Give me social computing or give me death!

Stephen Collins has made his first blog post at Web Worker Daily, titled “Three Steps to Introduce Social Software to Your Employer“. It reminded me of my ninja turtle days, fighting the good fight, trying in the mid 90s to get management to take websites seriously as a communications tool. In those days, I would shout from the sewers (like a ninja turtle) “give me a website or give me death!”

I think we’re experiencing the same troubles now with social computing. While there are some serious benefits to be gained for knowledge workers by using web 2.0 tools, managers are ignoring them through fear that their people will waste time writing blogs that have nothing to do with work. It’s something that Anne Zelenka has recently blogged about. Her activities are seen as time wasting, as largely irrelevant to corporate objectives. For those of us struggling with ways in which we can introduce social software, Stephen’s post shows us how to pick up the nunchucks and wage war.

But there are those managers who are ok with social computing software. These managers scare me more than those who despise it! I saw the same gleam in the eyes of managers around 2000 who saw knowledg mangement as software to install in order to manage knowledge. It was about the same time that the National Archives of Australia brought out their ePermanence strategy. As managers clambered to be cool and do ‘knowledge management’ I saw records managers, archivists and librarians, all pushing management for tools to support their corporate activities. Unfortunately, none of this was really about giving tools to knowledge workers so they could do their jobs better. It wasn’t about the user - it was about a corporate agenda and about controlling corporate information.

Before you jump on the social bandwagon and reach for that corporate wiki, or start to install blogs everywhere, if you’re a manager you can take a leaf out of the Information Architect’s user-centred design approach and look at the user and their needs first:

• who is going to be my target audience?
• what kind of relationship you I want to build with them?
• what sort of message do I want to deliver?
• do I want to engage them in a conversation and discuss something like policy or the way we do business or just tell them what we’re doing and how?
• are they ready for it?

After you’ve asked and answered these questions, then put on your corporate hat and think about the corporate issues.

At the end of the day, if you want a successful wiki or corporate blogging project, you can’t just slap in the tool, create some policy, and expect people to run with it. It’s called social computing because, simply, its supports social interaction between users. If you put road blocks into manage things, and limit users ability to interact on a social level, then your project is doomed to fail. At the end of the day, the users and their social interaction must be the focus of your efforts.

M