Engagement, or just good friends?
Something fundamental is changing in the way we work. I know: you’ve heard it all before over the last 20 or 30 years: those warnings of tectonic changes coming to our working lives. Sure, we’ve all seen change: pens to keyboards; typewriters to word processors; carbon paper to photocopiers; telexes to faxes, then email and LinkedIn.
But beneath these changes, the systems supporting our business activity have chugged away, keeping the records in order so we can account for activity, report on our successes (and failures) and look for clues to help us shape a better future. The filing cabinets have been changed for databases, but the information is the same.
Evolution or revolution?
But something fundamental really is changing, and this time the change may move from evolution to revolution. The way most of us work today was ordained two hundred years ago as the industrial revolution swept the western world, moving workers from their homes to factories and offices, under the watchful eyes of the overseers. The way we work is changing—and maybe those changes will see us moving back home again (200 years at the office is a long time) but, more likely, moving anywhere and everywhere, including the office.
According to Geoffrey Moore in his recent AIIM white paper “A Sea Change in Enterprise IT”, the change is in the systems. No longer are the systems focused on simply keeping the records. Now they are providing the glue to our work communications, collaboration and relationships. Just as social networking has invaded our personal lives, so it is now invading our work lives. The “systems of record” are being overlaid with and, indeed, permeated by, “systems of engagement”.
What are systems of engagement? According to Moore, they are systems that connect people in real time, particularly through smart, geographically aware mobile devices and ubiquitous, cheap bandwidth. And they are the systems that are enhancing collaboration between groups of people.
It’s good to engage
Geoffrey Moore claims that “what some are calling the consumerization of enterprise IT is not some sop thrown to the millennial generation swelling our work forces but rather a next wave of productivity gains to be garnered from investing in a next wave of IT.” Moore sees the benefits flowing from “empowering the middle of the enterprise to communicate and collaborate across business boundaries, global time zones, and language and culture barriers, using next-generation IT applications and infrastructure adapted from the consumer space.”
McKinsey Global Institute’s Jacques Bughin and Michael Chui claim that organisations using social networking technologies are now seeing measurable business benefits. The results of their latest annual survey show at least modest benefits for most organisations adopting some level of “web 2.0” technologies. (See “The rise of the networked enterprise: Web 2.0 finds its payday”, McKinsey Quarterly, December 2010.) The message? Systems of engagement deliver business benefits.
So, what’s the problem?
But with the benefits come new challenges. Just when we had content management all figured out—all those records neatly packed away in relational databases behind the firewall—an exploding mass of social communications is gushing into cyberspace. Now we have content of all kinds—voice and video, emails and Tweets—no longer corralled and tagged, but freely roaming the web or bunkered down in some corner of a foreign field that is for ever Google.
And social content is often generations away from a carefully crafted document; social content is messy content. The ether is littered with half begun conversations and discarded thoughts. Plucking an item of communication from the hermeneutic heap can be as enlightening as trying to circumnavigate the world using a street directory of Des Moines.
Be alert but not alarmed
So there’s work to be done. To win the benefits promised by systems of engagement, we must revisit and rework the disciplines of content management. Geoffrey Moore in “Sea Change” sums up the task: “The central challenge for organizations is to define how to implement systems of engagement quickly, responsibly, and in the context of achieving a business purpose.”
Moore rehearses the business benefits of new social technologies while drawing out the pitfalls. Meeting across time zones, collaborating real-time, improving customer service through a variety of new communication channels—the scope is vast and exciting. But, while you’re doing these new things, look out for the gaps and traps in existing policies—policies rendered inadequate by the new ways of generating, storing and using the content of daily communications and collaboration. You’ll need to understand privacy obligations, reinvent information security and come to terms with new layers of compliance while finding ways to search new forms of content to uncover information in context.
How we work is changing dramatically: it’s looking like an inflection point, a sea change, maybe a tipping point—even a revolution. But while embracing the change, be alert to the new challenges, from technology to governance. Enjoy the engagement, but avoid losing friends.