Les médias sociaux, plus que des communications (un autre point de vue)

Vendredi, j'ai publié un billet sur ma vision des médias sociaux comme outil de transformation des organisations.

Samedi, je lisais un billet intitulé Social Business: Be Careful What You Wish For sur le (très intéressant) blogue de Tom Webster.

Évidemment, si j'en parle, c'est que Tom est pas mal d'accord avec ce que j'écrivais. Je cite (les emphases sont de moi):

(...) the best example of this kind of existential change lies not in the case studies of our currently celebrated crop of social media superstars, but in a well-documented (and with good reason) example from the past: the legendary TPS (...) the Toyota Production System. (...) The TPS was less a “manufacturing strategy” than a complete change in the theory of the firm. Toyota realized that they couldn’t simply increase their manufacturing quality standards unless their employees were thoroughly empowered to make those changes – in other words, they couldn’t have “just-in-time” inventory unless every employee was empowered to act in real time. So one of the central tenets of TPS was less about “six sigma” or other trailing variables, it was simply this: any employee can stop the assembly line. (...)

I believe that the successful models for a new, social business will have a similar approach. As we move from the “just-in-time” era to the real time era, the theory of the firm must change to keep pace, or new upstarts built on better models will upend the incumbents again. If your business is not structured to allow employees to “stop the line,” you might find the line stopping anyway – only not at a time of your choosing. (...) (I)f you are not the market leader in innovation or operational excellence (...) you’d better be nailing customer intimacy and be structured to do so. And as I write this on the cusp of 2012 (likely the end of the world, anyway), that means a business structured around real-time public feedback and rapid response.

Je traduis (et paraphrase) le dernier passage en gras: Si votre entreprise (ou organisation) n'est pas structurée de façon à que les employés aient la latitude d'agir, vous pourriez bien vous retrouver dans une situation où ce sont des forces extérieures qui vous forceront à agir.

Alors, est-ce que les membres de votre organisation ont la latitude d'agir?