Twittering Our Way To ... Where?

Socialtext is coming out with a Twitter-like tool for internal company use, prompting TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld to dub this "the year of the activity stream." There's a risk for companies here that CIOs can help manage: too much focus on process, not enough on the result.The risk comes when collaboration becomes a job requirement itself, rather than job requirements dictating the extent of collaboration. An "activity stream" like Signals and others could be wildly helpful to our colleagues. Or it could be a crutch to assure us that we're all very busy.

Nicholas Carr's writing on how the Web is changing how we think is a must-read for CIOs thinking about how enterprise 2.0 tools like Signals will affect the workforce. In a recently posted interview, Carr credits the real power and efficiency of interactive media, but also warns against discounting other activities -- immersion in a great novel or movie or piece of music -- as "passive" and therefore less valuable. He's talking about more personal pursuits, but I find this concern very relevant to the workplace. Says Carr:

A lot of valuable work people do is quiet or lonely and anything but easy. The gift of some of the most productive people I know is the ability to do one thing very well, letting nothing distract them from that focus. I wish I were one of these people and hadn't stopped to answer 17 e-mails and read 48 others (I just counted) during the course of writing this post.

This doesn't mean something like Signals is a bad idea inside a company. If it lets that superproducer give a terse, results-oriented update -- Project done. Deal closed. -- even more efficiently, it could be a perfect tool. Socialtext founder Ross Mayfield says that part of the power is integrating messaging into its collaboration platform. TechCrunch's Schonfeld posts a helpful image of Signals in a post that notes:

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams gives a business technology exec more to chew on (here's the video) in a recent interview with Charlie Rose, where he suggests that in five years, people will be as comfortable with Twitter as they are with blogging and social networks:

CIOs need to lead the discussion here, to be seen as the guide to using enterprise 2.0 tools like this. Getting collaboration right -- among co-workers, with business partners, with customers -- will be an increasingly important part of a company's competitive advantage. Deciding whether to bring a tool such as Signals in is a small step. Shaping the culture around how it's used will be the much bigger factor in whether it delivers or drains productivity.