Being ‘diplomatic’ I’m not going to step into the debate featuring Dennis, Susan, Nenshad and others… but I’ve been waiting and waiting for one benefit to be touted, an important but unplanned benefit (the only one?) I’ve seen in practice myself:
Years ago I was chairman-and-investor-in-residence at a electronic games company. Starting in 1995 it gained about 50 new employees every year, doing games on Nintendo and Sega platforms, later Sony and online – all developed by a great gang of mostly boys with an average age of 20. No kidding, our first Xmas party started with a ‘parents day’.
As the industry expanded and the kids became slightly older and experienced we had the usual groups gelling in some corner tinkering with business plans behind our backs, then jumping ship and starting a competitor.
Not what the ‘leadership’ wanted of course, but pretty inevitable. The kids soon learned to encrypt the business plans as well, so the fun of reading plans and mails left behind on hard drives was withdrawn. Annoying.
Suddenly something happened, we did not know what, but whatever it was it stopped the wave of desertions.
Could it be the new menu in the cafeteria? Could it be that we suddenly became better at communicating? No theory clicked and management (me included) remained as clueless as we should be.
Until one day.
This being the quintessential geek work place, reeking of popcorn and with employees sleeping on the floor after a good night of downloading stuff, they had just made good use of the servers and network and created a flurry of internal ‘newsgroups’, the predecessor of todays forums. Of course the management was the last to find out, but we did not care.
Suddenly the group dynamics changed. When networking was solely physical classic group dynamics ruled, groups formed in a corner of the corridor, and face to face disagreements had to be handled and a common purpose quickly built. Usually along the lines of ‘management sucks, we’re smarter’ and ‘lets split and do it on our own’. And surely enough every desertion group came from the same physical location of the office.
With the company-wide network something else happened, visiting the office next door was replaced with online socialising. And while Peter found Andy in full agreement with his views one day it did not take long before they found disagreement helped by full transparency and input from 100 opinionated co-workers. The full throttle dynamics killed the slower dynamics of yesteryear and any tendency to group forming was followed by instant and efficient group splintering.
It was the exact same effect the E 2.0 advocates predict will flatten the hierarchy that splintered the employee group building. ‘Split and control’ is an old adage, and here they had organised it themselves. Excellent we said.
And the management lived happily ever after. 
(Cross-posted @ thingamy)
Sig,
Great story; especially the brilliant recognition of managements contributions to its successful conclusion. Communication is one of three “pillars” of Enterprise 2.0 solutions. Social networking, while suspiciously a lot like goofing around on the internet instead of doing the job I’m paid to do, can deliver value as a component of E2.0. It also obeys the number one rule of all E2.0 solutions: Do no harm.
That rule was followed when they implemented newsgroups as an “overlay” to the existing infrastructure: smelly popcorn break rooms, classically incapable management teams and enterprise 1.0 (or earlier) business systems. All of these infrastructures contribute to the environment where more and more employees are convinced they could do it better.
Enterprise 2.0, and what I see are its three segments – Communication, Operation, Customer, all contribute to mitigating the damaging effects of the existing infrastructure and in fact demonstrate commercial value. Unfortunately the Enterprise 2.0 discussion has been rather narrow in its focus (social) and rather dubious in its business value (social again). But a true E2.0 solution coordinates the chatter (communication) that can unify performance, it delivers the goods (operation) faster, better and cheaper to a market (customer) that appreciates its value v. alternative uses of funds.
The fact that E2.0 solutions can be deployed on top of the existing infrastructure for a fraction of the cost and time that E1.0 and previous solutions required without the risk, disruption and stifled innovation and flexibility is if not revolutionary…at least evolutionary. Now if the market could just stop focusing on twitter or facebook as the embodiment of E2.0 and focus on the true needs of business (hence enterprise).
Great blog.
Steve