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Information flows in the enterprise should always enhance the ability of participants to do the right thing in the right place at the right time. Which lets me segue neatly into the crux of this post, curation in the enterprise. Every enterprise has its own variant of curator, people who help decide who sees what, when, and in what shape. Information overload is everywhere, the Shirkyian filter failure is everywhere, and into the valley ride the usual six hundred, theirs not to reason why. So in order to understand how enterprise curation should take place, it’s worth looking at some extreme forms of enterprise curation as practises today. There appear to be four main forms: The Signal Booster The Spreadsheet Jock The Soulmate The Sidler

The Signal Booster obtains power by PowerPoint, thinks in bullet points, rarely knows more than what’s on the slide. Acts as a mediation layer between those that do and those that decide.

The Spreadsheet Jock believes there’s safety in numbers, that firms can be managed by algorithmic trading. Runs the risk of past-predicting-the-future

The Soulmate is a crony of the powers-that-be, using that association to derive second-order power, and has an unusual effect: an inadvertent tendency to ensure that anything the CEO doesn’t want to hear doesn’t make it to the CEO.

The Sidler is a rare beast, someone who can only thrive in the rarefied environment of “briefing” cultures. They are often seen alongside the CEO, whispering in their ears, advising and commenting on the status of things they aren’t involved in. Sidlers are chameleons, sometimes boosting signals, sometimes driving spreadsheets, sometimes being soul mates. But always sidling.

All these are extreme forms of enterprise curator, responsible for deciding what information is accessible, to whom, when, and in what shape.

And all these are fundamentally inefficient models of curation in the enterprise,

Linus’s Law (“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”) plays out very well in any community that is built to scale. So every staff member is empowered to solve problems. Every trading partner. Every customer.

In large hierarchical organisations, some form of summarising and filtering takes place in all information flows, from top to bottom as well as from bottom to top.

A web rather than a chain, the social enterprise is somewhere where everything and everyone is a node on the network.

Everyone’s not just a curator… Everyone’s not just a designer… Everyone tries out products and services, and provides active feedback.

This ability for two-way communication means that conversations take place without any loss of detail. The need for summarising is reduced, since the cost of hanging on to the detail is low.

Drilling into the detail was historically complex for reasons other than just the cost of doing so, or for that matter the distance expressed as the number of levels in the organisation, the divisional silos, and so on. We had the added complexity of security systems that did not differentiate between systems of engagement and systems of record, and as a consequence didn’t know how to handle entitlement safely and securely. Good social enterprise implementations solve that elegantly.

It’s not enough to have access to the information, that still doesn’t solve the overload problem. So we need access to expertise.

Find the people that are acknowledged rather than asserted experts, experts because of what they do rather than who they are.

As we move from the Hit Culture to the Long Tail of problem solving, we need more and more experts, “long tail experts”

The promise of the social enterprise is a remarkable promise.

Networked non hierarchical models. Involving everyone: staff, partners, customers. Two-way communications. Easy access to domain expertise. In an environment where aggregation takes place without any loss of accuracy or of the source data, where you can “follow an order or a complaint, safely, securely, efficiently, effectively”.

I’ve come to realise that the Social Enterprise is to traditional software what Skype is to traditional telephony, what Paypal and Square are to traditional payments. Quick and effective. Riding over the top of existing infrastructural investments. Focused on simplifying the customer experience, eradicating traditional frictions, reducing the distance between the customer and the firm. Engaging with the customer rather than with the back office.