At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston earlier this week, vendors and their platforms took center stage as the nascent market for social computing software continued to heat up. Technology is a key enabler – BearingPoint’s own firm-wide wiki is a good example – but keeping a close eye on the workforce issues tied up in Enterprise 2.0 is important. After all, the Gen Y crowd is part of the reason wikis, blogs, and social networking turned corporate in the first place.

How can companies engage Gen Y and take advantage of their collaborative approach to work?

Don’t Stop Doing That

Believe it or not, your firm’s under-30 employees already brought an enterprise-class set of collaboration and social networking tools with them the first time they walked through the door. Their massive social networks, seemingly effortless adaption to new technologies, and innovative, collaborative approaches to corporate life need to be encouraged and fostered. Properly structuring the role of the IT department is crucial here – asking Gen Ys to throw their choices about technology away, and return to the knowledge worker mainstays of email, documents, folders and taxonomies, will leave them alienated and disengaged.

Respecting a Gen Y’s ways of communicating and collaborating is a step forward-looking managers need to consider taking. During the conference’s Next Generation Workforce panel, this became clear; and as one panelist put it, “Companies realized that encouraging diversity of race and gender in their organizations was valuable long ago – they will come to realize respecting the different ways their staffs choose to communicate is equally valuable.” Failing to do so – through aggressively blocking social media sites, IM and discouraging blogging will leave Gen Ys feeling as if you aren’t respecting their value, and drive them to organizations they think will. This is something that’s important to consider, as corporations begin to depend on Gen Ys to take over the roles of retiring boomers.

Process This

Twitter, Facebook, and Googleish search isn’t all that the next generation of your workforce expected when they joined your company.  Gen Y engagement was central to what panelists saw as the success of future organizations – these future leaders typically join organizations believing they can change the world, and build the same “community” at work that propelled them through college. But alas – under-30 employee satisfaction is typically higher than any age group during their first month on the job, but falls through the floor after just a year, ending up lower than all other employees.

What happens? Employees realize that they’ve run face first into a wall of bureaucracy and carefully engineered process.  Their intangible assets, like their social network, their ability to be efficient processors of information and generators of insight, can’t be effectively tapped by their employers.

Companies have spent years and billions of dollars investing in IT systems that support and improve business processes. Processes are often woven into the hierarchy of the organization. But Gen Y employees value flat organizational structures, free form collaboration, and strong community as the most effective ways to further their goals, not carefully orchestrated process.

Giving Gen Ys the flexibility to innovate in at work, be creative, and bypass traditional processes is critical to making them successful in your organization (and keeping them from jumping ship). Process efficiency is not the end all and be all of your company – take advantage of the opportunity that Gen Ys bring to become more innovative and collaborative – use these intangible assets as a way to push your organization forward. An independent research firm’s recent analysis shows that companies that can successfully monetize intangible knowledge assets can drive profitability. Companies that don’t can hit a wall when further process efficiency is no longer achievable, and innovation from disengaged employees is not forthcoming.

What’s Next?

It’s possible that the entry of Gen Y into the workforce will mark the end of process-centric IT and business, and the start of Enterprise 2.0 – companies oriented around collaboration and community, and the technologies that allow for that to occur. Companies that pick up on the value that Gen Y brings to an organization will be more competitive, and innovative, in the future

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“They can learn to listen. Listening to each other is core to our culture, and we don’t listen to each other just because we’re all so smart. We listen because everyone has good ideas, and because it’s a great way to show respect. And any company, at any point in its history, can start listening more.”

- Eric Schmidt Reveals Google’s Secret

So it’s not just the fact that Google has a bunch of people with “145 IQs”. There is something more – decisions are collaborative, and not the exclusive territory of the CxO.

What makes this level of collaborative decision making possible? Enabling technologies are naturally important. But, an open management organization that’s conducive to dialoguing with staff is even more key. Achieving this in modern enterprise is where things get tricky. What Enterprise 2.0 technologies make possible, Management 2.0 should embrace.

To start, I’d suggest organizations try the following:

• Look at areas of your operation where embracing employee input is critical to a successful outcome. Innovation around internal processes, products and service offerings immediately comes to mind. Create islands of managerial flatness here, supply enabling technologies, and create incentives for participation. Enabling technologies here might include an innovation market, like Spigit.
• Break the ice by putting management on the same footing as employees. At my firm, we’ve had a positive experience using the commenting and discussion features of Confluence to allow employees to post questions, and inviting the VPs to answer. The resulting knowledgebase is a searchable way for future employees to get up to speed.
• Give employees a voice: Give any employee who so chooses the ability to blog internally. It’s quick, cheap and an easy way to make employees feel more connected and less alienated. It also gives management a new insight into the ebbs and flows of communications within their organization. The blog post that has 100 + comments and has been read by thousands might be worth listening to.

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What Intellectual Ventures does might seem obvious – pay some luminaries to collaborate and, naturally, genius will flow forth. But what’s more important then who was invited to these innovation sessions, is that they were invited at all. Cross domain collaboration is uncommon – just look around your organization. How often does HR interact with IT? Marketing and R&D? Infrequently, at best.

To enable innovation, managers must allow staff with divergent perspectives to come together in the pursuit of a shared objective – in the case of Intellectual Ventures, generating novel patent applications and then licensing the resulting portfolio. But, for your organization, enabling innovation is just as important – allowing all its members, regardless of which silo in which the org chart claims they reside, to innovate is the clearest way to move your organization forward, more closely align it with the marketplace, and realize critical efficiencies.

Gladwell’s central thesis is that innovation and discovery do not necessarily come from geniuses, but are “…products of the intellectual climate of a specific time and place.” Intellectual Ventures realize that by allowing people with vastly different backgrounds and expertise to look at the same problem, by creating an atmosphere conducive to innovation, discoveries inevitably occur.

Geniuses still have a role, but they are often people who prove particularly adept at harnessing the available information and using that as a basis for their innovation. “The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight”.

So the lesson is: “Insight (can) be orchestrated”. Want to create the right intellectual climate for innovation? Make each of your employees efficient insight generators? Allow them to connect, to discover one another, and to have insight into your organization’s activities.

This is where Enterprise 2.0 hold promise. Enterprise social networking tools like Sonar connect employees around themes and competencies. Wikis like Confluence allow staff from differing business domains to quickly see what each other are working on. Tie it all together with enterprise search, and the result is a connected enterprise, where all perspectives can be brought into the same virtual “room”. Create an environment like this, and watch innovation flourish.

Want more of my Management 2.0 rants? See: Adding Enterprise 2.0 to the Corporate DNA

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This interview, with Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker, elaborates how exposing the inner working of your company to your customers can have many, many benefits . Mozilla, as an organization, operates in a fishbowl. Very little of what happens inside of the company is hidden from public scrutiny. This poses some intersting management challenges, but at the end of the day has lead to exceptional products. Because Mozilla’s customers are so integral to its process, it’s much easier for it’s products to be what users want them to be

These vocal, contributory communities of customers – fostered by technologies like Clearspace X and management that supports open collaboration and transparency – could be referred to as “Marketing 2.0″. No degree of advertising could have given Firefox the level of momentum it has. Again, I’d wager that software companies aren’t the only businesses that harness their customers in this fashion. Opening the enterprise to two-way collaboration with customers will prove to be a competitive advantage. But it will take a touch of vision, and a certain willingness to have your mistakes publicized, to realize that value.

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The authors define an operational model in which enterprises seek to monetize the intangible qualities of all of their employees (pure e2.0 dogma here, although the term is never mentioned) – making their employees more valuable by recognizing their ability contribute to operations in ways that don’t necessarily adhere to management orthodoxy. For example, Hamel and Bryan suggest that in this “post-managerial” society, strategy will no longer come from the top, but from the line employees closed to the push and pull of the market. Management takes on more of a parallel, off to the side role, making only decisions that must, by their nature, be made hierarchically.

The piece ends with Bryan noting that, because of these advances in technology and globalization companies will be able to harness ideas and innovation in a way that was not before possible. He calls it a “…an incredibly exciting time to be alive”. Indeed.

Radically-Enterprise 2.0, eh? An organization that exhibits both the technical underpinnings and the organizational DNA of what everyone’s talking about. I find their rationale compelling, but read the article if you’re in need of some more convincing. I’d challenge decision makers both in and outside of the corporate IT departments to spend a moment thinking about ways that today’s enterprise can deploy Enterprise 2.0 technology (and organizational design principals) in ways that exemplify Hamel and Bryan’s vision:

Lowell Bryan: “…the direction that most companies need to go in is improving how they enable their people to collaborate with one another at much lower cost by dramatically reducing unproductive search and coordination costs. And that means deploying such devices as talent marketplaces, knowledge marketplaces, and formal networks to make intangible assets flow throughout the company, as opposed to going up and down vertical chains of command.

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