The benefit and effects of social networks in the enterprise
- there are close colleagues, people you directly work with, people you could potentially work with, other people in your company and people you have no relation to. Social networks are tools that allow you to widen the second circle. They allow you to get to know more people for possible collaboration you do not know already and they allow you to manage loosely coupled relationships to more people than you could without tool support.
A recent piece by Alex Iskold: The Social Enterprise - What Works, and What Doesn't says social tools in the enterprise allow communication paths outside the organization chart graph. The reason is that classical tools for enterprise organization like the org chart focus on positions, not people. To illustrate this, you could use a sketch like this:
We can see clearly the boxes and arrows, indicating the organizational structure. As for the people, the organizational contents, we can only see the head clearly, for all other people in the organization that we do not know directly, vision becomes blurry.
With social networking tools it becomes possible to see the actual people behind the positions, you can find out about interests, activities and create an image of a person you have not yet met in real-life, but which could help you in a future challenge.
This allows you to create connections and social structures that span multiple branches of the organizational tree. As an effect, people become more important than their position in the org chart and you can create more decentralized organizational structures like virtual teams.
As a side-note: While writing this post I realized how this people (social content) over organization (social structure) notion reflect David Nüscheler's mantra of "content first, structure later" applied to social systems.
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I am Product Manager for Collaboration and Digital Asset Management at
Thanks for blogging about this. You are absolutely right, this is the critical bit from my post. The fact is that in each organization the pathways used to get things done transcend the hierarchy. Another way to understand it is to picture information traveling up and down hierarchy - a long, inefficient path. The shortcuts that people create to get things done are actually information shortcuts.
Alex
Posted by Alex Iskold on November 09, 2007 at 03:23 AM CET #
Posted by Lars Trieloff on November 09, 2007 at 12:44 PM CET #