What I really meant to say was ....

In a comment to a previous post Jon Husband asks for clarification.

I thought others may want to read it.

Much of corporate IT has been designed to replicate a heirarchical view of organisations which pidgeon holes people and bears little relation to the real world they work in.

Also most people are still pretty uninspired by computers and fail to make them work for them. They have given up a lot of their social interchanges in return for staring at computer screens and neatly lined up behind the view of them as meatware in a system.

If on the other hand they had been encouraged to grow up, take responsibility, and form relationships then the power to get things done would increase dramaticaly - as the ability to get things done relies heavily on relationship and communication - two things which conventional computing seems designed to limit.

Comments

[Britta Mohr]

When we were all very busy doing KM a few years ago we found out that we were faced with KM Systems whose nature was socio-technical. Unfortunately most of us invested heavily into the technical part, instead of the socio part. That was a mistake I still notice being repeated again and again, with every new and cool application coming up. Maybe the problem is based in the fact that the human emotional repertoire doesn't seem to have evolved much (if at all, read Shakespeare or the Old Testament)over time, whereas we invent a new tool every other day.

[Euan]

Very true that the hard stuff isn't the technology but each iteration does seem to make small strides towards being more closely aligned to the social world it operates in. Whether or not the reality lives up to the hype the aspirations of Web 2.0 as defined in his original article by Tim O'Reilly is a long way from the design criteria of mainframes 40 years ago.

It also depends on the ownership of the software and the intentions of those who have control of it. Again the approach I took at the BBC of aiming for a distributed feeling of ownership and excitement at the unpredictability that engendered is probably some people's worst nightmare!