Although a lot of people conduct research, analyze and write about how organisations are using social computing and participatory tools it is fair to say that is far to early to conclude a best practice or write a step-by-step “how-to” guide on the subject. It still up for grabs and I find the situation quite interesting – I guess this rather long post could act as evidence of that (now you´re warned).

In McKinsey Quarterly recent review on “how to make Web 2.0 work” based research from the last 2 years in at least 50 corporations, they end up suggesting six critical factors. Although I can conclude much of the same from our own work – the factors are quite generic and thus hard to disagree with – the most interesting note comes in the end of the paper where the authors suggest that “encouraging participation calls for new approaches that break with the methods used to deploy IT in the past“. I could not agree more.

As social computing and participatory tools are viewed – and handled – as traditional IT (although their claim for fame comes from the web) the momentum of these initiatives are at risk of fading away before we even get started. The idea of viewing these tools as what they are – web based – is not new, nor is the fact that most organisations have IT procedures, rules and regulation for (sometimes) good reasons. Not only does IT (in this case) manifest the bureaucracy of post-modern organisations, it also poses an economic threat to these participatory ambitions – IT is (as we all know) expensive and it takes guts to “go all in” on something as vague as what some call “social media”.

So, how can we balance this act between sheer conviction and belief in these social tools and the need to live up to technical standards and business cases? I guess there’s many answers to that one, but I think the idea of prototyping would make for a good start (Thanks, Andreas, on a great and inspiring conversation on the subject the other day).

When we want to see what a given participatory tool can do for our organisation – why don’t we start with an “organisational prototype” where we can try out working with or through a given tool but also test the benefits/challenges for the organisation. We could deploy a beta version of some technically flexible kind, invite a group of real people and ask them to use it in their work (their real work that is) for a couple of months, developing and tweaking the tool together with them as we go along. Then after a couple of hands-on months we would evaluate the tool in terms of technical feasibility (or “how should it work if we were to build a “real” one”), business viability (or “what was the value created from using the tool”) and human sociability (or “did we like using it or not”).

Such an approach could get the organisation going faster, giving them the opportunity to make real experiences using a tool or trying out a “phenomena” (social network analysis anyone?). But most importantly, it would give them real data to inform their decisions, make the organisation better to specify their specific needs to an eventual vendor and make their large investments in participatory tools less risky.

In the coming weeks and months, I will be using some time on the idea of building “organisational prototypes”, how the process could look like and how it could be efficiently measured, so if you share my interest, and would like to pitch in, hear more about it or disagree, please let me know.