Theory, practice, praxis and framing

Put simply: methodology is not, in itself, a theory. And I mean theory in quite a social science way: a framework for understanding peoples’ behaviours and actions. When I see service design in the line of work, it is probably best described as a spectrum of research methodologies or meta-methodologies (as in, it can eat up more focused methodologies and reconstitute them as being part of a whole: ethnography and wireframing can sit in the same box, and become “service design” by dint of the order of deployment and the use of the outputs).

Defining Enterprise 2.0

More and more often these days I get asked, “Does [offering X] from [vendor Y] qualify as an Enterprise 2.0 product?” Established vendors of collaboration software are modifying their offerings and repositioning them as social software platforms that have all the features and functions necessary to support the new modes of interacting and getting work done. Smaller companies and startups often say that the established vendors “just don’t get it” and that the new features they’ve incorporated–blogs, wikis, discussion forums, tags, etc.–are just window dressing on products that are still essentially geared for Collaboration 1.0. – Andrew McAfee