The trouble with trying to describe what is going on in organisations as social computing breaches their defenses is that we have to resort to some pretty clumsy labels in order to do so. Enterprise 2.0 is probably the clumsiest of the lot but like Web 2.0 it will serve a purpose if used with due care and attention.

But even subtler language can cause problems.

Niall Cook picks up on two phrases attributed to JP Rangaswami in the recent Information Week article about him and his work:

When asked about the respective roles of blogs and wikis in organizations, he said that blogs are for the “creators and thinkers” whereas wikis are “about doing things rather than thinking about things”.

I am not sure that JP actually meant such a clear distinction as the language suggests and in my own experience categorising one group of people as “doers” and another is “thinkers” creates artificial separation uncomfortably close to a class system. I believe people move from one type of activity to another and back on a frequent basis and our experience at the BBC was that people became pretty confident at moving from forums to blogs to wikis depending on what they were trying to achieve and using hyperlinks to weave a web of meaning between them.

This is why Niall’s main point is really interesting:

I’d argue that there is a fourth type - the connector. They may not be a creator, a thinker or a doer (at least not in the blog or wiki sense). But by tagging the blog posts and wiki pages that they find interesting, they automatically - perhaps even unwittingly - create connections between intellectual property and the people who create it. The tags they use to “describe” these resources become the glue that holds the whole continuum together.

If we can set aside the idea that these different activities are associated exclusively with different types of people they are nonetheless very useful as ways of describing different types of behaviour.

One of the joys of the new way of looking at work enabled by these new technologies is that it makes it easier for people to break out of the rigidities imposed by old labels and the pre-conceptions that came with them. Moving fluidly from one type of behavior to another while moving around the computer screen and fusing them all into a new and powerful capability is a skill that is just emerging and will, I believe become essential in business.