Too Much Buzz?

In a recent article about Social Media, Too Much Buzz, The Economist newspaper takes a somewhat skeptical and definitely cautionary tone.  The sub-title for the piece, Social media provides huge opportunities, but will bring huge problems, sums it up nicely.  

They go on to say:

Cyber-enthusiasts gush about the way social media help entrepreneurs. They have a point: disruptive technologies reconfigure old businesses and create new ones. Facebook could let companies aim their ads more accurately. Firms are starting to use internal social-networking tools, such as Yammer and Chatter, to encourage collaboration, discover talent and cut down on pointless e-mails. Youngsters are happy to embrace it, but older managers may be less keen. The use of social media within companies could be quite disruptive to traditional management techniques, particularly in strongly hierarchical firms.

While I agree with much that they have to say, I think that they may have missed the bigger point.

To fully appreciate the long-term implications of emerging social business technologies I believe that it is necessary to step outside of our current understanding of how work is performed. Consider instead a world in which all that is known can be easily accessed on demand by anyone, anywhere, at any time – for free.  If you lived in such a world then how would you go about your work?

Since in this world there is no information friction, the emphasis would be less on efforts to create, sustain and exploit a monopoly on specific information (intellectual property) and more on enhancing the capability of the enterprise to employ range of information in new and different ways to solve business problems. This is a world where work is organized less to focus on invention, which is about the creation of new information and more to focus on fostering innovation, which is about the use of information.  The former is often accomplished through a small group of elite resources, while the latter is accomplished through enabling and engaging the entire enterprise. Success in this world will be much more dependent upon the ability to connect, communicate and collaborate. Success will come from thousands of people working together to leverage the full extent of their collective experience to understand problems and create solutions.

In an absolute sense this idealized world will not come to pass; the movement of information will never be completely frictionless.  But if you consider the accelerating rate of adoption of the SoLoMoDat technologies (Social, Local, Mobile and Big Data) something like it is rapidly approaching. In my opinion these technologies, which have emerged somewhat independently, will be combined to enable new and very different ways of doing business.

As The Economist claims, these new technologies will in fact provide huge opportunities.  But it is only the firms that combine the use of the new technologies with new ways of doing business, innovating and collaborating, that will succeed in this new world.