The company I work for just had a minor social media hiccup: Over the weekend, a dozen of our most active company microblogging system users lost all of their followers. It was unpleasant: We had all gotten used to using this system as a way to communicate with people we know or don’t know; we would log into the system to share what was going on in a meeting or to get answers from the crowd – often with great insights. Losing a couple of thousand people who listen to you over night is like waking up on a deserted island: You won’t find an audience waiting for you (somewhere in this metaphor hides a joke about the cloud monster from LOST, but I digress).
My guess is that the IT centralists had a field day: Finally proof that decentralized, or worse: software-as-a-service solutions are a serious danger to business intelligence and continuity. Something to put into slides for the next intranet portal credit approval.
Of course decentralized systems have risks – relaxation of control structures leads to increased flexibility, but also to the need for more monitoring and clean-up. The real question we have to ask is: What’s better, a user-friendly, decentral best-of-breed system with occasional hiccups, or a safe, monolithic system no one uses because it’s a horse designed by a committee? I wouldn’t hesitate a second and pick the decentral approach. Clayton Christensen (who wrote about disruptive technology in The Innovator’s Dilemma) would agree.
Internal social media thrive on volunteerism: People are going the extra mile not because they asked to, but because they think it’s the right thing to do. Volunteerism depends upon intrinsic motivation, the joy in doing a task itself. For this reason, usability (read: remove barriers to effective individual usage) must be the highest priority of social media system owners and community managers, because usability makes people enjoy a system.
Equally important is a point that my colleague Christian pointed out while going while the microblogging community was trying to find out how it can get its followers back: When dealing with complex systems, it’s more important to enable a speedy recovery than preventing accidents to happen. The latter is impossible – the former ensures long-term survival. In other words: When preparing for risks, focus on resilience, and less on robustness.
What’s your opinion? How does your company value usability?
UPDATE: I got my followers back this morning – and the upside of the hiccup was that many users voiced how important internal microblogging has become to them.
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Interesting post Timm, especially the point you make about volunteerism. Let me flip this and post the thought that the people who are the catalysts and the linchpins in an organization will instinctively think about contributing proactively like this, hence the followers, and the technical dilemma.
Volunteering reflects the inherent added value that catalysts and linchpins bring to the collective intelligence of an organization. These people are worth their wait in gold. Easily replaceable labour, by comparison, doesn’t; it provides less intangible value at a cumulative and corporate level which is another point in favour for software as a service, where adoption rates and useability are by definition generally well proven.
Which brings us to the point about systems management. The risk of obsolescence and the opportunity cost of losing scalar possibilities because of the restrictions of centralized, bespoke systems cannot be underestimated for an aspiring dynamic and networked organization. Rapid fire, iterative development is becoming an increasingly essential component of any strategic mainframe, and centralized, compartmentalized management systems do run a substantial risk of falling short by being less adaptive by definition. ‘Focus on resilience, less on robustness’, absolutely, that’s a very good way to put it.
That old axiom, ‘you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’ seems to have served your company well in the last few days; I hope the connectivity that was lost and then found will help put a new slant on some of the issues and arguments you’ve talked about above.
@Anne: Thanks for your comprehensive comments; I think that the value of employees for a company lies in the product of their knowledge x motivation, and sometimes worry that the classification into “stars” (high potentials, catalysts, linchpins, engaged ones) and “non-stars” has lead to self-fulfilling prophecies inside companies of actually creating more “non-stars”.
Good one on “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone”