Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum Blog

Great response from Andrew McAfee to my question regarding the emergence of network social networking visualisation tools such as IBM Lotus Atlas that enable networks to be mapped ... to see who is collaborating ... and who is not.  On the one hand, these tools can boost social search by helping people to 'see' who else is collaborating or contribution on a topic and to span the 'six degrees' that separate you from someone who knows something useful to you.  On the other hand, however, they smack of 'Big Brother'.

Andrew's response was that we need to be careful about peering over the shoulder of knowledge workers, and he prefers tools that keep the knowledge worker in control of their own collaboration experience.

This is interesting when combined with his comments that one of the barriers to adoption of enterprise 2.0 is too much structure ... so the social networking visualisation tools could become more of a barrier than an enabler if they are perceived by workers to be the equivalent of email-snooping software.  It will depend on the culture of collaboration in the organisation to start with - particularly in terms of the perceived openness and the extent to which worker trust the executives.