This is the best post I’ve seen on this subject (other than my own!).

I agree with all your points as far down as when you suggest that it might be fitting to focus on the process and not its outcomes.

I think this would be a hugely dangerous approach (in terms of its potential to take us down various blind alleys.)

My diagnosis is slightly different - it was the original outcome that was wrong ie the outcome isn’t the use of social media.

In my blog, I suggest the appropriate outcome is the creation of social capital (so the social business is one that invests in developing social capital).

You’ll find the post here: http://blog.social-advantage.com/2009/09/my-further-thoughts-on-social-business.html.

This is a great conversation and one I struggle with a bit because I hear so much of the Enterprise 2.0 chatter being around the technical architectures of the social applications being deployed. I don’t think that fans of the term necessarily want to limit the discussion to and yet, it keeps being discussed in more IT-centric circles.

I am a firm believer that we are moving toward more networked organizational structures. I am a strong believer that structure and incentives drive employee (or partner/customer) behavior.

Just like the Internet changed information structures from hierarchies to networked, it is now driving the same in human organization structures. The people who understand how the web changes information exchange have a generally better grasp on how you might change organizational structures.

I started calling this the Social Enterprise/Social Organization toward the end of 2007 (see my IDC report The Social Enterprise: How Social Networking Changes Everything). But ultimately, the semantics don’t matter… the structure, management, business process, leadership, measurement and cultural changes do. So, not sure where I come down on what we should be calling this but we do need to communicate that it is much bigger than just one aspect of a business.

Karl Weick, in his classic Social Psychology of Organising, does exactly that. He says that the double interact is “the stable component in organisational growth and decay”. An interact is where someone says or does something and I respond. Their reaction to my response is a double interact.

Social flows of human intractions, networks of double interacts, are made transparent by social technologies, geographically distributed and connected online by location-independent working, and are breaching multiple boundaries - including national, organisational, cultural, demographic and professional.

“it might be fitting to focus on process and not its outcomes” - I think both; one implies the other.

The Yin/Yang dance of tools and techniques has been discussed for decades in the context of business change. That’s not changed.

I am uncertain of your characterization of a ‘2.0 world where performance-based relationships are key’ — that sounds like the last vestiges of industrial taylorism, where the individual is a cog in a machine judged only on meeting others’ expectations, and the company holds all the cards.

‘Social’ in this context suggests something different, namely that social connection, between people, should be the dominant modality for conceptualizing the workings of the business, not disembodied business processes. It has its toots in the rise of the social web — social networks, social media — and should not be considered frivolous: it is an earnest and apt term.

Collaboration has had its day. It was a byword of the ill-fated knowledge management credo of the 90s. Collaboration was about streamlining knowledge work through group-based tools: so-called ‘groupware’.

Social tools do not start with the group, however. They start with the individual, or as I sometimes say, ’social = me first’. And then, these tools support connection through social relationships, not principally through groups. This difference may seem subtle, but like so many other revolutionary ideas, big things flow from small changes.

But, what’s the best term for this broader organizational concept? I am not keen on “social business.” As Andy McAfee argues in his upcoming book, “social” is perhaps accurate, but it is also an unfortunate choice of word for the technology and certainly for the enterprise. In the business world, “social” just doesn’t resonate — and whether we like it or not, it connotes a level of frivolousness that doesn’t encourage business people to grapple with the serious challenges ahead.

I think something related to collaboration — the Collaborative Enterprise, Extended Collaboration — conveys business purpose more accurately. The application of 2.0 technology to business is about bringing ideas together, it’s about collaboration. The folks at nGenera, with whom I collaborate for part of my time, are using the phrase “Managing the Collaborative Enterprise” and having good success in sparking both the imagination — and the energy to act — of business leaders.

This new presentation by Oscar Berg (@oscarberg) does a great job of illustrating the significance of the possibilities: http://twurl.nl/uu6nsw

Design is the beginning, the end, the middle: it’s everything.

The significance of it, and the depth of its impact is but briefly alluded to in this piece that ties the critical nature of complexity science to business organization http://bit.ly/gWrBd

We’re in a recession because not enough managers listened to economists like Paul David and Carlota Perez who were warning that paradigm shifts are decades long, difficult and messy. When a single Blackberry has more information processing power than NASA used to put men on the moon, you know that work is going to be organized differently, just as factories changed when they replaced the big steam engine at the end of the line with a hundred electric dynamos along the production line.

In that context, I feel that “Enterprise 2.0″ does a good job of signalling that we should think about how Web 2.0 impacts on running corporations, and how we might organize production differently.

But does it help to call this new stuff “social business”? Not really, because Ford and Carnegie and Watson and Courtauld, their businesses were social, too. What people are talking about today is something we might call Peak Hierarchy. It no longer makes any sense to have a separate class of people who manage, who supervise other people’s work and direct them around.

Nowadays, there are hardly any jobs for people who can’t think for themselves. We all have to be able to think for ourselves, process information, communicate well, collaborate with our peers, and improvise. It’s The End of Management As We Know It, (And I Feel Fine.)

With regards to the Enterprise 2.0 fatigue, someone coined the term “social business” which I like a lot better. I’d leave out the word Design as that indicates this very phase at this very moment

We’re all becoming globally connected on and at an ever-increasing scale and pace. This will certainly affect business as we know it, and in my opinion force a re-evaluation of the role of traditional management, delivery and sales. “Power to the people” seems to be come a reality, I wonder what this will mean with regards to the traditional political model as well, in due time…