Valentin's Blog

Discussing the use of Collective Intelligence for the 'Enterprise 2.0', one almost inevitable argument is that experiences from the web cannot be transferred, because web scale is just sooo much larger. But I wondered - exactly how much larger, in particular when we look at really really large organizations, even the biggest of them all:

Too make it quick: 600 times; there are 600 times more web-users than there are employees in the largest organization. Current estimates put the number of web-users at 1.5 billion, while (according to wikipedia) the largest organization has 2.5 million employees. There are more people in the Facebook group "AGAINST THE NEW FACEBOOK LAYOUT" than there are people in the largest organization on earth! By the way: this organization is the state owned Indian Railways (hence the nice picture by Akuppa); other organizations of similar size are the People's Liberation Army (estimated at 2.25 million active duty personnel) and the largest private organization: Wal-Mart (2.1 million). The largest German organization is Deutsche Post (DHL) with 0.5 million; there are 3000 times more web users than employees in Germany's largest company.

So yes, very clearly, experience from the open web cannot be easily generalized to organizations; not even to the biggest ones and not even if we disregard all issues beyond pure size (e.g. motivational issues).