In the age of community – CIO as “benevolent facilitator”

In 2007 I was very privileged to lead a team of IBMers in writing this Redpaper:

I wrote most of the chapter on community dynamics.  Here is an excerpt (section 3.1) from the paper:

Community: a cornerstone of TAP strategy
Simply stated, without community involvement TAP, as it is designed, would fail. Community participation is the critical element that the program must have for success. To illustrate the defining importance of this, consider the following operating principles for TAP:

• TAP allows any IBMer to identify as an Early Adopter, by virtue of their own interest in the offerings available on TAP.
• It is the stated policy of the TAP management team that they do not make any effort to prejudge the ultimate value of an offering being considering for boarding on TAP. If it meets a set of basic criteria (see “The boarding questionnaire” on page 43) then the offering can be hosted on TAP. They let the dynamics of the Early Adopter community determine the ultimate value of the offerings.
• The TAP management team declared that the needs of the community will also guide how TAP itself is managed and how it evolves over time.

Supporting adherence to these operating principles is not something that is necessarily easy to do. Especially when you consider the last principle listed. It is in the nature of IT organizations in large traditional companies to attain power and control so that they can preserve their influence and importance. In order to support these principles, TAP management must put a great deal of emphasis in the program on minimizing the organizational inertia and bureaucracy that inevitably develops when small programs become large.

And this is where we come to the vital importance of community. The TAP team can design hosting systems and program management processes to effectively minimize scaling costs as the program grows. But to minimize development of organizational inertia and bureaucracy, so that the nature of the program itself can easily change to meet the needs of the community, what you really have to do is affect a transfer of those powers to the community: the organizational inertia becomes community inertia, and bureaucracy becomes community-based governance. When this type of ‘transfer of power” takes place, then TAP’s adherence to those operating principles becomes inherent. Also, the role of the supporting IT organization takes the form of benevolent facilitation.

I think that the role of CIO as “benevolent facilitator” will become an underlying theme common to successful social computing initiatives in the enterprise (ie. enterprise 2.0).

What does this mean for our clients?  Very few enterprises will need their own internal full-blown version of a TAP program.  But most at some point soon will need to deploy social computing platforms such as IBM’s Lotus Connections.  So, thinking within the context of an enterprise Connections roll out, how does the IT department grow into the role of “benevolent facilitator”?  I think they need to start by deploying it to the business and managing it from whole new perspective. Instead of the traditional top down finite feature function command/control point of view, they manage it from the bottom up, as a social computing innovation platform.  Connections is very open and extensible. Its definitely a platform – not just a monolithic application stack. My gut tells me that this is the best strategy for positioning Connections (or any extensible social computing platform for that matter) for long term success and measurable ROI in the enterprise.

Key to this approach will be how you position it along the spectrum of innovation platform vs. top down managed application offering, based on client situation. You can certainly position and manage a Connections deployment either way. And maybe in practice it will be both ways… a sandbox for technically adept widget developer-contributor/early adopters, and a consumable service for business users. You can tell where I think the long term sweet spot is.