Look forward Dennis Howlett, who wrote a number of enthusiastic posts about promise and proliferation of social software in his blogs, Irregular Enterprise and Accman Pro, seem to start loosing his enthusiasm for it’s value for an enterprise. At least it is my understanding of his post.

 

Collaboration is about problem solving in the flow of business processes - or at least it should be. That’s where cost sits and where all the automation in the world will not rescue the business manager. Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t solve problems per se but it may serve to expose them. The question then comes, how does business go about solving the problems it has discovered?

Dennis focuses on use of these tools for support of BRP (barely repeatable processes) (I love this term) which consume most time and effort of most “expensive” people in a modern enterprise. I think it is an excellent point.

The reason BRP is so “expensive” is because it requires a lot of “new” information gathering to execute it,  where sources of the required information and methods for gathering it, are also need to be learned at the same time. It requires strong applications thought leadership to articulate opportunities for embedding knowledge, available in enterprise wiki’s and external social networks, into a BRP on “as-needed” basis. Since these processes are “barely repeatable” such implementations can only be an “inside job”, i.e. there is no economic scale available to build and sell “solutions”, only tools.