Martin Cleaver, masterfully.

Transparency can be viewed as an alternative to explicit communication: with the benefit that individuals don’t have to involve others when looking for information, instead they can probe offline into publically available data about projects and profiles about people.

Teams normally communicate explicitly through the hierarchy in meetings and email: these activities are:

1. expensive due to the time requirement of the people involved,
2. error prone as no one knows all the answers
3. sub-optimal in result as everyone acts as gatekeepers, and those gatekeepers inevitably affect the shape of a request the gatekeeper communicates

Organisations need to be organised. Processes need to mesh. Goals need to nest. They are complex eco-systems driven by dynamics of interdependencies, and each component is a freely-moving part that affects and is affected by others in the system.
One such dependency is how a technology can fulfill market need. Market needs are best known by people with contact to customers. New technologies best known by those that play with them. That’s usually, but not always in the realms of Marketing and R&D. Merely connecting Marketing and R&D is expensive under normal processes, there’s certainly not time to get and optimize input from everyone.

The key notions of Transparency and Participation in promised by Enterprise 2.0 apply here. In the hypothetical purely transparent organisation everyone in the enterprise can see everything that goes on. e.g.

• The individual opinions of customers, their unmet or partially met needs, their decisions to try other products from other companies or to replace purchases with doing nothing (non-consumption).,
• Staff’s experiments with new technologies even when its not their job function,
• The informal support roles that many I.T. people fulfil with friends and family.

Gathering such information is an impossible and fairly pointless task when its conducted without corporate goal, adequate policies and the right tools to surface patterns with low-enough costs. The information only has value when it is aggregated in such a way that shows context, relevance, depth and perspective.

The Enterprise 2.0 - Tacit Media as Thomas Purves coined it - is about  making that information easy to gather, and available and distributed as a norm. Enabling automony allievates the need for permission from the hierarchy.

Socialising such aggregated pictures help individuals see themselves in context: where individuals can understand how ecosystems mesh within an enterprise and see themselves as part of that picture, it too helps them make choices about how best to adjust their actions. For example it can help them a place to best fit in the enterprise, and finding who to align with when they want to lobby for a change of the corporation’s goals.

In short, transparency lowers the cost of communication, allowing more communication in return for less effort. And blogs, wikis and social bookmarking  etc. are showing themselves as worthy candidates

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 5:22 pm and is filed under Organizational Transparency. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.