Guess What: It is About the Tools

Jevon MacDonald on the need to concentrate on technology usage in areas of business other than IT:

So far the vast majority of our thinking has been focused on the IT element of a social business transformation. We are asking questions like “Which tools should I use to collaborate?”, “What are the case studies of social networking in a company?”, “What are the results of using twitter in the enterprise?”. I believe that these questions are all too shortsighted and narrow partly because they presuppose the necessity of collaboration, social networking and other Enterprise 2.0 tools, but those are not safe assumptions to make.

People don’t talk about “asynchronous addressable messaging” or “text-based human digital communications”. They talk about email. They understand what email is, and it’s simple enough that it doesn’t need a complex description of the concept behind it.

I can say to a client “You can have a wiki” and it means something. If I say “You can have an enterprise 2.0” it doesn’t mean anything. Enterprise 2.0 is a notion that only exists inside the software and technology industry. Outside that industry, people in marketing, HR, design, manufacturing, sales, research, business development, and countless other areas of business frame processes – and improvements to those processes – based on understanding specific tools well enough to make regular use of them.