Beware of the dark side of enterprise 2.0

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference , you’d anticipate to hear people extolling the benefits of using social media tools at a company, but you might not anticipate to hear about the dark side.

And there is a dark side that ranges from the obvious — information overload and employee burnout — to issues that might be a less obvious — such as an increased feeling of isolation and letting the “loud talkers” assume a position of expert voice.

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“Sometimes you just have to turn all that crap off,” Greg Lowe, social media strategist at Alcatel-Lucent, told an early morning keynote audience today. “You’ve got to unplug yourself. I’m in social media and my ADD is struggling to keep up. Sometimes when I go to a coffee shop, I leave my computer and phone at home. I bring a notepad and maybe a book.”

Lowe and Kathleen Culver, a transformation architect also at Alcatel-Lucent, stated there are great advantages for any company using enterprise 2.0 technologies, including social collaboration platforms, microblogs and wikis. These technologies can increase productivity and facilitate greater collaboration with employees in far-flung offices.

However, as with most anything, there is a downside.

And with enterprise 2.0, the downside tends to involve information and time overload.

“This spigot of access of anywhere, anytime, anybody can flood our free time,” Culver said. “The problem is that with these new forums and ways of interacting, there is a strong desire to be responsive. This need to respond doesn’t just happen in the forum of your work day. It’s happening 24/7. It means that we are potentially on all the time.”

And that constant attention to our gadgets, to the stream of social updates and work-related posts and tweets can keep people from relaxing their brains.

“We’re losing our downtime,” added Culver. “So we are working the BlackBerry at the dinner table. We’re sending out tweets. We’re invading our play time. What they are finding about play, whether it’s tennis or Sudoku, is you are taking work problems out of the context of work. You’re no longer getting that time away from work … It’s not just the fact that you are getting all of these messages, it’s the unpredictability of it. The problem is going to be burnout.”

While companies are slicing travel budgets for employees and instead using video chats and web conferences, there are drawbacks to fewer face-to-face meetings.

“A tremendous amount of communication is nonverbal, and if we are not meeting face-to-face, then we are missing out on a lot of that,” added Culver. “But there is another challenge, too. There’s a loss of comradery with our colleagues. We’re getting this feeling of isolation because we are not getting together.”

Another issue to watch out for is that if everyone in the company has been given the capability to weigh in on on-line discussions, beware of the person who may have more time to speak but less expertise.

“The real experts might not be doing all the speaking in these communities,” Culver said. “The experts might want to be working in their labs or working with customers and they aren’t posting all the time. Just because someone is posting, doesn’t mean they are an expert and everyone should be taking their advice.”

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin or subscribe to Sharon’s RSS feed. Her email address is sgaudin@computerworld.com. Read more about enterprise web 2.0/collaboration in Computerworld’s Enterprise Web 2.0/Collaboration Topic Center.

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Beware of the dark side of enterprise 2.0

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