ConFigures

Participatory Web: Wachovia, Enterpise Sabotage, and Liveblogging

Jack Vinson’s impressions of a recent conference caught my eye.  I’m not crazy about the name (I so much prefer “participatory web” to web/anything “2.0″), but I know I’m fighting against the tide here. Anyway, several interesting bits:

• “The Wachovia presentation this morning appears to have opened some people’s eyes on how things could happen.”  Having been familiar with Wachovia since they were a small NC bank, I wondered what they were up to.
  • Steve Newberger wrote more about it:  [Fields’] analogy: Web 2.0 is this generation’s equivalent of his generation’s company picnic and bowling leagues. Additional critical rationale: mitigate the impact of the maturing, retiring workforce, i.e., the attrition of knowledge assets.  They’re using SharePoint (WSS/MOSS), with extensions for instant messaging (I miss using IM for work) and video blogging (we talked about getting that going at my previous employer — 2-minute service call how-to videos, viewable over mobile devices, anyone? — but didn’t get the resources to get it rolling in time).
  • More important than the technology is Wachovia’s attitude.  From a preview of the talk,  Wachovia’s collaborative environment is designed to attract younger Generation Y employees who expect access to Web 2.0 tools at work. […] “They’re coming to us with high enthusiasm but encountering arcane tools and bureaucracies,” he said, adding that many young workers’ engagement levels “fall off the table” after about a year on the job. “They are leaving Fortune 100 companies,” he said.  As I said at my previous employer and during my Knowledge Gardening presentation at Penguicon 2007, the ability to use modern, fun, low-entry-barrier collaborative and knowledge sharing tools is a recruiting advantage.
• The CIA presenters recommended starting small, such as with an acronym wiki page (I’ve had success with that approach!), and pointed to an OSS (CIA precursor)  manual from 1944 about how to sabotage organizations and production efforts: Insist on doing everything through “channels”, refer all matters to committees, haggle over precise wordings of communications,  advocate “caution”, and question whether a decision lies within the jurisdiction of the group.  The conflict such behavior would have with the architecture of participation is obvious (Note:  I do think precise wording and formal processes can be useful and important, but relative risks should be considered, and getting bogged down is a risk, too).
• “People get ticked off at twittering and live-blogging during an Enterprise 2.0 conference, just like they do at other events.”   They get ticked off?  I hope no one’s gotten mad at me for tapping on my laptop at presentations.  I guess I can see the negative potential (folks so busy twittering, blogging, taking pictures, etc. that they’re not engaging with the rest of the conferees), but I’d always had more of an attitude of “their loss” when it seems that they’re not fully there.  I suppose if a substantial proportion were doing so, that might take away a bit from the energy of the event (?).