It's all about Context!

The Washington Post had a fascinating article yesterday, Pearls before Breakfast , that takes a look at our perceptions, and how they are framed by context. Although the article is quite long, I highly recommend taking at least a short look at it.

The article raises some interesting questions, including: What is Art? Is the goodness and value of Art inherent in it, or is it framed by context?

It's an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?

Whether it's Art, or Enterprise 2.0, the same fundamental truth of human nature applies - context does matter! In a utopian world, of course, when we're trying to solve a problem, it does not matter who within the Enterprise comes up with a solution, regardless of level or organization; all solutions are evaluated strictly on merit. Theoretically, politics has no place in problem-solving. In my experience, however, who says something has a big impact on our perception of what is being said; there is always a qualitative difference in how a solution is received, depending on whether it was presented by the VP of your Division, by another engineer in your group, or by someone else, say an engineer in another division.

If I post a problem, should it matter whether the solution comes from within my own group/team/division or not, and whether the presenter is an engineer or a top manager? Of course not. But it does!

This is a factor that needs to be taken into account when developing social solutions for the enterprise. Intuitively, it makes sense that during an information search or when trying to solve a problem, you would want to first search your immediate group's wiki, then work outward to your departmental wiki, and then further afield within your Division or even the Enterprise as a whole; similarly, you might search your team's and your bosses' bookmarks first, before expanding the scope of your search to bookmarks from other sources within the enterprise.
Or, for special cases, you might want to search peer functional areas first (say, all QA departments within your Division), and if you still don't find what you're looking for, only then open up the search in a general way. And the software tools you use, should facilitate this behavior.

I wonder if the major Enterprise 2.0 vendors already support this behavior or are thinking about it?