Work isn’t working, according to David Coplin, Microsoft’s chief envisioning officer. Coplin said that the current style of work is not culturally adjusted to the kind of information sharing that will see internal agility increased within organisations, allowing them to better react to rapidly changing markets.
The author of a book entitled “Business Reimagined”, Coplin said that the first step in tackling this situation is to realise that the problem is cultural.
“I look around me in the world of IT,” said Coplin, “and I look at how organisations use technology and what I am seeing more and more is that technology has become the prism, not the release. It is constraining how people work. It is enabling people to do the same things they have always done rather than enabling to reinvent them.”
Within this, said Coplin, there are a few key topics that are of the moment: flexible working, enterprise social and cultural change.
People want the kind of direct access and collaboration in business that they find so satisfying from their private lives, he said.
He gives the example of buying a product and then needing to complain. He said not only can you engage directly with the company through social media, but you can often contact the specific person that is responsible for the product or service with which you have the issue.
“This only needs to happen two or three times in your personal life before suddenly realise how empowering that kind of connection is, how empowering that type of collaboration is.”
People want the same experience in business and this can be enabled through enterprise social, said Coplin, but only when the culture of the business changes to cope with the democratisation of information.
The two cultures of sharing knowledge and retaining it to preserve power are colliding inside the work force, said Coplin, and “we have not yet found the right balance. And it is a balance because it is not one or the other”.
“But once we get to the point where the culture in an organisation is in the right balance that is when the productivity pay off will come. That is where we are in the lifecycle of this.”
However, though the technologies to enable enterprise social are there, Coplin is adamant that it is not about the technology.
“We are broadly speaking in a place where technology is not the solution here. You don’t solve this problem by buying more technology.”
“It’s a cultural issue, and until you open the eyes and minds of the organisation and you understand the kind of cultural change that’s required, this stuff is not going to have any impact, whether it is enterprise social or collaborative workspaces.”
“If the culture of sharing is not right, technology is not going to fix it.”
Often people will use new technology in exactly the same way as they use old technology, despite the fact that it enables a completely different way of working, Coplin argues.
“We have a duty of care to help people understand the benefits that this change can effect inside organisations.”
These technologies allow organisations to be more agile internally to better react to changes in their market. “We think that’s crucial,” said Coplin.
A pitfall to guard against in rolling out enterprise social projects, warned Coplin, is limited trial. He advocates rolling out such trials as widely as possible to those who typically would not be included in tech trials. If they can be won over, he argues, the rest will follow.
But internal sharing can also be improved by external collaboration too, as Coplin argues that interested organisations need to be connected with each other to share stories about success, what has worked and what has not to change the culture within the organisation.
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