I’m not satisfied with my earlier definition of Enterprise 2.0, so let’s propose a refinement (I’m sorry if this feels a bit pedantic, but clear constructs are important to academics):

Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.

Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities. (Wikipedia’s definition).

Platforms are digital environments in which contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time.

Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people’s interactions become visible over time.

Freeform means that the software is most or all of the following:

• Optional
• Free of up-front workflow
• Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities
• Accepting of many types of data

Examples of Enterprise 2.0

• DrKW’s internal blogs and wikis
• Rite Solutions’ prediction markets
• Enterprise tagging
• R&D departments’ use of Innocentive to find solutions to problems that have been stumping them.
• MK Taxi’s ability to connect mobile phone users in Tokyo directly to the driver of the cab closest to them, bypassing the dispatch center altogether.
• Employee blogs like this one

Not examples of Enterprise 2.0

• Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, etc.  These are for individuals on the Web, not companies.  Some companies use sites like YouTube for viral and stealth marketing, but let’s explicitly put these activities outside our definition of Enterprise 2.0.
• Most corporate Intranets today.  As discussed earlier, they’re not emergent.
• Groupware and information portals.  Again, these tools don’t facilitate emergence, although this may be starting to change.  Groupware and portals also seem to be less freeform than the Web 2.0 technologies now starting to penetrate the firewall.
• Email and ‘classic’ instant messaging, because transmissions aren’t globally visible or persistent.  Some messaging technologies do ensure that contributions are persistent.

How does this sound?  Is it the right definition?  Let us know.

The issue of ‘Web 2.0 vs. SOA’ has been getting a lot of coverage recently (Michael Platt’s Weblog has a good summary of posts on the topic).  I’d like to narrow the discussion by focusing on the differences between SOA (service-oriented architecture) and Enterprise 2.0.  

Many people have pointed out that unclear definitions in this arena make clear comparisons difficult, so let’s start by defining terms.  SOA first:

From xml.com:  SOA is an architectural style whose goal is to achieve loose coupling among interacting software agents. A service is a unit of work done by a service provider to achieve desired end results for a service consumer. Both provider and consumer are roles played by software agents on behalf of their owners.

From whatis.com:  SOA defines how two computing entities, such as programs, interact in such a way as to enable one entity to perform a unit of work on behalf of another entity. Service interactions are defined using a description language. Each interaction is self-contained and loosely coupled, so that each interaction is independent of any other interaction.

A whole additional page of SOA definitions is here, and they’re all fairly consistent.  SOA is a modular software architecture, and the modules are pieces of code designed to interact with each other.  

Now, since I was the first to write extensively about Enterprise 2.0¹ I feel I’m entitled to define it:

Enterprise 2.0 is the use of freeform social software within companies.

‘Freeform’ in this case means that the software is most or all of the following:

• Optional
• Free of up-front workflow
• Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities
• Accepting of many types of data

‘Social’ means that there’s always a person on at least one end of the wire with Enterprise 2.0 technologies.  With wikis, prediction markets, blogs, del.icio.us, and other Web 2.0 technologies with clear enterprise applications people are doing all the interacting and providing some or all of the content; the IT is just doing housekeeping and/or bookkeeping.

Jeff Nolan insightfully points out that Web 2.0 is greatly aided by things like scripting and REST architectures, and I agree that Enterprise 2.0 applications are a lot easier to use if users can drag and drop and do other cool AJAX-enabled things from within the browser.  But to me these components aren’t even enabling technologies, since Enterprise 2.0 could happen without them.  They’re clearly accelerating technologies, but keep in mind that the first wiki was built in 1994 and put on the Web in 1995, well before the initial XML spec was submitted. 

Programmers could build fully-functional wikis, blogs, tagging systems, and prediction markets by carving them out of solid COBOL and serving them through the first Netscape browser.  They’d be clunky, but they’d work.  And I bet they’d draw users, too, because they’d tap into our desire to use technology to interact with each other, and also tap into the good stuff that emerges when we do so.  As I wrote earlier, I think of Web 2.0 as the era when technologists really woke up to this;  Enterprise 2.0 will be the era when business leaders join them. 

A big part of the reason that Enterprise 2.0 tools work so well is that whatever information processing shortcomings we humans have, we are extremely flexible, tolerant of minor errors, able to react on the fly and interpolate missing data, and eager for spontaneity and serendipity. 

Absolutely none of those things are true of computers.  They remain, to use Joseph Campbell’s great phrase "like Old Testament gods:  lots of rules and no mercy."

SOA is largely about getting these rules in place up front so that subsequent computer-computer interactions become easier.  Lots of writing about SOA has stressed the need for ex ante standards, centralization, and governance.  In fact, most thoughtful writers about SOA spend much more time discussing philosophies and approaches than they do tools and technologies (they all acknowledge, though, that a few advances like XML have been tremendously important).    

So both SOA and Enterprise 2.0 are really philosophies; the former about letting computers interact with each other without humans, the latter about letting humans interact with each other via computers.  And advocates for both say they’re right around the corner, and point to examples on the Internet to buttress their claims.  So what’s the big difference?

To me, one huge difference is the difference in claims vs. evidence between the two.  

When I started my doctorate in 1994 and began trying to educate myself about IT’s impact on business, one of the things I kept reading was that legacy stovepipe systems, legacy spaghetti, point-to-point connections, and all the other prevalent anti-patterns of corporate IT were on the brink of being replaced by modular, loosely coupled, ‘hot-swappable’ pieces of code.  This change was coming about, it was argued, because of a combination of better tools for developers, more common standards, compelling business cases, and philosophy shifts on the part of technologists.

Over the years I kept reading the same article (Heck, I even wrote it once.)  The terms kept changing —  from objects to modules to components to EAI to Web Services to SOA —  but the concepts and arguments were remarkably consistent.  

And while it’s unquestionably become easier over the past twelve years to integrate applications both within and across the firewall, it’s still very, very far from easy.  As a 2005 article I wrote in Sloan Management Review argues, this is essentially because it takes a long time to get all of Campbell’s rules in place, and having 95% of them in place yields the same result — failure — as having 5% of then in place.

Even SOA proponents agree that there’s no recent tech breakthroughs that make it a more achievable vision now than it was before (the Wikipedia entry for SOA states that it’s an evolution, not a revolution).  In fact, most proponents take pains to say that the philosophy is highly technology-independent.  

So I’m really not sure why we should greet SOA with reduced skepticism compared to its direct predecessors.  Are technology buyers only now aware of the benefits of loose coupling?  Are they suddenly less pressed for time on integration projects, and so more inclined to trade off short term efficiency for potential long-term benefits?  Has IT governance suddenly become much more centralized, to the point that SOA approaches can be effectively mandated?  

Are technology sellers now more willing to put aside their differences and make their offerings truly interoperable (and therefore more interchangeable)?  Have standards bodies gained more enforcement power or clout than they had before?

Claims about the power and benefits of SOA and its predecessors have been running ahead of reality for years.  Claims about the power and benefits of freeform social software, on the other hand, mostly cropped up in the wake of real-world examples.

It’s true that predictions about Enterprise 2.0 are to date running ahead of the reality behind most firewalls, but at least we Enterprise 2.0 proponents have several up-and-running, powerful, productive, and worldwide examples that we can point to and say "See — that’s what I mean!"  If SOA proponents can only point to public APIs and mashups (cool and productive though they are), I think that makes the case about how far the vision is from the reality.

A second difference between SOA and Enterprise 2.0 (which I think is closely connected to the first one) is that a service oriented architecture has to be imposed up front, while an Enterprise 2.0 environment emerges over time.  Imposing structure takes time.  It also takes a great deal of thoroughness, tenacity, and attention to detail, and a clear vision of where you want to go.  Letting structure emerge requires none of these; it requires only a few mechanisms to let patterns and structure become apparent.

I want to stress again:  I don’t believe that imposed structure is necessarily bad, or Orwellian, or misguided.  I got started studying technologies that impose structure, and I still think they’re incredibly useful tools for business leaders.  But I do think it’s critical for leaders to be clear about when they’re imposing structure and when they’re letting it emerge.  And considering SOA and Enterprise 2.0 to be somehow parallel philosophies, or two sides of the same coin, is a great way to lose that clarity.  

¹I thought I coined the phrase ‘Enterprise 2.0′ but tag searching on Technorati shows me that the UK Internet consultant Stuart Eccles posted about ‘Enterprise2.0′ on February 20, 2006.  My first post on Enterprise 2.0 appeared on March 24, 2006.

When I talk about Enterprise 2.0 with company management teams, industry groups, and executive education students I usually start by asking people to raise their hands if it’s easier for them to find what they want on their company’s Intranet than it is on the public Internet.  

No one has ever raised their hand.

I then ask them to think about how strange this is.  Their Intranets are infinitesimally small compared to the Internet, and they’re also usually built and maintained over time by well-paid professionals.  At many larger companies, in fact, the Intranet is the responsibility of a dedicated group whose job is to organize the site and make things easy to find.

I next ask how people find what they’re looking for on the Internet.  Everyone responds "Google." (most people are polite enough to refrain from adding "duh.")

At this point I use all the classic case-method teacher techniques (standing still, cocking my head to one side, looking puzzled, scratching my scalp, etc.) to tip people off that the big question is coming.  "But hold on —  doesn’t your Intranet also have search capability?  Isn’t there a little ’search’ box up in the corner of each page?  Why doesn’t it work as well?  What’s so great about Google?"

This is a great question for getting the nerds in any group to self-identify.  They explain to their colleagues that Google returns www.hbs.edu as the first result when searching for ‘harvard business school’ not because the HBS home page features those three words more prominently or frequently than any other page (think how easy it would be to game that system), but because it’s the page apparently about ‘harvard business school’ that’s most frequently linked to, especially by other sites that are themselves frequently linked to.

This system, which is at the heart of Google’s PageRank algorithm (and therefore also at the heart of its $111 billion market capitalization), has some desirable properties:

• It gives most of us what we’re looking for most of the time.
• It’s hard to game (but not impossible)
• It gets better as the Internet gets bigger
• It relies heavily on people.  Not people at Google —  PageRank is automatic —  but page builders all over the Internet who insert links to other pages.  Over time, lots of these people have linked to www.hbs.edu.  In other words, www.hbs.edu has a lot of backlinks.  This high volume of backlinks is what places www.hbs.edu at the top of Google’s results for ‘harvard business school.’   

Google’s founders realized that even though the Internet is extremely decentralized the Web still has a huge amount of structure thanks to links.  This structure can be exploited not just for navigation (i.e. hopping from page to page via links) but also for search.  Links provide so much structure, in fact, that the Web appears to us to be a very orderly place; we can find what we want on it.  

The point of the Q&A described at the top of this post is to highlight how remarkable this is.  As the Web was gaining steam about ten years ago its advocates (myself included) predicted that it would bring many kinds of benefits.  Easy-as-falling-off-a-log searchability, however, wasn’t one of them.  In fact, I recall a lot of handwringing about how we were ever going to be able to stay on top of it as it grew and changed.

What we didn’t realize is that thanks to links the Web is very much like an ant colony.  

Ant colonies are also highly decentralized, but they appear tightly orchestrated.  Colonies have complex social structures and use sophisticated strategies to forage, defend themselves, and make war.   This happens because each ant is ‘programmed’ by its DNA to do certain things (carry an egg, fight an intruder, go to where food is) in response to local signals (usually chemical scents from other ants, eggs, intruders, food, etc.).  As ants interact with each other and their environment they send and receive signals, and these low-level activities yield high-level structure. 

Complexity science uses the term emergent to describe systems like this.  Emergence is the appearance of global structure as the result of local interactions.  It doesn’t happen in most systems; what’s necessary is a set of mechanisms to do critical things like connect the system’s elements and provide feedback among them.

The Web’s emergent nature doesn’t stem from the fact that it’s a huge collection of digital documents; if the Library of Congress were digitized tomorrow and put on line, it would not constitute an emergent system.  The Web is emergent because it’s the dynamic creation of countless people around the world interacting with each other via links as they create new content. 

This is a key difference between the public Internet and  private Intranets.  Public Web sites are built by millions of people, while most Intranets are built and maintained by a small group.  Emergence requires large numbers of actors and interactions, but Intranets are produced by only a few people (even though they are passively consumed by many.).  In addition, most Intranet pages aren’t as heavily interlinked as pages on the Internet.   

Another important difference is that Web 2.0 has accelerated the rate of emergence on the public Internet.  I think of Web 2.0 tools and technologies as accomplishing two important goals:  increasing the number of people who are contributing content (and the ease with which they can do it), and increasing the number of ways to let content creators (and consumers) interact with each other.  These new interactions are the further mechanisms, beyond linking, for emergence —  for letting patterns and structure emerge from low-level behavior.

Tagging, as implemented on del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, Yahoo’s My Web, etc., is a new and clearly powerful way to let structure emerge.  Tagging, like linking, fulfills all the standard criteria for emergence:

1. It’s conducted by many agents spread all over the Internet
2. These agents are acting independently and with great autonomy.  I don’t pick my tags from any pre-defined list; I make up whatever ones are useful to me. 
3. Agents are also acting in their own self-interest.  My del.icio.us tags help me navigate my own bookmarks.  The fact that they help reveal the Web’s structure to everyone else is peripheral to me, but central to the value of del.icio.us for everyone else.
4. The high-level structure of the del.icio.us folksonomy (which changes over time, and is visible in its wonderful and intuitive cloud views) can’t be predicted by observing low-level activities.  My tags, in other words, won’t tell you anything about what’s going on across del.icio.us as a whole, just as watching a single ant won’t tell you what the entire colony is up to.  Complexity science uses the term ‘irreducible’ to describe this sharp disconnect between low-level behaviors and high-level structure.

I also think automatic signaling mechanisms like RSS (that alert users when new content has been added to pages of interest) help foster emergence.  Signals are another type of interaction between people and content, but with an interesting inversion.  With links and tags, the person initiates the interaction; with RSS, the content does.  Signals also meet all four of the criteria listed above.  

In addition to tags and signals, online tools like Digg and the recently announced Google Co-op (briefly explained here) also accelerate emergence.  Digg lets users vote on the merit of news stories, and Google Co-op provides a means to let people tell Google what different sites are about —  what their content is.  Google then uses that information to help guide searchers more precisely.  

However, tools like these don’t meet criterion #3 above.  They’re not about people acting in their own self interest, they’re about people doing things for the good of the community.  That’s not a bad thing at all; look at how powerful and helpful user ratings and reviews are at eCommerce sites like Amazon, and how willing people are to build up eBay’s community by rating buyers and sellers.  Reliance on altruism, though, does lead me to suspect that contributions to Digg and Google Co-op might grow more slowly than tags, links, and RSS subscriptions.

But things might well be different within the enterprise.  As I’ve argued previously in this blog, employees in healthy companies are much more interdependent than strangers scattered across the Internet, and should also have a greater shared sense of mission.  In addition, business leaders have the two powerful behavior-shaping tools of incentives and culture at their disposal.  The cultures of Wikipedia, Digg, and other online communities grew up around the technology; within companies, culture already exists.

This implies that companies’ Intranets might be able to take faster and deeper advantage of all the mechanisms of online emergence than the broad public Internet.  It’s not hard to imagine that teams of employees would start linking, tagging, subscribing to feeds, providing ratings, describing the content of both internal and external pages, etc.  Perhaps the Intranet could even become a point of pride among employees, or an important part of the identity of the company.  It’s also easy to imagine that the function of the Intranet group might shift from generating largely static and sparsely interlinked content to assisting the organization and navigation of employee-generated content.

A bit of tech work is required to enable this vision, but nothing too strenuous.  What’s going to be much more difficult is explaining these tools to employees who are very accustomed to working with Web 1.0 Intranets.  Everything I’ve seen indicates that the ‘activation energy’ required to get the current workforce comfortable with Web 2.0 tools, and so to create Enterprise 2.0, is pretty high.  My executive education students usually have a deer-in-the-headlights look when we start talking about the new tools.

However, I’ve also heard and seen firsthand that once people do finally comprehend and get comfortable with the new generation of tools it becomes very difficult to stop them.  These really are ratchet technologies, but they’re not intuitive to those of us who have spent more than a decade working with Web 1.0.  Give us a bit of time and a bit of help to get used to them, though, and watch what emerges.  

As I think about online emergence a couple questions come up.  Please leave us a comment if you have any insight on any of the following:
 

• Are there other mechanisms of online emergence in addition to the ones discussed here?  
• What companies/organizations are doing the most advanced work to bring Web 2.0 inside the firewall?  I’ve heard about Motorola, the BBC, Microsoft, and IBM, and I’ve written about internal blogs and wikis at DrKW.  But these can’t be the only examples.  Who else is doing interesting and instructive work in this area?
• What are the best ways to get a Web 1.0 workforce comfortable using Web 2.0 tools?

My posts on Enterprise 2.0 have stressed that its component technologies let structure emerge over time, rather than imposing it front as Enterprise IT does.  Enterprise 2.0, however, does not mean that business leaders surrender all of their previous levers of control.  It also doesn’t mean that IT is now bad if it imposes structure up front.

There remain plenty of good reasons to impose structure via IT —  to demonstrate compliance with laws and regulations, to ensure that best practices are followed with 100% fidelity, to increase ‘analyzability,’ to hand off grunt work from people to computers, etc. —  and these reasons do not go away or become less important simply because of the appearance of a new set of technologies.

What does get called into question by Enterprise 2.0 is the assumption that collaboration IT  needs to be thoroughly ’set up’ in advance.  When I look at a lot of corporate collaboration technologies after spending time at Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Flickr, and Blogger I am struck by how regimented, inflexible, and limited the corporate stuff seems, because it does some or all of the following:

• Gives users identities before they start using the technology.  These identities assign them certain roles, privileges, and access rights, and exclude them from others.  These identities almost always also place them within the existing organizational structure and formal corporate hierarchy.
• Contains few truly blank pages.  Instead, it has lots of templates — for meetings, for project tracking, for documents and reports, etc.
• Has tons of explicit or implicit workflow –  sequences of tasks that must be executed in order.

• Wikipedia is the world’s largest reference work, and its factual accuracy is close to that of Encyclopedia Britannica.  I’ve followed the debate about the Nature study that underlies that statement, and I still find it a fair statement.
• The Iowa Electronic Markets have been consistently more accurate than professional nationwide polls in predicting US election winners.
• Folksonomies provide powerful, accurate, and dynamic categorizations of many kinds of content. 
• Peer rating systems let good products and content rise above the din.