Encouragement - Continued

Some reflections continuing from the previous post ... and, encouraged by Bill Ives writing about the Enterprise 2.0 conference ... Some of the things i have been thinking about, and talking about for some time ...

If we were to look at three levels of management in the organization ... the junior, the middle, and the senior ... ok, ok ... so, this is a bit of an oversimplification, but not too much, dont you think? ... i find that the junior folks (call them kids in my old age?) are the folks who are usually gung-ho about adoption of some of the social computing tools which are available to us today. These are folks who have almost grown up with social networking ... who started using these while at school, or at college ... and, who effectively use a variety of tools for managing their connections. In other words, these are the folks who live in a connected world.

The top management (older than me, if you insist ...), are the folks who are looking at adoption of social computing tools from the business returns perspective ... and, more often than not, these are the folks who, uncalculable ROI notwithstanding, are not necessarily the folks who are against these tools (ok, so this is a generalization, so please take this with a pinch of salt!).

The challenge to adoption, what i feel, is where the middle management comes in. These are the folks who arent as adept at social networking, or computing, as the junior folks are, and these are the folks who dont necessarily see the bigger picture, and hence, in their domain of the limited picture, with an inadequate understanding of these tools, there seems to be a kind of lack of understanding of where social computing could lead us, as individuals, or as organizations. And this is probably the part which we need to address as much as any other.