You identify the crux of the issue, Jenny .. and just like today, the type of dynamic you describe has been one of the quests of the OD domain for the last couple of decades at least.

And clearly today’s environment of increasingly networked organizations, workers and information is exacerbating and sharpening the issue. How can it not ?

As context to my question reading Jon’s piece I could help but hear Dave Weinberger expressing concern at a Berkman Center event about the larger issue of how a society communicates and addresses problems that impact everybody in a world of long tail social media echo chambers. I had to ask myself how PersonAll addressed that issue for an organization.

I appreciate your observation that:

“The key for Enterprise 2.0 products is to take the best ideas from the social web and accommodate them to the logics of the organization.”

No doubt that is so but how many leaders have the mindsets that allow them to pay attention to innovation in the organization’s grassroots, bubble up and accommodate the best to create value?

Thanks for the perspective.

Jenny, to answer the question as I know the product, the key is on profiling and liberty you give to the users.
Profiling helps deliver the information (here the widget that encapsulates the information) to the targeted audience. This is something we know how to do as it’s live for quite some time now.
The less usual bit is the liberty the platform administrator gives to users. This end-user customization or personalization. For the time being we are used to personalized start pages as internauts, not employees. iGoogle, Netvibes and likes provide total freedom to user to manipulate (create, import, export, delete, move in the page) widgets because they are B2C. When you enter the organization, co-ordination requires driving. That is your point. PersonAll offers a system in which the admin decide if a widget or a group of widgets are movable or deletable or not. The result is that the organization has ownership and can make the information is made available full time and where in the page it is located.

The key for Enterprise 2.0 products is to take the best ideas from the social web and accommodate them to the logics of the organization.

No doubt PersonAll is at the edge of a trend you describe as:

:personalization of work … how you, the individual knowledge worker, carry out the work, choose and use the tools with which it is carried out, and fit yourself into the attendant rhythms of collaboration and co-creation built up from processing constant flows of information..”

What I’m interested in, as it’s hard to see from the screenshots, is how organizations act to ensure key messages and values are communicated and practiced in a world of work personalization?