Social media as the trojan horse for organizational change?

photo credit: ccarlstea

I have just been appointed as one of the ambassadors of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in October. In this context I haven been asked what my special interest is to attend the conference. This is a very good opportunity to publish a posting that has been waiting until end of May.

In the last months I have been talking to some smaller and larger companies about the use of social media in their organizations. I really enjoyed the many interesting discussion – nonetheless it was surprising to see how far these discussions went. For me the most interesting aspects of the whole social media and enterprise 2.0 discussion is the question if social media can function as agents for organizational change. On a high level I am really curious that many organizations start to implement a social software tool and already during the implementation of a short time after they start to talk about values, rules and strategic dimensions of the recently implemented software. Sebastian Küpers shares this experience and he has the idea that social media can function as trojan horses for redefining core-values of a company and finally organizational change. Mirko Lange has discussed here (in german) in a very good article the strategic dimension of social media and he points out that companies cannot treat with ignore social media which relates again to values.

I am looking forward to discuss this impression at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit soon. Besides this high-level interest I am curious to see some examples of social tagging in enterprises and I would like to see if the topic of Open Educational Resources has already arrived at companies and SMEs. Finally I would like to see if I can raise some interest with our ongoing project called OpenScout that focuses on making very large amounts of open study material in the domain of business and management education available for competence-based education with a special focus on SMEs.