1.415.644.5795One movie scene most of us will never forget is when Oliver Twist, desperate with hunger, rose from the table and advanced to the master with bowl and spoon in hand to audaciously ask, ‘Please, sir, I want some more.’ The carnage that followed all hinged around the shock and repetition of the word ‘MORE!’
‘More’ is a word that rarely raises an eyebrow or causes disdain in our modern world. Some things are changing due to energy crises and obesity but mostly ‘more is better’ is the mindset of the masses. Rockerfella was once asked how much money one needs to be happy. His response was ‘just a little bit more.’
Yesterday’s conversation starter on HBR called ‘Is Social Media Worth Your Time?’ provoked this post. Morten Hansen appropriately states: Some people miss this point: They think of adoption success in a company as the number of wikis, blogs, tweets, and Facebook pages that people have created and used. In other words, they measure success as the activity level. But that’s the same as saying, “in our company, we have lots of meetings so we must be doing something right.”
When I inquire among leaders responsible for collaboration and communication within enterprise how they know if their existing solutions are delivering the goods I often get statistical responses of how many searches are being done on an average day or how much original content is being created by the people. This only tells me if people are using a system but it doesn’t communicate if a problem is being solved effectively. In my estimation the more searching you have to do reflects how ineffective the system you have created. This is rarely considered in this addicted googling generation.
When I walk down the halls of other Enterprise 2.0 vendors I get a little scared. There is no doubt many are doing a great sales job and have borrowed extensively from consumer social media but what I want at work are better filters and less noise. I have a job to do and I don’t want to have to bother with being social with everyone. Computing technology today has the ability to do more than we realize, it just needs innovative minds solving problems more effectively. There is no reason why we should need to search for everything we need or have to worry about tagging and taxonomies/folksonomies. Computers are supposed to be smart and free us from filing and sorting, it is about time we saw more of this.
I want suggest that less is better as long as the information is more precise and more relevant to my needs. I enjoy that each day I no longer have to search hard drives and emails to find the information I need. Neither do I have to search to find the expertise I need as I work on projects as they are suggested to me as brainpark learns what I am working on. Life is simpler and I have more space to think and innovate. There is no going back.
If you are seeking a business focused collaboration system that is alternative to everything else you have seen we may be the people you want to be talking to. We solve complex problems and know that computers were created to serve us.
