What’s New About Social Business Design ?  |  November 9, 2009  

There has recently been a spate of aggregation of the higher-profile individuals in the Enterprise 2.0 field, resulting in the launch of groups like (for example) Dachis and Altimeter, and the coming together of Ross Mayfield’s SocialText with Dion Hinchcliffe’s capabilities.

The term “social business design” is increasingly being attached to such initiatives.

I am still trying to figure out what these folks (and others, like me) are trying to sell with “social business design” that is any different than the socio-technical systems design field (a sub-domain of OD, if you will) that found some early enthusiasm in the 60’s, established some credibility in the 70’s and early 80’s and then withered away as the western world got into business reengineering.

Except that we now have the technological infrastructure and a myriad of platforms and applications that can actually help the workers interact more easily and to greater / better effect.  I do understand that.

I’m on record as believing that all this renewed interest in “social business design” will result in a resurgence of the OD (organizational development) field … its principles track very closely with the innovations in management Gary Hamel is suggesting are necessary in his book The Future of Management.

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Socio-technical Systems – from wikipedia:

Sociotechnical systems (or STS) in organizational development is an approach to complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces. The term also refers to the interaction between society’s complex infrastructures and human behaviour.

In this sense, society itself, and most of its substructures, are complex sociotechnical systems. The term sociotechnical systems was coined in the 1960s by Eric Trist and Fred Emery, who were working as consultants at the Tavistock Institute in London.

Jon Husband
Wirearchy