Joe McKendrick writes about this on the FASTForward blog, and points out that Andrew McAfee of Harvard and Tom Davenport of Babson are agreeing to disagree. The debate is over how so-called enterprise 2.0 technologies will impact the world'd workforce. Enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts like to discuss how the new technologies disrupt traditional business hierarchies. Davenport doesn't totally agree. He says,

“The absence of participative technologies in the past is not the only reason that organizations and expertise are hierarchical.�

In other words, he questions whether Enterprise 2.0 technology will truly level the playing field. Hierarchies exist independently of technology, so how is technology going to change all that?

McAfee agrees that focusing too much on the technology will limit healthy adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies, but points out that these new technologies are radical departures from the earlier technologies and not simply evolutionary outgrowths whose success can be measured by the same standards.

Going one step further, I'd say that the current generation of young people who have grown up with technology all their lives are very different from those who have worked in the traditional, hierarchical organization. As Dina Mehta says,

“it is their way of life...They don't take it as seriously as we do. They are not as grateful to it as we are. They do not talk about how cool YouTube is — they just use the services to check out the latest Gwen Stefani video — the video is their point of conversation rather than how cool the service is. When I ask them to imagine life without them, they simply cannot - they know nothing less. They're not delighted by 'free' as we are - growing up with this medium has made them expect it. There are few divisions between the techno haves and have-nots among them, as in our case.â€?

So Tom’s right — the absence of technology isn’t the only reason that organizations are hierarchical. The people in charge of those organizations organized them that way because it’s what they understood how to do. And Andrew’s right — today’s ubiquitous technologies that we use in all facets of our lives are radically different from the earlier tools that had a specific place and use. I think the next workforce generation are different too — possibly radically different because for them the debate isn't even about the tools, but about the information, and that's the real change in the way we work. Am I right?