Are Traditional Organizations Scared of Web 2.0?
January 5, 2008 by Raj Sheelvant
Two online articles Is the Enterprise Afraid of Web 2.0? and Why CEOs Are Afraid of Social Media investigate interesting reaction by the Traditional Firms on the rise of collaborative tools and social media. On the superficial level, executives and CIOs seem enthusiastic about wikis, blogs and social networking and have shown willingness to embrace this new development. You will see lot of 2.0 slapped to everything conventional and executives are pounding their chest as to how they have unshackled new ways of harnessing collaborative power within their organization. But at a deeper level, the traditional firms are downright scared of this new development. Externally they need to deal with the following changes:
- On a competitive landscape, new competitors will begin to emerge unconventionally due to lowering of barriers to collaborate and this will get more and more difficult for the traditional companies to keep track of their new competitors.
- The role of producers and consumers is beginning to blur and merge because of collaborative technology and is creating a new breed of prosumers. Traditional Organizations need a new set of rules to manage prosumers.
Internally the organization needs to restructure itself radically (read my blog on Why Traditional Organizations fail to leverage Web 2.0 technologies). From the article Why CEOs are afraid of Social Media: “To believers and practitioners of traditional top-down, command-and-control, for-me-to-know-and-you-to-find-out management (which is to say most of the people who run large business organizations–even those who talk a good participatory game), blogs, wikis, social networking sites are IEDs littered along the road to organizational stability…” and according to the article Is the Enterprise Afraid of Web 2.0? “Web 2.0 challenges the core assumptions about information in the corporation—who gets it, who owns it, and who has power because they have it. And that’s a really scary thing for people used to controlling it…”
There you have it. To integrate social media and collaborative technologies, the traditional organization need to go through some drastic changes in their internal structure. Just by changing Enterprise to Enterprise 2.0 superficially will not enable the organization to harness the collaborative energy within the organization or with the prosumers. Traditional Firms will be challenged seriously by new and emerging competitors if they do not radically alter their power structure and control of information to take advantage of Web 2.0.
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Comments (3)
It will be interesting to see if organizations that adopt the E2.0 environment and culture will have to adapt organizationally. If anything, the first stage is already happening – the prosumers are leading the companies’ innovative thinking and making a real impact on the business as well. In different discussions we’ve had with customers and prospects, even on such new solutions like WorkBook (essentially E2.0 access via social networks like Facebook), we were told by management that the motivator for buying such tools originates from knowledge workers down the chain of command. These tech-savvy employees are leading the organization to change the way work is done at the office. In fact, we see that when management tries to shut off access to popular consumer tools like Facebook, iGoogle, and Netvibes, there is a virtual revolt amongst employees to make these services available.
Also, I agree that the competitive landscape is changing, because it will become increasingly difficult for traditional vendors to supply proprietary solutions, when popular consumer technologies and services can provide the same value, at a much lower cost. The challenge, of course, is doing this securely, so that access is tightly maintained and that information does not leak out of the organization.
Yonni Harif
WorkLight
Hello Yonni, You are right about the security – its going to be very challenging. Thanks for your comment.
Executives and CIOs do seem enthusiastic about Web 2.0 developments and seem willing to embrace them. The problem comes when they go to the same people they always go to and they try doing the same thing they always do. The social media movement is changing the economy and more, take a look at http://alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/22534