How about become a bit more 2.0?
A customer of mine said at his briefing to a design agency: “and the website should be a bit more web 2.0” Yeah! 2.0 is fancy. The web is 2.0 now they say. How about Enterprises? Are Enterprises 2.0? Governments? 2.0? But what is that 2.0 thing in an Enterprise or Government? The good old times systems work. And they work well. The business is running well. So why should we change? And what to change?
About 8-9 years ago we heard the same rumors about changes. They said everything will change. The internet is coming up and all old businesses will fail if they don't change to internet driven business. The net provider promised us video phones and broadband connections. We all know what happened then. The video quality was bad, the connections were slow and most internet businesses failed. The technical revolution failed - at least at that time.
What they promised then is coming up now. And we love the world we live in now. Even if we hear older people talking about how bad all this new stuff is and how good the old times have been. This and with that I am sure, will never change. They see their own loved achievements disappear and emerging technologies and young people replacing their own technologies or even themselves. It’s a deep fear of losing importance.
Technology changed for real since the 2k bubble. This is a fact. Mobile videos are of good quality, the internet connections are fast. But somehow there is more that changed since then. A new generation of young people, growing up with all that new mobile multimedia stuff, is conquering the world of business. New consumers help developing the products they consume by themselves. Wikinomics tells us something about what is happening. New rumors are emerging: “Go 2.0! The social internet is coming up! Change your business! Get social! Let your customers and suppliers develop your products!” This sounds great. Nothing to do for us anymore. Customers and suppliers care about our products and we just have to earn money. Something tells me this will not work.
The change we are facing now is not a technological one, even if the root of the change is technology. This took place. The new technology enabled us to share and search and contribute. The change is a social one. Our kids grew up using this tools and expect the business world to work like that too. It doesn’t right now. Some companies (Synaxon, treadless) tried to implement now technologies and experiment with different organizational structures. They also changed and this is crucial complete the world of values.
* to share knowledge and information
* to collaborate within the enterprise and its dialog groups
* to accept incompleteness, if more speed is the yield
* to use and contribute knowledge
* no fear to change, instead lead the change
* peer production
* have fun while working
"INATT" (It's not about the technology) in this sense is more accurate then ever. Slowly but inexorably our kids are growing and they bring with them a total new spirit: The natural use of technology for communication and data exchange and a new way of collaboration, development, contrubution and consume. The social technology is emerging and will change our world.
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