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People know how to work. Work gets done despite the lack of these "enabling" social tools, or even despite their presence. People like to play around with how

by a3n 11y ago

People know how to work. Work gets done despite the lack of these "enabling" social tools, or even despite their presence. People like to play around with how to arrange metawork. Mangers especially like this. A lot of it is yak shaving.

devonkim 11y ago
The level of productivity in so many megacorporations is so low it's just plain alarming. I've commented before at work that if this is all I was able to do in the time I've had at most smaller companies we'd either have gone bankrupt or I'd have been fired. When something as simple and necessary to do your job as "I need access to a gig repo to fix a defect, here's the patch" takes weeks or months, you may get some work done but the rate of actual accomplishments would become basically negative. Enabling users to get something done while adhering to corporate policies effectively is a problem I don't believe anyone has solved for the Fortune 500 as a whole. If they did, I assure you that several billion of a market cap would be a small fraction of their likely valuation. Slack isn't allowed in most places in the F500 as shadow IT goes, for example, but they hit the billion dollar club within months practically because they approached chat in a small manner that Salesforce did. Even a small, tiny win is a billion dollars across these kinds of companies.
- a3n 11y ago
  > Enabling users to get something done while adhering to corporate policies effectively is a problem I don't believe anyone has solved for the Fortune 500 as a whole. Well, they must have figured out how to get something done, to have survived long enough to get into the Fortune 500. :)
  - devonkim 11y ago
    Most big companies primarily grow through acquisitions and just gluing together innovative efforts and hoping that results in sufficient value after the attrition common after companies are acquired. If big companies could grow like start-ups often, we'd have a very different business climate. It's why big companies are more concerned about losing revenue than growing it - this is the opposite with start-ups. It's what seems obvious when you're near your market cap.
mindcrime 11y ago
People know how to work. Work gets done despite the lack of these "enabling" social tools, or even despite their presence. Of course it does. But does it get done as well, or as effectively, or as efficiently without a certain level of technological support? Would you want to work in a company that didn't use any technological capabilities for collaboration? No email, no IM, no document sharing of any sort, etc? I mean, printing out documents and sending them via one of those old-style interoffice memo envelopes ought to be enough for anybody, right? The thing is, not every company needs the same kind of technological capabilities, because they don't all have the same issues. If you're in a 10 person startup where everybody sits in one room, a lot of knowledge sharing is done by just speaking out loud and everybody hears you. If you're in a 32,000 person company with offices spread around 80 countries, it's a lot harder to make sure that everybody knows everything they need to know, and knows it in a timely manner. And there are "serendipitous communications" that will never happen without some technological help, as you have employees who will almost certainly never meet in person. Or if they do, it'll be once every couple of years. Tooling can be beneficial, it's just important to understand that no tool is a panacea. Also, no tool(s) can fix a toxic company culture, or broken processes. These are reasons some companies deploy technological tools to enhance collaboration and knowledge sharing, and don't see the expected benefits. (Disclaimer: I'm totally biased, as my company makes "enterprise social software". Take everything I say with a grain of salt as you see fit.)

by a3n 11y ago

devonkim 11y ago

The level of productivity in so many megacorporations is so low it's just plain alarming. I've commented before at work that if this is all I was able to do in the time I've had at most smaller companies we'd either have gone bankrupt or I'd have been fired. When something as simple and necessary to do your job as "I need access to a gig repo to fix a defect, here's the patch" takes weeks or months, you may get some work done but the rate of actual accomplishments would become basically negative. Enabling users to get something done while adhering to corporate policies effectively is a problem I don't believe anyone has solved for the Fortune 500 as a whole. If they did, I assure you that several billion of a market cap would be a small fraction of their likely valuation. Slack isn't allowed in most places in the F500 as shadow IT goes, for example, but they hit the billion dollar club within months practically because they approached chat in a small manner that Salesforce did. Even a small, tiny win is a billion dollars across these kinds of companies.

a3n 11y ago
> Enabling users to get something done while adhering to corporate policies effectively is a problem I don't believe anyone has solved for the Fortune 500 as a whole. Well, they must have figured out how to get something done, to have survived long enough to get into the Fortune 500. :)
- devonkim 11y ago
  Most big companies primarily grow through acquisitions and just gluing together innovative efforts and hoping that results in sufficient value after the attrition common after companies are acquired. If big companies could grow like start-ups often, we'd have a very different business climate. It's why big companies are more concerned about losing revenue than growing it - this is the opposite with start-ups. It's what seems obvious when you're near your market cap.

mindcrime 11y ago

People know how to work. Work gets done despite the lack of these "enabling" social tools, or even despite their presence. Of course it does. But does it get done as well, or as effectively, or as efficiently without a certain level of technological support? Would you want to work in a company that didn't use any technological capabilities for collaboration? No email, no IM, no document sharing of any sort, etc? I mean, printing out documents and sending them via one of those old-style interoffice memo envelopes ought to be enough for anybody, right? The thing is, not every company needs the same kind of technological capabilities, because they don't all have the same issues. If you're in a 10 person startup where everybody sits in one room, a lot of knowledge sharing is done by just speaking out loud and everybody hears you. If you're in a 32,000 person company with offices spread around 80 countries, it's a lot harder to make sure that everybody knows everything they need to know, and knows it in a timely manner. And there are "serendipitous communications" that will never happen without some technological help, as you have employees who will almost certainly never meet in person. Or if they do, it'll be once every couple of years. Tooling can be beneficial, it's just important to understand that no tool is a panacea. Also, no tool(s) can fix a toxic company culture, or broken processes. These are reasons some companies deploy technological tools to enhance collaboration and knowledge sharing, and don't see the expected benefits. (Disclaimer: I'm totally biased, as my company makes "enterprise social software". Take everything I say with a grain of salt as you see fit.)