Nick Carr had some thoughts about my Enterprise 2.0 article and post on the same topic. As always, he got to the heart of the matter, and it’s worth quoting him at some length:
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."’
My enthusiasm and cautious optimism about these tools stems from the fact that they’re already being used heavily and delivering huge amounts of value. This usage right currently takes place almost exclusively on the public Internet; Enterprise 2.0 is my shorthand for these tools’ migration behind the firewall.
If you believe that this migration won’t take place, you believe essentially that companies — interdependent groups of people with a common mission and a profit motive — are less able or less likely to engage in free-form collaboration than the mass of previously independent volunteer freelancers that have made Wikipedia, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, del.icio.us, Digg, etc. so powerful and successful.
My article and Carr’s post emphasized one reason why employees might be less likely than Web surfers to use blogs, wikis, tags, RSS, etc.: they’ve got too many other things to do. It’s very reasonable to believe that most busy professionals are only going to blog if it helps them get their job done. But it’s also pretty reasonable to conclude that blogging will do exactly that.
Lots of knowledge workers spend lots of their time on two activities: keeping their colleagues appraised of what they’re doing, what progress has been made, what they’ve learned/concluded, etc. and trying to locate resources within their own organizations — facts, references, work that’s already been done, people with relevant smarts or experience, etc. Blogs (like the other Enterprise 2.0 tools) can help with the first of these tasks, and in doing so also help with the second. It’s not too farfetched to envision companies in which people use Enterprise 2.0 tools to report progress, collaborate, and share the outputs of these collaborations. These same people would probably also search the company’s internal ‘collabosphere’ — the collection of blogs, wikis, group-level instant messages, tags, etc. — early and often in any effort.
In short, I completely agree that most workers these days feel busy, and hard-pressed to keep up with both demand and supply of information. The tools of Enterprise 2.0 can help do both.
I can think of two other plausible reasons that Enterprise 2.0 will not become a widespread phenomenon. First, most companies might not have a sufficiently long tail. Chris Anderson brought the statistical concept of the long tail into the realm of business, where he applied it to product demand. Most books that Amazon sells have very low demand, but because there are so many such books (book demand, in other words, has a long tail) it makes great sense for Amazon to offer them all (especially if they don’t have to own the inventory themselves). The cumulative sales of many, many low demand books (yellow in the picture below) will be greater than the total sales of the few blockbusters (red in the picture).
A Long-tailed Distribution
I think there’s also a long tail among people, and it relates not to willingness to consume (i.e. demand) but rather to willingness to produce. In November of 2005, the most recent month for which comprehensive stats are available, Wikipedia had over 850,000 articles in English, and 2.9 million across all languages (including more than 10,000 in Esperanto). This content was generated by fewer than 50,000 contributors in English, and 103,000 total.
A ‘contributor’ is defined by Wikipedia as someone with a user ID who’s made at least ten total edits. Anonymous and more casual participants are certainly important at Wikipedia, but it’s my understanding that the bulk of actual content comes from the population of contributors (please correct me if this is wrong). And even this population is skewed: active English wikipedians (more than 5 contributions in a month) numbered 15,600 last November, and very active (100 or more) numbered only 2081.
The Internet lets Amazon aggregate demand for books at the end of the long tail, and thereby profit. The Net also lets Wikipedia aggregate supply from people at the end of the long tail of willingness to produce, and we all profit. But these people are a tiny, tiny fraction of all Internet users.
If companies only get the same fraction of Intranet users to use Enterprise 2.0 tools, these tools will be roundly and rightly acclaimed as failures. Business leaders have to find ways to increase the ‘ambient percentage’ of internal wikipedians, bloggers, taggers, etc. well beyond what we’ve observed so far on the public Internet. Demonstrating that these tools will increase productivity, decrease workload, and put hours back in the week will certainly help, but I wonder if such demonstrations will be enough.
Perhaps the biggest leverage business leaders have in encouraging Enterprise 2.0 is that maddeningly vague word culture. If they can convince their organizations that using and contributing to the internal collabosphere is part of the fabric, identity, and life of the company, some interesting things will happen.
The third reason to be pessimistic about Enterprise 2.0, however, is also culture, especially as it’s defined and shaped over time by business leaders. If these leaders signal that they really don’t want open, freeform, and emergent collaboration, they really won’t get it. I predict that the diffusion of these tools is going to sharpen differences among companies as some work to foster the new styles, modes, and practices of collaboration and others work (subtly or overtly) to squelch them.
What do you think? What are the other impediments to Enterprise, and how (if at all) can they be overcome? Leave a comment and tell us what you think.
{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
Cautious optimism seems like the correct approach.
That said, I think a reason for optimism is the extent to which today’s startups live on Enterprise 2.0 platforms. Nick Denton makes this point effectively here. If these IT solutions work for startups, it’s likely that the big guys will eventually find similar benefits.
This Zdnet post on the adoption of blogs and wikis in Motorola is a case to look at.This seems to be model that is perfectly bottomup with minimal intervention from the management.The CIO claims about 4000 of the 65000 employees contribute to the system which in my view is fantastic.
Here is a related podcast.
“theyÂ’ve got too many other things to do. ItÂ’s very reasonable to believe that most busy professionals are only going to blog if it helps them get their job done. But itÂ’s also pretty reasonable to conclude that blogging will do exactly that.” Exactly, on both counts. The ‘too many things to do’ is an energy barrier that needs to be overcome. Not always easy, but what makes me very optimistic is that when you do breach that inertia, these tools really are as easy to use as it ‘says on the box.’ For anyone. Not just techno-geeks, not just Generation M. And the energy barrier declines over time as a tipping point is reached…indeed I think we are getting close at DrKW and in some business lines are already past it. And the benefits to an information worker – once they’ve tried it – are so immediate and compelling that it becomes natural and part of the furniture very quickly: I honestly can’t conceive of going back to working without the wiki. And for all intents and purposes , wide adoption only began 6-7 months ago! As for the long tail argument, I actually think you are too pessimistic. While Enterprise2.0 probably doesn’t survive with the 15k/2k to 2 billion power-contributor-ratio of wikipedia, to use your wikipedia example of ‘regular’ and ‘power’ users, I firmly believe that 90% of the benefits of these tools start kicking in with as little as 10% and 1% staff participation respectively and these % drop as the organization grows. (ie imo in large companies (5000+ employees)there is a minimum absolute number of active users (50-100 power users and 500-ish regular users.) As to your last point, I agree (that it is the key risk) but think leaders that take this attitude will lead their companies down a blind alley (have commented further on my blog).
There is defintely a potential of these web 2.0 technologies, but selling these as “soft” tools might bring lead to it’s early demise. Unless we can attach some hard benefits against these tools, they might bite the dust as with so many other KM tools. The objective will be to show how these tools can enable enterprises to connect with the wider “macro trends” happening across the business environment; e.g. emrgence of prosumers, power to the individual, communities to create etc? Have commented further in my blog.
Wouldn’t you think the Long Tail is another expression of Pareto’s Law?
Just like Surowieki’s Wisdom of Crowds the masses might determine the eventual commercial applications but there is also the idea that winning-by-usage (such as why Wickipedia will win out over paid content of Encyclopedia Britannica) and freeware/shareware will get the leading edge.
We have successfully implemented enterprise 2.0 tools (blogs, podcasts, and aggregation systems)in a program for a global financial services firm. We started by swapping out poorly functioning course management platforms and email listservs and replacing then with weblogs and aggregators. These tools support a program on innovation that is its own little counterculture within the larger culture. But we have demonstrated that the enterprise 2.0 tool set is more likely to yield results in terms of innovative projects where the return can be measured. We have also given everyone who participates a video iPod to receive an ongoing podcasting series on innovation.
Now the challenge is expanding the enterprise 2.0 tool set beyond the pilot program. With this clearly defined and measurable success, we have a chance….
Andrew, take a look at my thoughts after reading your article and Nick’s post:
http://www.basement.org/archives/2006/04/sneaking_web_20_into_the_enter.html
I try to speak to many of the same issues you raise.
I believe that many of these tools will, in the long run, have a big impact on large corporations, but the will not be easily “implemented” in the strutures/organizations we have today.
An organization with the approach that these tools should fit “within” an organization, will not get much out of their implementations.
The real value we are seeing now is that knowledge workers within specific fields can find each other and collaborate and communicate regardless of organizational belonging.
I like to compare these tools to the telephone or email, it might give you benefits within an organization, but the real benefits comes when the tools belong not to an organization but an individual.
It will be interesting how organizations will manage to balance openess/creativity versus control.
Conceptually, Enterprise 2.0 addresses many requirements of the DoD’s Horizontal Fusion Portfolio. The needs of Dynamic Communities of Interest aligns nicely with the collaborative environment and toolset. I wonder if anyone can ever realize the benefits with such strict requirements for authentication and secrecy?
Mike, while I can well imagine that defence and security enviroments might well have the most stringent authentication and secrecy requirements, banking and especially investment banking face many of the same issues – both from a reputational and regulatory point of view. Our experience so far has been that social media are in that sense ‘just another tool’ and as we have always had to adapt our policies and technologies to new media, we are doing the same with these new tools. Indeed I would hazard to say that so far it has been easier to adapt these policies and (perhaps even more importantly) behaviors to blogs and wikis that it was (or continues to be) wrt email. One, these technologies are identity driven and so authentication and identification is (relatively) easy to integrate (both from a technological and usage point of view)and two, the intrinsically ‘public’ nature of these channels leads people either subconciously or conciously to be ‘smarter’ about what they post or communicate and where. I’m not suggesting that we’ve solved or even encountered all the potential pitfalls but our approach so far has been: start with the premise that information is public (within the firm) until it isn’t (easier than assuming everything is in silos and then trying to extract what is ok to be public) and when dealing with the most sensitive areas (ie corporate finance, m&a) starting out with very small well controlled experiments and then expanding when everyone is 100% sure that the technology/policies are robust (in terms of protecting confidential information and respecting chinese walls.) It is early days, and this is just a gut feeling on my part, but my suspicion is that by creating these ‘natural’ but well defined communication channels we will actually lower the risk of accidental (restricted) information leakage inside the firm, and in so doing reduce our operational risk. Hope this helps.
Web 2.0 is a new technology developed recently with some additional facilities which has successful uses for knowledge management. It has reduced workerÂ’s tension up to some extent help both demand and supply of information which ultimately helps to improve productivity.
Web 2.0 is a new technology developed and I believe the same that the diffusion of these tools is going to sharpen differences among companies
Ways to make money
Web 2.0 is a new technology developed and definitely sharpen the effectiveness of the companies.
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I have not much time, but I’ve got many useful things here, love it!
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