenon would be limited to the “social innovators” within the enterprise alone.

What do you think?

If you liked this post, you should also read:

  • JB
    We've (NewsGator) had great growth as a company providing the 'facebookization of the enterprise' to the global 2000 the last two years. IT is a critical enables, but as you point our HR, Corp Comm, Knowledge Management, and change-agents throughout the org are primary drivers. In re incentives, we've found that enabling light weight interactivity around people and content drives activity -- independent of incentives. Immediate responsiveness channelled back through multiple media seems to be sufficient reward!
blog comments powered by Disqus