An Early Look at the Emerging Management Practice of the Radically Connected Workplace by Estee Solomon Gray

Quietly, and still for the most part under the corporate radar, a new digital divide is emerging in the workplace. Whether by virtue of birth, accident of experience, or attribute of personality, those who have had the good fortune to grow up digital, work for a technology company, or naturally enjoy the more discovery-based, "social" work-style of the networked economy use a different set of skills - and carry a different set of expectations - than their less "digital" colleagues, superiors and reports. In a world of always-on connectivity, multi-modal mobility, non-co-located collaborators, as well as product-life cycles counted in months rather than years, these are the people, the "next gen," who know how to get "net work" done.

At the same time, a new wave of technologies is following the path paved just a few years ago by instant messaging onto our desktops and into our pockets and purses. Like the millions of users it has already earned, this generation of tools takes peer processing for granted. The product terminology is still awkward: real-time personal and collective publishing/communications solutions, social network navigation/visualization systems, integrated telephony/messaging platforms, etc. But many "high potential" managers and "high-value" contributors are already experienced with them. New NetWork practices - and the mores surrounding them - are in the process of being negotiated. NextGen are experimenting everywhere, often just off the corporate radar screen:

• "Blackberrying" during a meeting is no longer "impolite". Divided attention is simply a cost of doing global business.
• No longer constrained by MS Outlook or IBM Lotus Notes, people use IM, SMS, and Skype [www.skype.com] not simply to "communicate" but to actively manage their presence(s) - online and off.
• They rely on RSS/Atom newsreaders [www.bloglines.com], and presume a high level of technology in their personal lives - from political activism to the logistics of meeting dating and matchmaking.
• Put in customer-facing roles, they experiment with blogging [www.sixapart.com], drop the pretense of "fungibility" in favor of "personality" and, seemingly overnight, create intensely meaningful customer communities.
• Tasked to build teams or outsource work, they see the value in professional network navigation/visualization tools like LinkedIn [www.linkedin.com] or its sales analogue Spoke [www.spoke.com].
• Wikis [www.tikiwiki.com, www.wikipedia.com] and group blogs let teams side-step tangles of emails and attachments circulating Word documents and avoid never-quite-right project workflow management systems.
• Add in live multiparty "text" chat ("IM") or actual voice chat ("phone") and you can have an experience that rivals the productivity - and pleasure - of the best hallway encounters. Back channel 'sessions' take the place of the scribbled notes of the co-located participants.

The implications for those responsible for the health and competitiveness of their organization's infrastructure are many. It is almost certainly too early to pick industry "winners" from "losers". And it may be too soon to advise deliberate adoption of new tools and work practices. But it is not too early to strategically sense the workplace and workforce changes underway and to begin to adapt our structures and systems accordingly. Here are some questions you might want to address for your organization.

The NextGen NetWork Challenge: A Call to Adapt

The social software market may still be in its innovator phase. But it is driven by such fundamental economic, demographic and technologic forces that it is here to stay. Some say the tipping point for blogging has already passed. More conservative estimators forecast an 18-24 months timeframe to "mainstream." The window is short.

Awareness of the significant workplace value of these technologies and practices is beginning to reach older managers and to threaten or change their work practices. Enterprise blogging systems, for example, are literally following in the footsteps of enterprise IM systems, which entered corporations from the street, home or school to provoke furious corporate IT immune system responses and yet, based on sheer utility and productivity, earn a place in corporate infrastructures.

A fundamental dialectic is at work here. New practice begets new tools. And new tools beget new practice. Indeed, one of the basic tenets behind "social software" is striving to have the tool literally emerge from the doing of the practice. These are technologies that tend to look simple, even stupid - until you add the social system that uses them. Each of these tools, in its own way, "captures" conversations - and hence the intellectual capital created - in ways never possible before. Equally important, each of them "creates" connections - in ways never attempted before - and literally produces new "social capital".

Experienced entrepreneurs agree. In every "new market," there is a time - early on - when the most important activity is striving to see - new needs, new uses, new roles, and new pressures. It is not necessarily easy to see, even or especially if you come from the affected user base. It takes time, it takes discipline and, most importantly, it demands a thoughtful process of reflection and a fertile test bed for drawing conclusions based on a diverse set of viewpoints, skills and styles. In short, it takes focused, expert, evocative original research and a discovery/learning process.

There is a fundamental transition taking place in how work gets done in organizations; social software is just one piece of that puzzle. Together with innovations in social network analysis and social networking tools, Communities of Practice themselves are going through a revival. "Social" is no longer a dirty word in corporate America. The unauthorized and emergent are gaining steam, if not primacy, in determining how and when work actually gets done, not to mention by whom. The need to look deep 'inside the organization' at the actual NetGen NetWork practice is beginning. The world is changing; it's important that your organization either preempt, adapt or worse-case, react, because the ramifications affect everything --- hiring, decision-making, collaboration, information dissemination and learning!

Estee Solomon Gray - Founding Partner, Congruity Estee's career spans 25 years working with senior Fortune 100 executive teams, startup management teams, leadership networks and communities of practice. She has held key positions in marketing, customer support and product development, most recently as Chief eLearning Officer and VP Marketing for InterWise. Since founding Congruity in 1990, she has been widely recognized as an in-the-trenches consultant and thought-leader on cultivating corporate communities of practice and "social computing" approaches to human/social capital management. Her work has been featured in Fast Company Magazine, Release 1.0, several books on knowledge management and systems design, and the forthcoming "Creating a Learning Culture: Strategy, Technology and Practice" (Cambridge University Press, June 2004). Prior to Congruity, Estee was a founding member of Regis McKenna's technology marketing practice. She has worked closely with top management teams at Xerox, HP, Silicon Graphics, National Semiconductor, Raychem and others. She is currently focused on the design and use of next generation knowledge systems under the emerging rubric of "social software" and "social network creation." Estee holds MBA and MSEE (computer architecture) degrees from Stanford University and a BSc (neurophysiology and biomechanics) from Yale University.

For more information on upcoming NetGen NetWork research, or Congruity's practice at the intersection of social networking analysis, communities of practice and social software, contact estee@congruity.com.

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