The Rise of Social Tools
The big story of the transformation of business culture isn’t the props -- the servers, networks, ten million web sites, and all the information lying around in databases and in HTML -- but what people are saying to each other and how they coordinate their actions, behavior, and goals. The big story is that the global computer network is a enormous chat room, enabling us to collaborate in unexpected, complex, and novel ways. We are experimenting with new social systems, systems that to an unprecedented degree involve software and hardware.
In the 60’s it had become unthinkable to run a business without a telephone on every desk. By the late 80’s, everyone had to have email. The need for cost justification of these new expenses, at first demanded by management, fell by the wayside as the second-order effects -- the social impacts -- became felt. The rise of PCs has not led to increase in productivity relative to things that people formerly did without PCs, like writing letters and memos, or selling widgets. PCs have decreased productivity in these areas. Why? Because people are spending their time in new activities, activities that were not possible before, and adding new value to the business. And all that comes for a price -- the time spent in the care and feeding of computers, networks, and software.
And at the same time, a new category of software is emerging, software intended to augment social systems. Not to change the company inadvertantly, like email did, when the electronic analog of interoffice mail became something else, grew into something else by changing the way people communicated, and led a change in the structure of the company. No, this generation of software is intentional, designed from the start to guide human behaviour into new paths and patterns, to counter prevailing ways of interaction. I call these social tools: software intended to shape business culture.
