Disintermediarization : how a 2.0 practice can help against credit crunch

Enterprise 2.0 is enterprise before being 2.0 and social tools are tools before being social. It’s very important to understand that anything 2.0 is, before all, characterized by a vision of interactions between people before being about the use of such or such tools. And a relevant vision can help bringing an old legacy business back to youth without changing its purposes nor its main characteristics.

The current economic situation shows us how once “what can’t be changed” faces a major crisis despite a presupposed infallibility, it’s possible to makes things change since the “we’ve always done things this way so there’s no other way” reflex is not relevant anymore. But it needs a real paradigm shift.

Banks don’t have money anymore ? They don’t trust people ? They don’t lend anymore ? They don’t even trust other ? Add to that the fact people don’t trust banks anymore too and you get all the required elements for a credit cruch.

So, strangely, everything that was only about mathematics, based on foresseable nature of things, cartesian risk scoring, showed its limits and more and more attention is paid to what was ignored : people, trust and what underlies all that, that’s to say the existence of links, of interpersonnal exchanges that make trust possible. Perhaps the beginning of an answer for those for are convinced that discussions and networkings had no business value.

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Société Générale : lack of control or systemic failure ?

I’m sure you heard about what happend to French Bank Societe Generale who lost 5 billions euros because of one of its traders. Many question came about the efficiency of the controls which failed. I even read blogs saying that, considering it was a matter of control, of visibility, of trust, enterprise 2.0 would have been the solution to avoid such problems. Stupid !

Enterprise 2.0 (especially software) would not have helped in any way. On the other hand, something in the 2.0 philosophy would have been useful : management 2.0. In my opinion, what brought Société Générale to such a disaster is not a question of control or software, it was caused by the same things that prevent people from getting involved in collaborative and social dynamics : lack of communication between silos that make people face contradictory messages. [Read more...]