Among the the fundamental and trendy issues about enterprise 2.0, it’s impossible not to mention this one : what does making a community work and live takes ? According to many enterprises, that’s what make their “enterprise 2.0″ projects succeed or fail. As short and simple it is, this question brings two strategic issues about which going astray is easy for people who always choose the easiest way or are abused by those who tell them they only have to jump on the bandwagon while things have to be meticulously prepared prior to anything.
First, we’re talking about making a community live, animating, emceeing it. Whatever the verb we us it, the purpose is clear : bringing life and energy to something that don’t have it. And when one try to answer objectively “why is there no life in the community”, in 90% case the answer is : people are not interested, they have no interest, it does not make any sense for sense. So the purpose of emceeing is make people understand that the community matters and to “put some oxygen into the bowl”, hoping one or two fished will start dancing. If not, the only solution is to change members and bring people for whom it really makes sense. This is difficult for many reasons : companies want to mobilize people they identified rather than those who would really like to be involved, so building a community that is not built upon the org-chart or (worse) that is made of exernal people is conceptually impossible.
Second, we’re taling about communities. Communities are places where practices, knowledge, informaiton are exchanged and has not to be confused with workgroups which are operational entities. A human entity can be both at the same time, but most of times, inside organizations, it’s one or the other. Groups know that they have to do, to deliver, and that’s why they exist. Groups exist because they have operational purposes. Communities exchange to learn, groups exchange to execute (even if there a learning dimension in the background routine). The group is a manager’s reponsability, the manager being responsible for objective’s achievement. Communties can be handled by external people who is an expert, a skilled communicator while groups only react to hierarchical hierarchy (even if expertise matters in the background).
Do you guess where I’m driving at ?
You can find the "original" french version of this blog here
