The Enterprise 2.0-generation and the future
What can we expect from the future corporations whose leaders and information workers all grew up in a world where internet already was labelled “2.0”? When I grew up, in the early seventies, e.g. young girls all had diaries with little heart shaped padlocks on. No one was allowed in to their secret thoughts. Today, young girls are publishing their diaries on blogs, open for the entire world to read and reply to. When me and my friends did something really stupid, we tried to keep it to ourselves. Today the film is on Youtube within seconds after the situation. The drive to share and take part of other peoples “business” is enormous.
Now, take this collaborative force into the future corporate world. When we, and every other generation grew up, knowledge was power in the sense that you should keep valuable information to yourself and act on it when the best opportunity came along. Hence, even though the wind is changing slowly, today’s business mostly depends on few people who know a lot. Tomorrow the business will depend on many people who each have specific knowledge. Tomorrow, knowledge is a fresh fruit that should be consumed fast or it will be useless. Knowledge will be power in the sense that you can use it to broaden you network and collaborate with even more communities and so on.
So, what about the future corporations then? Given a continuing technical evolution, we will have the possibility to seek and find relevant knowledge for an existing or upcoming situation within our organisations in a way we never had before. The leaders should be able to get more relevant and fresh information to act upon then ever seen before. The key to this is of course the power of the learning communities, the social operating systems and the networks. The leaders and information workers of tomorrow will have this power built in from kindergarten and they will know of no other way to conduct their business than to cooperate with others, share ideas, keep discussions going and making it all public within the organisation. Business Intelligence will move its focus to tracking and monitoring these communities and seek out the relevant information instead of aggregating and analysing already distorted data from legacy systems, and creating charts that are out of date even before they are compiled. The good part is that as long as the climate for starting and running the communities is healthy, the communities will almost take care of themselves. They will define their own set of rules, the do’s and the dont’s, and they will find the best channels for them to publish themselves within the organisations.
Now, take this collaborative force into the future corporate world. When we, and every other generation grew up, knowledge was power in the sense that you should keep valuable information to yourself and act on it when the best opportunity came along. Hence, even though the wind is changing slowly, today’s business mostly depends on few people who know a lot. Tomorrow the business will depend on many people who each have specific knowledge. Tomorrow, knowledge is a fresh fruit that should be consumed fast or it will be useless. Knowledge will be power in the sense that you can use it to broaden you network and collaborate with even more communities and so on.
So, what about the future corporations then? Given a continuing technical evolution, we will have the possibility to seek and find relevant knowledge for an existing or upcoming situation within our organisations in a way we never had before. The leaders should be able to get more relevant and fresh information to act upon then ever seen before. The key to this is of course the power of the learning communities, the social operating systems and the networks. The leaders and information workers of tomorrow will have this power built in from kindergarten and they will know of no other way to conduct their business than to cooperate with others, share ideas, keep discussions going and making it all public within the organisation. Business Intelligence will move its focus to tracking and monitoring these communities and seek out the relevant information instead of aggregating and analysing already distorted data from legacy systems, and creating charts that are out of date even before they are compiled. The good part is that as long as the climate for starting and running the communities is healthy, the communities will almost take care of themselves. They will define their own set of rules, the do’s and the dont’s, and they will find the best channels for them to publish themselves within the organisations.