Skip to main content

Diigo Home

Balancing Technology and Culture During a Social Business Implementation - The Diigo Meta page

www.headshift.com/...ncing-technology-and-cultu.php - Cached - Annotated View

Bertrand Duperrin's personal annotations on this page

bertrandduperrin
Bertrandduperrin bookmarked on 2009-08-14 culture corporateculture technology adoption socialnetworks implementation

The topic of corporate culture and social computing has been done to death but still seems to rumble on as an undercurrent for many blog posts. Views range from the suggestion that corporate culture needs to be right for social computing to succeed all the way through to suggestions that social computing can act as a catalyst for cultural change. Of course its never as clear as either of those academic stances and when you listen to people in workshops saying, "it's not about the technology, it's about the people," in the same breath as, "the platform has to be perfect," it becomes very apparent very quickly that there is confusion over where the optimum balance lies.

  • Let me start by saying the final aim of any social business program shouldn't be to find balance between technology and culture.
  • In a company with a good culture they'd see the benefit of sharing and make the best of the tools they have.  In a poor culture, one where there is fear or dislike of sharing, it's easy for people to use the drawbacks of the technology or process as an excuse not to share.  "It's too cumbersome to upload a document," "It's too difficult to find a time when everyone is available for a meeting." In this case an answer would be to set-up a blog platform.  Make the blog platform easy to use.  Make the process of posting to the blog wonderfully simple.  Those people who didn't share simple because the ways of sharing in the past weren't good enough will now be able to share.  Those who used technology as an excuse will still not share. 

This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 14 Aug 2009, by Bertrand Duperrin.

  • 14 Aug 09
    bertrandduperrin
    Bertrand Duperrin

    The topic of corporate culture and social computing has been done to death but still seems to rumble on as an undercurrent for many blog posts. Views range from the suggestion that corporate culture needs to be right for social computing to succeed all the way through to suggestions that social computing can act as a catalyst for cultural change. Of course its never as clear as either of those academic stances and when you listen to people in workshops saying, "it's not about the technology, it's about the people," in the same breath as, "the platform has to be perfect," it becomes very apparent very quickly that there is confusion over where the optimum balance lies.

    culture corporateculture technology adoption socialnetworks implementation

    • Let me start by saying the final aim of any social business program shouldn't be to find balance between technology and culture.
    • In a company with a good culture they'd see the benefit of sharing and make the best of the tools they have.  In a poor culture, one where there is fear or dislike of sharing, it's easy for people to use the drawbacks of the technology or process as an excuse not to share.  "It's too cumbersome to upload a document," "It's too difficult to find a time when everyone is available for a meeting." In this case an answer would be to set-up a blog platform.  Make the blog platform easy to use.  Make the process of posting to the blog wonderfully simple.  Those people who didn't share simple because the ways of sharing in the past weren't good enough will now be able to share.  Those who used technology as an excuse will still not share. 

Top Tags