I had a very interesting email exchange with my colleague Simon Forman earlier today about whether openness is a prerequisite for success in the deployment of Enterprise 2.0 applications within an organization.
The discussion started from a comment Simon made on my retweet of Mary Abraham’s comments on Open Text Enterprise 2.0 expert Cheryl McKinnon’s webinar on Enterprise 2.0 in the Legal world (and no, my mother would have no idea what that all means but I hope you can follow along at home).
To paraphrase, Simon’s point is that restricting social networking tools like del.icio.us “isn’t very social”. In general terms I agree with him; openness should be the primary modus operandi of any ECM or Enterprise 2.0 implementation (or as I tweeted earlier today, ECM should be “open by design, closed by exception”).
I don’t think organizations should prevent people from using social networking tools inside the firewall and frankly can’t prevent them from doing so in their personal lives. In either case it is critical to educate them to be smart about it.
An example: What if the CEO’s del.icio.us links were all about mergers and acquisitions, potential target companies and research about management consultants who can integrate two big companies? That would be a bit of a tip off that something might be up.
In the end I think it’s easy to forget that social computing is in its infancy and that many organizations are struggling to find the right balance between openness and (appropriate) controls. A good start is to educate your workforce about some of the potential pitfalls of social computing and to put formal controls in place as necessary. My advice; don’t be afraid of the openness required for social computing to be successful in your organization. The good will outweigh the bad in almost every case.