Enterprise 2.0

Harvard Professor Sloan Management Review (SMR) on what I call Enterprise 2.0 -- the emerging use of blogs and network IT) within the Intranet. The article describes why I think this is an important and welcome development, the contents of the Enterprise 2.0 toolkit,' and the experiences to date of an early adopter. It also offers some guidelines to business leaders interested in building an Enterprise 2.0 inftrastructure within their companies. One question not addressed in the article is: Why is Enterprise 2.0 is an appealing reality now?...He continues, in his blog: As described in the SMR article, these tools include powerful search, RSS signals whenever new content appears. As I type these words I don't know the best site to serve as the link behind the abbreviation RSS' in the previous sentence. To find this site, I'm going to type RSS' into Google and see what pops up (sure enough, the Wikipedia entry for RSS' was pretty high in Google's results). I also don't know the URL of the page I'm using right now to type this blog entry. I do know that it's on Socialtext) and I'll immediately get an RSS notification about it. These examples are not meant to show that my professional life is perfectly organized (that assertion would be worse than false; it would be fraudulent) or that we've addressed all the challenges associated with the growth of the Web. They're meant instead to illustrate how technologists have done a brilliant job at three tasks: building platforms to let lots of users express themselves, letting the structure of these platforms emerge over time instead of imposing it up front, and helping users deal with the resulting flood of content. As the SMR article discusses, the important question for business leaders is how to import these three trends from the Internet to the Intranet -- how to harness Web 2.0 to create Enterprise 2.0. Andrew also dug deep to develop a Harvard Business School Case Study: Nick Carr, always one for orderly skepticism, comments on the SMR article:

McAfee sounds a note of caution along these lines. He notes the possibility that "busy knowledge workers won't use the new technologies, despite training and prodding," and points to the fact that "most people who use the Internet today aren't bloggers, wikipedians or taggers. They don't help produce the platform - they just use it." There's the rub. Managers, professionals and other employees don't have much spare time, and the ones who have the most valuable business knowledge have the least spare time of all. (They're the ones already inundated with emails, instant messages, phone calls, and meeting requests.) Will they turn into avid bloggers and taggers and wiki-writers? It's not impossible, but it's a long way from a sure bet.

This may be true of the experts of today but not the experts of tomorrow. I don't wish to sound complacent but I always end my presentations with the view that organisations don't have any choice but to get involved in this stuff as the teenagers of today are the workers of tomorrow and they won't accept anything less. If you don't help them they may not work for you at all or if they do they will start talking about your business out there on the web - they can't help themselves!