Do you value your workforce?

Andrew McAfee's most recent post asks a great question. Will social utilities within the work environment succeed in removing the clutter found in free tools such as facebook and twitter? Will this add value? Or will the clutter be replaced with policies and procedures that smother the community?

The answer is both. Or neither. It depends entirely on the people within the system, the expectations placed on them, and their incentive to support the culture of the group.

Voisin is a tool. It's a platform that enables collaboration. It has no real personality without users. I liken it to a hammer whose purpose is to help build stuff. And like a hammer, it's personality depends on whether it's used to drive a nail into a board or club some poor soul's knee cap.

Voisin is designed to promote socially responsible behaviour within an online collaborative environment. In most cases, it will succeed. In the end, however, each application will succeed based on the personalities that occupy it's virtual walls. Nothing replaces good leadership.

It's the social culture within the group that will determine the overall behaviour of the system. If you have a healthy corporate culture based on knowledge sharing and teamwork, you'll see immediate and measureable results after implementing this technology.