#csnf - Lee Bryant and Credit Crunch Culture

Lee Bryant’s thesis is that businesses cannot afford big expensive investments right now, but that social tools can give us decent returns from low investments.

Social tools can rejuvenate old systems by putting a social layer on the top. 

Trust is fundamentally cheaper than control.

In the late 1990s intranets and the internet forked. The Internet went social, the intranets didn’t. The internet has had umpteen users testing and feeding back on all its products. The intranet has lacked that evolutionary pressure. IT are rarely good user experience designers, and most people don’t care. eBay’s reputations system is 10 years old – nothing like it has appeared on intranets yet.

You need to look at the concept of network productivity. Over time, the network becomes more productive. We need to look at that, rather than just individual productivity. Cisco has reduced business planning from 6 months to one week using these tools.

We’re wasting too much brain power in our organisation. We spend a lot of money on people, and sit them in front of Neanderthal tools. We also need to make use of hidden data and shared intelligence, like people’s searches and click-streams. Microblogging gives us ambient awareness of what people are doing – and thus improve decision-making.

More and more platforms are including small elements of social networking, because these status updates are vital.

People start to negociate meaning for themselves – planned taxonomies are passing away…

It takes one to two years for good adoption and up to five to really transform businesses.