Anyone with any experience with Enterprise HR software knows the pain and suffering it can produce. It's roundly despised by almost everyone who has to use it, and yet we're all forced to spend time grappling with it. The only cultural change it can affect is to make it worse: we get treated like database records, forced into filling in endless forms. Process over people.

Great new post on the Rypple blog that takes a different tact: well designed software can change cultures for the better. Here's an excerpt:

Quotation

You can take an offline, hierarchical, batch process like performance reviews and move it into an online form but it’s still the same old crap, now delivered in a synergy capturing ePile.

But, well designed, social software can change culture. Take the things that people already do — sharing photos, playing games, collaborating — and make them much, much more efficient. Build a platform upon which people can remix and they’ll rip, mix, and burn.

Read the full post at http://rypp.ly/cJo7oD

What do you think? Can software change cultures for the better?