Infopros and social media 1: culture or toolkit?
Jinfo Blog

4th December 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Social media pervaded this year’s London Online Information conference and seminars (http://www.online-information.co.uk). Many presentations addressed the concerns of academia – but when business did come to the fore, valuable lessons emerged. Generation Y may be bringing quite different values to business from their immediate predecessors, suggested Rooven Pakkiri of web solutions consultancy Digirati (http://www.digirati.co.uk). Valuing recognition over money, they set a high value on openness and looked to constant coaching and mentoring. They’d be the dominant workplace group by 2020, presenting big problems to enterprises that were not using collaborative platforms. The trouble was that the current toolkit just wasn’t working; email wasn’t a suitable medium for collaborative working – and in any case, only 11% of teenagers used it. Up in the conference Helen Clegg, director of knowledge management at management consultants A T Kearney (http://www.atkearney.co.uk), spoke of a ‘perfect storm’, pulling in the arrival of the millennial generation, the explosion of Web 2.0 and the introduction of enterprise collaboration software such as SharePoint. It necessitated a fundamental rethink of the way the company worked, the recognition that email was the place where knowledge went to die, and the learning of new lessons such as the fact that people liked to learn using audio. Joined virtually at one point by her chief information officer Hugo Evans in a YouTube video, the story was one of moving to a Facebook-type wall to share information, wiki solutions with tagged pages that permitted knowledge to be reused elsewhere within the business, and participation tools that allowed the best in-house videos to come to the top. But it wasn’t a free-for-all; a ‘governance lite’ regime manages all this innovation, proving that ‘a little governance goes a long way’. Agreeing that email was deeply ingrained and structured to be closed, Gordon Vala-Webb, knowledge management director at PwC Canada (http://www.pwc.com/ca), suggested that the real world was actually more like people just milling together and that the new tools could facilitate moves towards what he termed ‘social comfort’. Becoming visible in corporate social applications carried perceived risk – so he suggested a Trojan Horse approach: give people what they want, but put in stuff they’re going to need later as well. He cited PwC TV; to start with they turned off the user-generated option, but soon enough people asked for it to be switched on. Throughout the presentations, messages kept recurring. The current tools were finished but the new ones were inadequate as yet; in any case they wouldn’t work without the culture change, and that required a new approach to governance. Underlying it all, though, was the influence of the upcoming generation. When management asked ‘What do the Young People think?’, you could almost see the capital letters.

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