Dennis Howlett recently sent the ESME team a link to a long article about VAXNotes which was a collaboration tool that was active in the 1980’s (!) at  Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). I was reading this article and had a real case of Deja Vue.  The article provides an excellent description of the use cases involved in the use of the tool as well as the corporate culture that was necessary for its widespread usage within DEC.

As I read this article, I realized that many of the use cases that micro-blogging tools are meant to solve are actually problems that have been around a long time – for example, the need for employees in distributed companies to be able to collaborate and discover individuals (those old “weak ties”) who can solve their problems. The high level of employee involvement at DEC regarding VAXNotes (irregardless of job title, location, etc.) shows that the assumption that active enterprise collaboration is just restricted to the generation who have grown up with Web 2.0 technology is wrong. VAXNotes emerged in an environment that was pre-Web 2.0 – indeed it was pre-Web 1.0.  Thus, the assumption that it is just Generation Y employees who will be the primary users of such micro-blogging tools is misleading. If the corporate culture (as evidenced by the DEC article) supports such tools, users from all generations will use them.  

Thus, microblogging tool vendors should examine in more detail knowledge management research and the associated case studies to get a better feeling for these requirements. Although we always assume that such vendors are on the cutting edge of the technology, the problems that they hope to solve have been around for a long time.   Obviously if the problems addressed by these tools have been around a long time, then there are obviously tools / technology that meet the associated needs. True. True. The question is what do the new generation of microblogging tools bring to the table – 1) ease of use, 2) the ability for users to decide for themselves what information they wish to see and 3) integration in a variety of environments within and beyond the corporate firewall.  However, microblogging tool vendors must realize that the technology itself  and the metaphor that it represents can be easily copied (as seen in the plethora of Twitter-clones and microblogging platforms). It is the social network and the information that this network provides that is the key.  Thus,  providing a microblogging tool itself won’t be enough to guarantee success – the services that surround its ramp-up and dispersion in an enterprise will be critical as well.