My realisation is that it’s not particularly about social media (or knowledge management, or any other m technology) but that there is as you say, always a dance, between corporate culture and technology. And that technology vendors look to culture as an excuse to not quite work, and the organisation looks to technology as an excuse as to why the change didn’t happen. The old adage was that there was no technology solution to management problems; this evolved into “We can provide the tools but we can’t change the culture – you’ll have to provide that”. Now as a tech marketing type I’ve churned those out more times than I’d like to admit. They also appear more frequently when a technology is force fitting itself into a new trend. A contacts database becomes customer relationship management. Search tools become knowledge management. Instant messengers become enterprise collaboration.

So my first thought is that technology vendors wanting to sell to the enterprise need to stop making the excuses, and start thinking about what they’re really delivering, and what genuine impact it will make. The 10% point is interesting here, because it almost gives the vendor an instant excuse – “We deliver 100% of your 10% – our job is done, the rest is yours”.

If I flip to the other side of the coin as the organisation looks outwards at the technology, it is almost expecting new technology not to work for them. “We need to introduce a knowledge sharing culture; these tools will support it but they’ll only do part of the job.” The expectation is set, and it’s not very high. And the organisation itself starts to think that this idea is rather a difficult one, so when technology is implemented the user is looking for its fail points. Or in a worse scenario, that the company introduces a technology which is then blamed for the culture not updating. “We wanted to introduce a knowledge culture, but frankly the technology wasn’t there to support it and so our efforts failed.”

So my idea of coalescing (and accidental was deliberate…) is that both vendors and organisations do have many touch points, but these are often lost in the bigger initiative. Technology will not change a culture, but it will support the better bits of the culture that are there, so vendors need to look at the more personal and realistic positioning. Similarly an organisation will not find all the answers by introducing a technology, but it will be a big step along the way, so they need to open up to technology again. Initiatives are too often parallel and the people who will make it happen, and drive both components, get lost between those lines.

Can I see any coalescence? The reason that social media now excites me so much is its unstructured (and partly stealthy) adoption in organisations. People don’t realise they’re making a technology decision, they’re making a decision as to what will help them work better (I think the arrival of Generation Yers is only part of the reason). And the resulting referrals to other teams starts to build up a new way of technology adoption that is a much closer match to the culture – without having deliberately made it an ‘initiative’ with a capital I. That’s the moment when organisations start looking at ‘control’ and wanting to lose the freeform that lives within the culture, and starting the whole parallel lines movement again, rather than embracing the change that has been delivered naturally.

I’m basing my thoughts (and I apologise that I’m writing this based on an avid interest and observation from the vendor side – rather than detailed expertise so it really is *my* thoughts) on having worked through many technology trends and not seen enough differences in the way companies work emerge – and the holy grail for both staying well hidden. Perhaps now is the time to loosen up a bit and see how that works.

The first thought your post conjured for me was interviewing Bob Buckman, (labelled KM’s father figure by Infoworld) last year for an article*. He told me:

“If you look at it from the standpoint of how much effort it takes to achieve and effect knowledge sharing across an organization, you will find that the technology piece is about 5 to 10 percent of the effort, changing the way work is done is the 90 to 95 percent of the effort. You can define the effort as time or as money, it still comes out about the same” ~ Robert H. Buckman

In the same article we also quoted Stowe Boyd’s 2007 blog post about ” We Build Our Tools And They Shape Us: How Lifestreaming Is Shaping Web Culture”

No doubt the dance between technology and organizational culture is intricate and enmeshed. I’m interested to learn more about your thinking.

* See http://snurl.com/61xxi