David Cushman has been posting an interview on his blog with Clay Shirky, author of the book Here Comes Everybody.The connection between organisational culture and Enterprise 2.0 tools is a central point of my Master thesis and recently on actKM I have run into several different views and concerns about linking these two things together. Each has some good points and I particularly would like to know more about Graham Durant-Law's work (I am cursing not being able to attend the actKM conference this year where he is speaking!)
The video below seems to address this somewhat be explaining that Clay is not a technical determinist, but that the scalable nature of these tools does tend to lead to fairly novel kinds of social interactions not seen before. I tend to agree with him. It isn't the technology that changes people. However, it seems that the impact of these many-facted, multi-participant communication streams is to reveal new possibilities in the way relationships are expressed and therefore the culture of the organisation shifts to make use of these if they are beneficial to each individual in some way (not neccessarily beneficial to the organisation, I admit).
Obviously management is required to align the individual and organisation benefits, but Clay seem to provide good reasoning to why these tools and the communities that grow around them are more than just a change of scale in human interaction.
Click here to watch the video on David's Blog. Well worth the four minutes to listen in.
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