Enterprise 2.0 and the Knowledge Worker

It’s highly likely that you’re a knowledge worker.

Knowledge Worker is a term coined by the famous Peter Drucker to indicate that we’ve moved from a situation where we are like process workers in a factory stamping widgets to a society where the predominant worker activity is the need to create, use and re-use knowledge and information to do their work.

Many enterprises are recognising that the key to success in this information age is had through:

• access to people by people
• access to what they know
• encouraging people to share what they know
• easy ways people can collaborate

In this interview by IRR Australia, Ross Dawson describes Enterprise 2.0 and the benefits for knowledge workers in very simple terms.

That’s not to say, though, that all knowledge workers need is access to Web 2.0 tools. It does suggest, though, that people are an important part of knowledge work. Unless you have ways that empower people to interact and share knowledge and information in simple ways, throwing a wiki or a blog at them is going to be rather pointless.

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Culture and social computing

I’ve been writing for Jay Deragon about social computing and culture. It’s been good for me since I’ve not written an academic style article for some time, and its given me an opportunity to immerse myself in Hofstede again and return me to my cross-cultural psychology roots.

Ultimately, it seems social computing is something of a pan-cultural phenomenon. Of the 6.5 billion people living on the planet, 1 billion use the internet, and some 0.5 billion report using social computing tools. Interestingly enough, though, different cultures have different levels of uptake of this medium. Why?

If you account for socio-economic factors, and look at access to high-speed internet services, the developing countries like Korea, Brazil, China and Mexico, have a rate of uptake of social computing that is still faster than those developed countries like the USA, Canada and the UK. Therefore, access to technology is not the only factor in getting people to use social computing tools. Culture seems to have something to do with it as well.

Luckily, when it comes to looking at comparing and differentiating aspects of culture, we have Hofstede [1] to look toward for some guidance. When using his measures to describe cultures, particularly the Individualism/Collectivism index and the Power-Distance index, and graphing developing and developed countries against these indexes, we get a clear picture of what is motivating different cultures to use social computing tools.

Overall, Collectivist developing countries usage of social networking sites is greater than that of Individualist developed countries: a result that is consistent with Hofstede’s definitions and his cultural dimensions index. This is because the Individualism/Collectivism dimension refers to the relative priority given to the person or the group (often the extended family). Collectivism, for example, includes:

• feeling of involvement in, and contribution to, the lives of others
• sharing of material benefits
• sharing of non-material resources
• willingness of the person to accept the opinions and views of others
• concern by a person about the effects of actions or decisions on others
• concern about self-presentation and loss of face
• belief in the correspondence of own outcomes with the outcomes of others

Whereas Individualism encompasses:

• personal independence
• uniqueness
• competition
• personal achievement and success
• introspection
• emphasis on internal attributes rather than other people’s opinions and indications

Developing countries who are less Individualist are more likely to use social networking websites (y = -0.916x + 71.214, R-squared = 0.5519). In contrast, in developed countries those who are more Individualist are more likely to use social networking websites (y = 0.3853x - 5.5885, R-squared = 0.692).In certain studies, both France and Germany are noted to have relatively low adoption of social networking sites. Given both have a score of approximately 70 on Individualism, these results confirms Kemp and others’ [2] research.

A possible reason for the opposite effect seen in Individualism is due to the interaction with Schwartz’s [3] Egalitarian Commitment factors, both of which are positively correlated with Hofstede’s Individualism. It may also be the result of another factor: Power-Distance.

When investigating Power-Distance, the results reflect an overall trend: as Power-Distance increases, use of social networking sites decreases. This is consistent with Hofstede’s definition when taking other cultural research on egality, like that of Basabe and Ros [4], into consideration.

For developing countries, those who are relatively low on Power-Distance (e.g. Korea) are more likely to use social networking sites, than those who are relatively high on Power-Distance (e.g. Mexico and China) (y = -1.4496x + 149.4, R-squared = 0.6884).

Developed countries show a similar relationship, with Power-Distance having a strong effect on use of social networking sites (y = -0.3718x + 40.335, R-squared = 0.7472).

These results show that all cultures use social networking sites, but that Collectivist cultures participation is higher overall than Individualist cultures. This is to be expected given the collectivist focus on group interaction and sharing and less on personal independence. It is likely, though, that strong social egalitarian traits within certain Individualist cultures, reflected as low Power-Distance, accounts for their usage.

The results also have implications for organisational culture and enterprise 2.0, particularly those workplaces like the Public Service that hold onto their high Power-Distance authoritarian structures. In a world where connecting to people is becoming more and more important, these results suggest large change management issues ahead when it comes time to put social computing tools onto the desktop.

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[1]. Hofstede, G. (1991). Cultures and organizations. Software of the mind. London: McGraw-Hill.

[2]. Kemp, M. B., Jaap Favier, J., Josh Bernoff, J., Bouquet, M., & Klevchuk, O. (2007) Europeans Have Adopted Social Computing Differently. Forrester Research. Media Release, 27 June. Online at: < http://www.forrester.com/ER/Press/Release/0,1769,1154,00.html>, accessed on 9 Sept 2007.

[3] Schwartz, S.H. (1994). Beyond individualism/collectivism: New cultural dimensions of values. In U. Kim, H.C. Triandis, C. Kagitcibasi, S. Choi, S., & G. Yoon, (Eds.), Individualism and collectivism: Theory, method and applications (pp. 85-119). Thousands Oaks, CA: Sage.

[4] Basabe, N. & Ros, M. (2005) Cultural dimensions and social behavior correlates: Individualism-Collectivism and Power-Distance. RIPS / IRSP, 18 (1), 189-225 © 2005, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble

So where’s the social computing tools, dude?!

At the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, Marthin De Beer, Vice President of Cisco Systems, delivered his keynote speech telling IT managers that they had better start preparing to deal with Web 2.0 technologies, like wikis, blogs, mashups, and social networking websites, because sooner or later — and it’ll probably be sooner — they’re going to have to deal with it. Why did Marthin say this? Because IDC research suggests that IT managers and executives largely don’t know any of this is going on.

But his speech comes as no surprise many of us. I know I’ve had this expectation for a while. I know many other knowledge workers are also bringing from home an expectation of how computing should be:

“Now people have better computer technologies at home…. People want to use their favorite technologies at work. They’re satisfying themselves and not waiting for IT”
- Dennis Moore, General Manager of Emerging Solutions, SAP [1]

If recently IDC statistics [2] are anything to go by, they suggest that this expectation is about having social computing tools at work:

• 45% of companies have workers blogging
• 43% use RSS feeds
• 35% of companies have employees using wikis

This expectation has arisen because these technologies are increasingly becoming an integral part of people’s social lives, just as email was to workers 10 years ago. As such, people, and particularly younger workers, are starting to demand that they also be a part of their work lives, as well [3].

The IDC’s comments are a timely warning for all organisations ignoring this trend:

“The significant adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise will have a dramatic impact on how organizations capture, discuss, distribute, and protect their information. If not already planning for this change, companies will find themselves increasingly exposed and vulnerable”
- Rachel Happe, IDC’s research manager, Digital Business Economy.

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[1] Moore, D (2007). Enterprise 2.1. Enterprise 2.0 2007, June 18 – 21.

[2] Happe, R. E. (2007) Web 2.0 at Work: Adoption of Tools for Personal and Business Use. IDC Research, April. Online at: <http://www.idc.com/…rId=206176>, accessed on 27 June 2007.

[3] Gaudin, S. (2007) Younger Workers Demanding Web 2.0 Tech On The Job. 19 June. Online at: <http://www.informationweek.com….199905440>, accessed on 27 June 2007.