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January 01, 2005
Liberating the employee
When we look back on 2005 (yes, I'm slightly ahead of myself here) we will call this the year "the employee was liberated" (or something similar). Social software will be regarded as the new trade union of our time. Trade unions are defined as an "organization of employees formed to bargain with the employer". Social software on the other hand is a way for employees to "bargain with the employer, the customer or anyone else interested". Basically trade unions gave the individual employee a voice within the corporation. Weblogs are giving the individual employee a voice that can be heard well outside the walls of the company. And, today at least, most of high-level management don't yet realize what's going on. The command and control structures they are so used to and that have been successful ways of operating an enterprise for the past years are actually collapsing around them. Things like Wikis and Weblogs are being installed under the radar of corporate IT and adopted by a growing number of employees fed up with the static rules and regulations surrounding traditional information systems. Customers on the other hand are peering deep into the corporation and requesting, not the services of the company itself. but of the individual they found by reading his or her Weblog or by entering their name into Google. To cope, organizations need to recognize that they have no choice but to embrace change and restructure the way they run the company. Employees are forming networks that know no corporate boundaries and from these networks new types of commercial entities will arise to form the "social companies" of the mid to late decade.
The old relationship between vendor and customer was like oil and water. The new relationship between the "social company" and customer will be completely different. It already is.
Posted by Matthew at January 1, 2005 03:02 PM