We live in a complex world (Thesis introduction)

In fact we live in a very complex and exponentially more complex becoming world. Looking back in time of mankind one sees that on the macro level all started out fairly slow. When our predecessors the Neanderthal were around they hardly met any others of their kind except their group (family) members. It took tens of thousands of years until there were humans who settled down and formed steady and slightly bigger communities. The rise of the first civilizations with beyond-local trade is a recent event in humankind’s history. It is only since about 500 years, a blink in our species history, that humans know what the world actually looks like in terms of form and continents.

True international interconnectivity and the resulting complexity on the world-level began after the industrial revolution with first steam and later diesel run boats and trains. Cars and planes followed and today we live in a world where you can reach any place on the planet within three days. So on one hand innovations in mobility drive complexity by adding connections between humans all around the globe while on the other hand this trend was accompanied (interestingly also pretty accurately in time) from the very beginning with the evolution of human communication. Starting off just with just body language and simple sounds mankind has taken several significant steps in the development of communication namely: Speech (language), scripture, letterpress and telecommunication (from the telegraph to the internet). What becomes evident is the rapid increase of overall complexity within the last 300, 100 and 20 years. Increased mobility, communication and population growth are driving the complexity of worldwide human interaction on an exponentially incrementing curve (Klotz).

All organizations and especially companies are facing this complexity, summarized under the term globalization, being in competition with firms- and having customers from all over the world. Organizations have to keep up, change and adapt to meet the exigencies of our complex world. A lot of companies fail or struggle at doing so clinging to traditional organization-paradigms, culture and technology.

In the opinion of the author they are not only missing a chance but acting negligent and will eventually be pushed out of their markets unless they change their course and consider acting upon what has been discussed in the field of Enterprise 2.0. 2 The term Enterprise 2.0 relates to the term used for the second phase of the Internet evolution: Web 2.0 with its most prominent examples Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter. These examples have shown what power lies in the interlinking of great masses of people. Enterprise 2.0 incorporates using Web 2.0 concepts (blogs, tagging, wikis, etc.) and technology but goes beyond that.

The law of requisite variety says: The larger the variety of actions available to a control system, the larger the variety of perturbations it is able to compensate (Heylighen & Joslyn, 2001). Broken down for the business world this means that the more flexible a company is, the higher is its’ chance of succeeding in a complex world with turbulent markets. The goal is to have a company which is set up in a way so that flexible competence networks (of persons, resources and technology) can emerge, that are able to respond quickly to changing conditions in the markets and thus make the company get ahead of its’ competitors.

At the core of these networks are employees who have to be transparently interlinked and given a platform on which they can freely collaborate in order to leverage their collective intelligence. In this respect, social software opens new opportunities where traditional communication technologies like telephone and email have shown their limits. Social software is not an entirely new phenomenon but the use of social software in enterprises is a recent development. Social software promises to unleash employee potential in a way it has unleashed the potential of internet users to collaboratively create the world’s biggest encyclopedia: Wikipedia.

However when companies consider implementing social software they do not have a solid basis on which to compare social software products in order to find the right tool for their specific needs. Especially the emergent social software suites which try to combine all the functionality of social software, based on their background, have strength and weaknesses in different areas. This is where this thesis is attempted to provide some theoretical groundwork by proposing and pre-testing a set of application fields for social software suites within companies.

The result a comparison of leading social software suites in different business relevant use-cases and categories can be found on the website www.socialsoftwarematrix.org!