Further Enterprise 2.0

If you thought the previous post ended abruptly, that was because i was going to continue to write on the topic. One thing that comes out, i think, is that communities have a role to play in organizations, but they wont bring down the hierarchical structure of the organization. Rather, communities would continue to blend with the hierarchies of organizations, while at the same time, deliver value within that context. One way of looking at it is that communities may align with the way the organization delivers value to the customer, contributing to the value creation process. Whether this be product development, marketing, sales, production, communities could be aligned to this. This is because, as i wrote in the previous post, business processes align the efforts of different parts of the organization to the objective, and hence, if communities are to deliver value, they would need to be aligned.

Dion Hinchcliffe writes in his post about social business:

Dozens of Fortune 500 companies are formally using Enterprise 2.0 tools today and are not reporting this. They are however reporting better productivity, improved communications, the ability to find information, and cost reductions. But not the collapse of corporate structure. What is true is that additional lines of communication are opened including channels to weak ties and other broader influences. The traditional org chart, never a very good measure of what people actually do at work other than identifying who does their performance reviews, is being augmented by the social graph, not replaced.

This is the point i am trying to make. That communities would blend with corporate hierarchies, in a way that the organization as a whole can leverage communities for achieving something. Probably the idea that communities are a tool which can be leveraged by organizations to solve business problems needs to be considered? Please do post your comments ...