The State of Enterprise 2.0
The state of Enterprise 2.0: This is a dense article, but a good one. However, let’s backtrack for a second –
Last year, Andrew McAfee from Harvard coined the term “Enterprise 2.0” to refer to current social networking tools – blogs, wikis, tagging, social bookmarking, etc. – and how they’re creeping into the enterprise. I talked about McAfee’s paper a bit in my post about Emergent Behavior.
So, the ZDNet article linked above is an examination of “the state of Enterprise 2.0.” The author makes some bold assertions:
Enterprise 2.0 is going to happen in your organization with you or without you. […] I’ve both heard tale and witnessed personally the widespread use of hosted wikis in particular but even unauthorized internal installations of MediaWiki, such as at AOL, where their rogue installation of MediaWiki has become enormously popular and has pages for every product, technology, and department and I can cite a dozen other similar stories.
Enterprise 2.0 is more a state of mind than a product you can purchase. […] by the time you’ve installed, configured, customized, and integrated all of the ingredients you’ve brought together, if you’ve lost sight of the specific reasons why Enterprise 2.0 is supposed to work better, your effort will have been in vain.
Most businesses still need to educate their workers on the techniques and best practices of Enterprise 2.0 and social media. Just like the previous generation of workers received computer literacy classes en masse and learned how to use business productivity applications such as word processing, spreadsheets, and email, the same will be required for the current generation of workers and Enterprise 2.0.
That last one is important. Training usually always gets neglected in the average intranet rollout, but it’s critical here because you’re not just asking employees to do something different, you’re asking them to change their state-of-mind. Specifically, you’re asking them to do something they’re probably not used to at work – be publicly social, in a very visible arena. This is tricky.
To wit, the author continues:
The benefits of Enterprise 2.0 can be dramatic, but only builds steadily over time. Adoption and habits also take time to form and it’s quite typical to see 6 months go by before significant activity begins to take place in the Enterprise 2.0 platforms in an organization.
The most important aspect of all of this is that the enterprise needs to loosen up a bit. Intranets have always been about the Draconian control of information –we publish, you consume. This is changing.
This is more a philosophical than technical change, and that’s what makes it hard. We roll out new platforms all the time. But changing our state of mind is like losing sight of the shore.