Getting the Most from Web 2.0

These points are elaborated in the model shown in Figure 1, which links Web-based user inputs with HR outputs.

 

Figure 1: The Web 2.0 system and people management

Some Web-based user inputs will be familiar to readers, such as online text, images, video and instant messaging; other inputs may be less familiar, for example, podcasting, video, online voting, social book-marking, tagging and subscribing to RSS feeds. The important point to understand about these user inputs is that collectively they create value for organisations through network effects. Network effects describe how early adopter individuals and organisations rely on other users to build up online 'traffic' and turn them into a standard form of communications. The more people are drawn into using these technologies, or are compelled to use them, the more viable the system becomes for all. This is how email and the Internet developed into a standard system of communicating among two-thirds of the total American workforce that have been labelled 'networked workers' . It is also what is behind the thinking in some of the case study examples shown in Box 1, which seek to build on the power of online discussion forums, wikis and blogs.

Box 1: Case illustration: Discussions forums, online chat and message boards in three UK government departments

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UK government departments have a number of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 applications, the most widely used of which are chat and message boards, online conversations, management blogs and podcasts. Given their relative success, other departments are planning to use these technologies. Three good examples are the Department of Communities and Local Government's Director General and Ministers Monthly Staff Webchat, the Department for Work and Pensions Online 'Staffroom' Forum and Display Space and HR Revenue and Customs (HRMC) Suggestions Scheme and Online Discussion Forum.

The Department of Communities and Local Government's Director General and Ministers Monthly Staff Webchat is chaired by a Director General. Staff can ask questions directly to Board Executive members in an asynchronous chatroom. The online chatroom has a formal agenda, and transcripts and action points are fed back to Board members. The Webchat is marketed internally through various channels of communication and usually attracts over a hundred discussion postings a month.

The Department for Work and Pensions Online 'Staffroom' Forum and Display Space is slightly different in providing feedback to senior civil servants on a range of issues in which employees can 'Have a Say' on any issue they wish to bring up. It also has a 'Hall of Fame' for celebrating success in the Department.

HMRC's online discussion forum is an important channel for employee contributions to the corporate suggestion scheme, 'Angels and Demons'. Suggestions are being sought on how to improve work organisation and processes, and on culture change, along the lines of the BBC's Dragon's Den. According to the Web site, more than 12,000 HRMC employees had registered by October 2007, 8000 had contributed to online discussions on specific themes and 500 innovative business ideas had been logged. The online discussion forum had not required propriety software but had been developed using open source tools.

What Do We Mean by Web 2.0?

Although at an early stage, a family of powerful Web-based technologies are being adopted by some organisations to:

• encourage greater collaboration among employees, customers, suppliers and partners;
• give customers, business partners and employees greater opportunity for more authentic forms of 'voice' on issues that matter to them;
• help organisations, employees and potential employees learn about each other, and share their knowledge and experiences to create organisational learning.

These 'social and sociable' media technologies have come to be known as Web 2.0, following the introduction of the term in 2004 by Tim O'Reilly, a media guru. The most highly publicised of these technologies among HR professionals are blogs, social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn and virtual worlds such as Second Life.

This is perhaps even more important than normal to be clear on our use of terms and our understanding of the key features of Web 2.0, why it is different from earlier, Web-based applications and what its potential is forecast to be. So, we begin by setting out a working definition in Box 1 below, culled from a number of sources.

Box 1: Web 2.0, a working definition for HR professionals

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Web 2.0 is different from the earlier Web 1.0, which focused on the one-way generation and publication of online content. Web 2.0 is a 'read—write' Web providing a democraticarchitecture for participation, encouraging people to share ideas, promoting discussion and fostering a greater sense of community. In this sense it is a 'people-focused' Web, embracing core elements of the philosophy and practice of modern human resource and people management — conversations, interpersonal networking, personalisation, authentic voice and individualism.

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The important points to take away from this definition are the differences with earlier non-interactive, Web-based technologies and the people-centred, rather than organisation-centred, nature of these new technologies. To elaborate a little, experts in the field have identified five characteristics of Web 2.0 that have enormous importance for HR. These are described in Box 2.

Box 2: The characteristics of Web 2.0

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Participation and collaboration

Web 2.0 is driven by increased participation and collaboration among users, most obviously apparent in social networking, social bookmarking, blogging, wikis and multimedia online gaming. Indeed, it is these so-called 'network effects' that define Web 2.0 and make it so valuable — see case illustrations later.

Openness

Web 2.0 has come about because of a spirit of openness as developers and companies increasingly provide open access to their content and applications. Good examples include the emergence of open source course material, online encyclopaedias such as Wikipedia and Web browsers such as Firefox and Google's 'Chrome'. For some writers, it is this open source element that is the most important feature of Web 2.0, differentiating it from in-company attempts to deploy social media behind their firewalls — so-called Enterprise 2.0.

User control

Web 2.0 users control the content they create, the data captured about their Web activities, and even their identities — they can choose to be anonymous, create virtual identities or present their real selves. In the case of the latter, Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister and Barack Obama, the newly installed President of the United States of America, have done broadcasts on YouTube which have been viewed around the world.

Decentralisation and democratisation

Web 2.0 is also a decentralised 'architecture', relying on distributed content, applications and computers rather than a centralised system controlled by managers or IT departments. While decentralisation is necessary for wider participation, openness and positive network effects, it is also the most worrying aspect of Web 2.0 among many HR professionals because of the potentially damaging effects of brands through the organisational misbehaviour of 'ranting' bloggers and because they are not able to control corporate messaging.

Standards

Universal standards provide the basis for Web 2.0. Common interfaces and creating and accessing content are the things that allow the decentralised system to be created. This includes technologies such as XML, Java and media streaming to MP3 players and mobile phones to help create content available to everyone, as is the case with e-learning.

Modularity

Web 2.0 is built from many components from the bottom-up rather than top-down, which gives it greater flexibility. For example,traditional programmes of learning through university degrees are built top-down, with a 'programme, course and module' structure designed in that hierarchical order. However, it is equally possible and desirable to build from the bottom-up, creating highly flexible e-learning courses from standard 'chunks' of learning (so-called learning objects) to create modules and then courses, according to the individual needs of learners. In the same way, different Web 2.0 applications and mechanisms can be aggregated and re-mixed to create flexible outcomes that suit user needs. Personalised Google home pages are good illustrations of this characteristic.

Informing the People and Technology Debate

There is a rich seam of literature which addresses 'people and technology' and in broad terms the themes which arise are set out diagrammatically in Figure 1. The appearance or promise of liberation, empowerment and decentralisation is shown with its contrast of control, domination and centralization.

 

Figure 1: Contrasting impacts of technology.

Different forms of technology and technological change have been at the heart of many of the issues concerning the management of people and the work of human resource professionals for many years. In more recent times, however, these issues emanate from the role of newer technologies in transforming societies, transforming economic progress and in how we work in such societies. Excellent overviews on different aspects of the role of information and communication technologies (ICT), the 'new' economy. This has resulted in a renewed interest in the relationship between these new technologies and the management of people.

These more macro and intellectual concerns have been accompanied by the actual influence of technologies on the practice of human resource management. For example,technology as a transforming force, especially in the e-enablement of HR and its impact on the creation and transfer of knowledge.

As we have explained in earlier chapters, signs have been mounting for some time that previously accepted concepts of organisation and strategy have come to an end. The fundamentally Newtonian paradigm of organisations as machines and strategy by numbers has given way to structural change that shifts the emphasis from physical inputs and outputs to intangible ones such as knowledge, learning, creativity and initiative. The old paradigm of top-down control and hierarchical organisation appears to have exhausted its capacity to generate innovative responses to turbulent business conditions and intensifying global competition — indeed, far from fostering innovation, many managers feel it is holding them back.

The preliminary analysis of the literature — old and new — helps to inform the debate about the impact of, and relationship between, new technologies and people management. It suggests that these technologies are a moving target, which is likely to pose new problems and new contexts for organisations, especially as they move into newer stages of technological development.

With the new knowledge-based technologies advancing at a rapid pace, people management becomes an important mechanism for challenging the 'forces of conservatism', whether found in management or the workforce, and hence enabling organisations to more rapidly translate investments into better performance. This implies that in a knowledge-based economy, organisations certainly need to invest more in research and development, technology and capital equipment and skills, but these are not sufficient in themselves to make a step change in performance. Therefore to work, they need to be knit together in a truly people-centred business model, working as a system to learn and improve the offering to customers.

How the business models of organisations exert an array of competing pressures on HR functions, which create ambiguities and tensions in what it delivers, how it delivers, how effectively it delivers and to whom it delivers.

To deliver HR strategy, organisations typically respond to the competing pressures with a mix of re-organisation of the HR function itself and new ICT approaches. The re-organisation of the HR function involves new HR service delivery approaches models, often based on a tri-partite model of shared services, centres of excellence and strategic or business partnering along the lines  with outsourcing and, in some cases, off-shoring of key services, especially shared service centres. The introduction of ICT, often in combination with new HR delivery models can then rationalise or transform HR's internal operations.

It should be emphasised at the outset that these organisational, process re-engineering and ICT solutions are interdependent. Without progressively sophisticated ICT, new HR delivery models would not be as effective: indeed it is the increased reach and richness of technology-enabled information and organisational learning that have facilitated simultaneous centralisation and delegation of decision-making in HR, cited by academics, observers and practitioners as the single most important claimed distinctive capability of new HR delivery models. One of the logical consequences of these developments is the potential 'virtualisation' or, at least, significant 'leaning' of HR which results from simultaneously reducing the numbers of specialists required to deliver HR services internally while improving the quality of these same services and developing new HR business models.

The introduction of technology, therefore, offers the potential to transform HR's role. It promises to do this by:

• increasing the HR function's influence as consultants focused on the needs of managers and employees;
• enabling new flexible and responsive methods of delivering HR services, such as self-service via the Internet or Intranet;
• expanding HR's reach as the experts of the organisation's people processes and the developers of value propositions for different employee groups.

Thus, the 'bandwagon' of technology-enabled HR solutions seems to be growing at a rapid rate driven by some evidence of promising practices and positive evaluations of technology and outsourcing projects. However, this bandwagon in support of technology adoption is also fuelled by some 'dangerous half-truths' or 'total nonsense'.

To address the various challenges set out earlier, we now offer advice, supported by theoretical frameworks which are based on recent research and case study evidence. Our collective experience gained through working with a variety of companies to transform their HR functions through the design and implementation of technology shows that technology investments are frequently under-used and do not release the full benefit to the organisations concerned.