IT Directions

Recently a lot of attention has been paid to the book Wikinomics, by Tapscott and Williams:

Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics proves this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success.

A brilliant primer on one of the most profound changes of our time, Wikinomics challenges our most deeply-rooted assumptions about business and will prove indispensable to anyone who wants to understand the key forces driving competitiveness in the twenty-first century.

Based on a $9 million research project led by bestselling author Don Tapscott, Wikinomics shows how the masses of people can participate in the economy like never before. They are creating TV news stories, sequencing the human genome, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding a cure for disease, editing school texts, inventing new cosmetics, and even building motorcycles.

This is hype, of course. Less breathless appraisals of the book than its blurb above point out some of the book's shortcomings:

A review of this book in the Harvard Business Review states "like its title, the book's prose can fall into breathless hype." A review of this book in Choice recommends the book for "general readers and practitioners," but cautions that the authors "present an optimistic overview of successful collaborations and business ventures", "use unique terms (e.g., marketocracy, prosumption, knowledge commons)", should have given "more consideration [to] the darker sides of human motivation as well as groupthink and mass mediocrity", and "primarily draw on their own observations of businesses and trends for the ideas presented."

Nevertheless, it seems clear that blogs, wikis, et al are helping to bring about a fundamental change in the workplace. They accelerate the process started by the Web itself, namely democratizing the publication of information. One could view such technologies as enablers for the Community of Practice idea that has been hovering on the fringes of business life for the last 2 decades.

Further, the widespread use of such powerful communication tools is helping people realize that communication is not the same as collaboration. In fact, many of the people spearheading this recognition are those keenest to promote the existing communication tools. They seek new collaboration tools to go with their wikis and blogs, since they know that for their beloved wikis and blogs to succeed long-term, there must be a way for organizations to manage the explosion of communication that is resulting from large-scale, one-to-many information publication.

Without some form of control applied appropriately at each level of the organizational hierarchy, the "wiki workplace" will simply descend into anarchy.

TAKE AWAY

The authors of Wikinomics are sponsoring the creation by the general public of an "unwritten chapter", via a wiki that will be transformed into a document for publication at key points. This wiki has some interesting ideas. In particular, the vision espoused therein for Enterprise 2.0 offers a compelling vision for the next generation workplace, suggesting that a "People-Oriented Architecture" (POA) is needed to go with today's SOA.

Regular readers of this blog will recognize a similarity between the "Enterprise People Bus" described therein and the knowledge bus concept outlined in some of my previous posts.

There is no doubt that wikis, blogs and the whole panoply of social software tools are changing the workplace. Whether or not this change is for good depends on how fast organizations take up the collaboration tools needed to bring order to the chaos.