Enterprise Social - Micro-blogging in Current Form Inadequate
Many services such as Yammer, Cubetree etc. leverage micro-blogging to boost the efficiency of the collaborative process within the enterprise. Most of these websites provide a very clean and friendly workspace.
The inherent function of these sites is to use the power of personal updates and commenting to ease the flow of work
Just like Facebook, an employee can join groups, discussion groups, give status updates, and reply to status updates.
But just like Facebook, the employee can get overwhelmed by the information/attachments/updates/groups and there is no clear distinction of an actual hierarchy. For example, if the executive/manager of a project needs some way to “hand out” work, the process of doing so can get very hectic. It can be posted on someone’s profile, a group, etc but the process will depend on the employee looking at his/her profile consistently. With students, this works out because Facebook is a component of socialization and not team-work. A note from one friend to another doesn’t really require immediate responses, but from an executive to employee, time is a factor.
Another problem with this kind of approach, when it runs a framework of an enterprise, is that it can create a “culture” of the profile. That is people might fixate on their own profile and some other profiles. What this does is creates many circles that don’t flow well with the surrounding circles. People will also tend to wait for notifications and become less focused if there is no activity on their profile. What basically happens is that the inbox gets replaced by a cleaner looking “profile”. Other than the advantage of knowing what other employees are doing and a centralized exchange of information, the much needed hierarchical order/organization and real time exchange of info is lacking.
So how can one still leverage the power of micro-blogging in the enterprise arena to actually benefit, rather than fill holes to reveal new ones?
Information must flow in real time and must be ordered. Enterprises have many separate projects, and spilling all those projects on one centralized location creates added disorganization. It is like if there are many round tables; and people are allowed to go to another round table on a whim. Nothing would get done. Same goes for the profile method, people would float around the enterprise and their personal profile. Collaboration gets hindered. The social groups don’t help the problem either. Let’s say, for a project, a group was created. Now, not only does the employees have to deal with their own profile being updated and having a delay. They must also wait for the group. It gets worse if a certain segment and their assets are grouped. What this does is cut off supervision of a group and basically creates consolidated chaos. It is like when cliques occur at a school. The enterprise can suffer the same situation if using the profile and status update method. Yes, micro-blogging can help, but the subtle and more important factor is the real time flow of information and where the “round table” is not distracted by the occurrences of others. So what if the manager could start a project page, and the employees subscribe to that project page, the most important aspect being that the project, not the profile, is highlighted. So when the page loads, the employee’s projects are loaded and information is exchanged based on those projects rather than profile to profile.
