War of the Departmental Worlds
It’s easy to forget 
sometimes just how complex big companies really are. As much as enterprise-wide collaboration is talked about, it’s still mostly fiction. For the market at large, it doesn’t exist beyond email. And it’s not that companies haven’t tried.
It’s my planet. Step off.
Most of people’s time is spent with their group. These groups are typically made of of everyone from the same planet. Every once in a while, the group has to send an ambassador to another planet. But, for the most part, entire lives could be spent never leaving planet Finance, for example.
Planets have a class system.
There’s a government. An upper, middle and lower class. A pecking order. A big part of people’s time is spent working in and around this.
We’ve heard of other planets.
They have to be out there, we see them on charts. Others refer to them and talk about them as if they’ve visited. Those aliens that pass us everyday or that are on our email cc lists have to be from somewhere. Regardless, they’re not us.
Planets are hostile.
It’s harsh living on a planet. The conditions aren’t friendly and the environment is primitive. Dogs eat other dogs. Inhabitants are motivated by personal gain. And everyone knows that planets don’t like other planets. Darwin was right.
People live in huts.
Homes are little walled off, felt lean-tos. And all they have to communicate with each other are letters. They can also write stuff down and paper clip it to their letter. They hope someone reads their letter. Maybe it will change their situation, help with their personal agenda or in some cases, make the planet a better place. There’s always the tribal meetings. Maybe they could get something done in there. 
There’s tons of debris.
Big companies everywhere are riddled with legacy software junk, floating around like expensive, decommissioned satellites. These things have popped up here and there on planets. Supposedly, they come from Planet IT but often they’ve been commissioned and abandoned by other inhabitants of the planet.
The scary planet.
Remember Watto? IT is a planet filled with Wattos. Most of us never make it to Planet IT and for good reason. It’s scary as shit over there. We don’t understand all the tinkering they’re doing. They speak an odd language. And we obviously make them mad. Our antiquated tools came from Planet IT but they blame their government’s rules. Something is always being incubated on Planet IT. Not much hatches.
The black hole
It’s where our ideas go. And our emails. And the files we stick into our file servers.
The hard stuff
Everyone knows what the hard stuff is. It’s the important issues, the problems, the challenges, the big ideas. It lives outside the planets. No one seems to know how to get there.
The big bang.
It’s Social Software. Companies don’t want to be in this situation. Everyone is tired of it. We’re learning how to work as a team. We’re learning how to be motivated as a group. And for the first time we can see the big picture. Aliens aren’t scary. Work can be fun. The best news is that this grim, war of the worlds is already seeing a new day. This galaxy is actually changing. Still, the fridge will always have problems.
Things people have said about this post
Sam, I can’t help but think that you call us Watto because whenever you come to us for help you get your hand slapped.
You know we have a soft spot for you though.
If you don’t ruffle some feathers (or is that scales that Watto has) you can’t get the conversation started. Stir that pot. I love it (the post that is not “IT”, though I do have friends on Planet IT).
Another great conversation stimulating post! This is a huge subject and as Jive have figured out there is a huge difference between ‘community’ and ‘collaboration’.
Communities
In the real world people build communities to help each other – I’m pathetically addicted to old cars for example (which is a great way to stay poor incidentally), and am part of a wonderful community of similarly afflicted folks all over the world. We can’t wait to help each other out finding widgets, explaining stuff and on and on. I can bust my knuckles on a Saturday night on some mechanical problem – air, gas, spark – why won’t it run? …post before sleep and have answers from Australia, England, Tennessee the following morning by people who’ve been there and done that. This is the promise for enterprises – I leverage that expertize, have a bit more knowledge and move rapidly on with the project.
Enterprise Collaboration
Corporations are cold blooded, darwinian places and your hilarious post paints a great cartoon of just some the pecking order and rivalries…
The reality – as I am intimately familiar with – is that there is a great fear of change. Employees will almost always err on the side of caution/cowardise to protect their jobs, and the rivalries and tensions that build up between people and departments we all now can be astonishingly perverse.
Like sharks corporations have to keep moving forward or die and that tends to be the driving force for change. There’s going to be tipping points where opportunity overcomes fear that will encourage 2.0 collaboration.
Despite all the happy talk about ground up innovation from the minions (for example Simon Revell at Pfizer UK, who has a great presentation on ground up adoption I saw at Office 2.0 last year) I believe this ‘freestyle’ approach in bigger corps doesn’t scale – what’s needed is clear decision making, followed by clear succinct direction, goals and objectives from the top of the company on how everyone is going to use the new infrastructure.
The ad hoc, freestyle ‘try it and see’ approach tends to result in internecine warfare between groups, triage management styles and offline rivalries moving online as everything scales up. Not to mention a wild west of content in wikis etc.
This is one of the things that is really hurting the enterprise 2.0 space right now – there are no clear patterns or models yet, but an awful lot of confusing and immature noise about it out there. I’ve started blogging on this very topic but seem to have written more here than on my new blog!
Great post Sam
The classification of departments as planets is apt. Even working in a small company, you can feel worlds apart from how things are done in another group.
But, I want to make a comment in defense of the IT department, or at least building on the point you made that the drifting satellites have “been commissioned and abandoned by other inhabitants of the planet.”
In the desire to make a change, it’s easy to look to technology to fix the things that are broken, and then blame them when they don’t. But most problems in a company of any size aren’t related to the technology but the culture and process.
We’re going through a technology change at my workplace now, so I’m seeing how painful it is first-hand, and we aren’t a giant corporation.
Implementing new technology requires changes in long-standing procedures. The response of “But this is how we’ve always done it” is has a lot of inertia. Especially when the new change is short-term harder for long-term pay off. People don’t want to learn a new work routine, learn a new place to find information, learn a new way to do their old tasks.
Now, I’m not saying that people are closing their eyes and avoiding learning anything new. They just don’t want to learn a new process for an old skill.
The key for enterprise social software has been mentioned in Oliver’s comment above.
First, a top-down approach to selecting tools that can be implemented holistically, with an enterprise purpose and strategy.
Second, tapping into the ground-level passion and using the tools to connect those people.
Then companies can begin looking out to the stars.
[...] Another provocative, entertaining and intriguing post on Sam Lawrence’s ‘Go Big Always’ blog this morning ‘War of the Departmental Worlds’ [...]
[...] The problem is, there’s no central place for the people. All we have are file generating machines. Email machines. Calendar machines. Word processing, spreadsheet and presentation machines. And many companies purchased even bigger, complex machines to manage the output of all those other machines. In the meantime, we just work around those machines and wonder, “which way to the head?” [...]