The good people writing at Sandhill.com seem bound and determined to define Enterprise 2.0 as broadly as possible.  First there were posts by M.R. Rangaswami and Vinnie Mirchandani in September of this year.  Rangaswami wrote that:

"Enterprise 2.0 is the synergy of a new set of technologies, development models and delivery methods that are used to develop business software and deliver it to users."

I argued against this use of the phrase after I came across it, partly because I feel proprietary of the phrase I helped coin.  Naturally, I’d like to see my definition, which centers on the use of social software platforms within enterprises, become the dominant one.  So it’s hard to watch others stretch the original definition to accommodate other concepts.

However, I also responded as I did to M.R and Vinnie (whose opinion I’ve come to respect a lot) because I felt that we’d lose the attention of non-IT business leaders as soon as we defined E2.0 as anything except the process of using the new social tools within companies.  There’s a large role for business leaders in this process, and I’ve found that they’re willing, even eager, to discuss what that role is. 

They’re a lot less eager to hear about software as a service, open source development methods, and offshoring.  Their eyes glaze over when these topics come up, and I can almost hear them think "We have an IT department so I don’t have to think about these things."  

Earlier today a colleague wrote "Well it doesn’t take long in IT for any new term that gets any play to get totally hijacked.  Here’s a new extreme for totally redefining Enterprise 2.0" and pointed me to this post at Sandhill.com by Philip Lay.  He writes:

"[T]he three main pillars of Enterprise 2.0 [are] open source programming languages such as the interactive web application development tool Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript & XML), the increasing number of SaaS offerings, and the highly anticipated appearance of hundreds of SOA application modules in the form of re-usable web services."

This definition contains no trace of or allusion to human interaction with technology, which is the core of what I and others have been talking about under the rubric of ‘Enterprise 2.0.’  Lay’s definition consists of three trends: a software development approach (open source), a software delivery approach (software as a service, or SaaS) and a systems integration approach (service-oriented architecture, or SOA).  

Two of these three — SaaS and open source — have nothing to do with changing how a company operates; they’re simply about different and hopefully lower IT cost structures.  SOA is about modular reuse and recombination of code.

As a result, there’s very little in Lay’s definition for a non-IT business leader to get excited about, or to act on.  And yet even without business leader involvement, Lay’s Enterprise 2.0 will yield the following benefits:

"Enterprise 2.0… encapsulates long-held aspirational goals for business and government organizations that wish to become truly responsive to their customers and partners using the most leading-edge information technologies available today. Thus, concepts such as the "real-time" enterprise, as well as advanced "inter-enterprise collaboration", finally become more achievable, at least in theory."

Lay does admit that this will take time:

"Enterprise 2.0 – or, if you prefer, the concept of the real-time, inter-personal, proactive, truly customer-focused enterprise enabled by the best services-based software technologies available today – … will take a decade or so for the changes in business models and operating approaches to take shape."

but the words "at least in theory" above are the only indication in his column that (his definition of) Enterprise 2.0 is anything but a foregone conclusion.

I may be missing something fundamental, but how are Lay’s three developments, even in combination, supposed to lead to a "inter-personal, proactive, truly customer-focused enterprise" that is "truly responsive to… customers and partners"?

I completely fail to see how buying applications that are written in an open source community instead of within a corporation, and/or renting them as a service instead of running them on internal servers, leads to any higher levels of pro-activeness, customer intimacy, responsiveness, etc.

Some think that SOA is a different story.  Proponents of SOA / Web Services / the Semantic Web say huge benefits will be realized as applications become more modularized, re-combinable, and hot-swappable, but as Lay acknowledges "the proposed [SOA] standards relative to vital components such as UDDI and other registries, plus repositories, WSDL, XML markup language, and other protocols expected to navigate between legacy and new applications, have yet to become widely accepted or broadly deployed."

I’d go a lot further than that.  As I wrote in Sloan Management Review a while back, I think this vision is quite distant, if not unattainable.  Systems integration is, for the foreseeable future, going to continue to be slow, painstaking work undertaken only by companies that know they’re going to be doing a lot of business together for some time to come.

IT advocates too often make claims about technologies that are disproportionate to, or even divorced from, what the technologies  actually do.  Is it any wonder, then, that the IT-business dialog is so tenuous and marked by skepticism, and that IT so rarely has a real seat at the table during strategic discussions?  How long should we expect businesspeople to believe technologists’ assertions that a brave new world is at hand, and that it can be inhabited after one more set of trends comes to fruition?

This is clearly an interesting time for corporate information technology, and open source code, SaaS, SOA, and Enterprise 2.0 (as I defined it) are all important trends.  But conflating them, warping them, and overpromising their impact seem like excellent ways to ensure that they’re soon perceived as failures, rather than successes.

I don’t quite know what to do about the fact that my phrase has been co-opted in this way, beyond pointing it out and arguing against it.  I’ll have to ask Clay Christensen what he does every time he hears someone say "we’ve got a disruptive technology" when they really mean "we’ve got a technology we want you to buy."

After I posted on Avenue A | Razorfish’s Enterprise 2.0 Intranet, a few commenters pointed out a potentially troublesome feature.  When employees (or anyone else, for that matter) add the tag ‘AARF’ in del.icio.us, Flickr, or Digg, the so-tagged items show up within the company’s Intranet.  The intent of this feature, as I wrote, is to let employees easily and automatically make each other aware of potentially interesting content on the Internet.

Because these ‘AARF’ tags are universally visible, however, other companies can also see them and take advantage of them.  It would be technically straightforward for a competitor to scan del.icio.us, Flickr, and Digg for the ‘AARF’ tag, thereby seeing what Avenue A | Razorfish employees are highlighting for each other.  As Microsoft’s Alex Barnett posted:

"A potential issue to point out here. Since employees are using the AARF tag to share content with other employees and they are doing so on public sites such as del.icio.us, I can also see what AARF employees are bookmarking and sharing with other AARF employees. Is that a good thing? We’ll, it’s good for me . But is that good for AARF? Look, here is a sample. From a cursory look at the AARF tagged bookmarks, I can tell:

• Someone is probably lobbying HR for Starbucks coffee machines at the office (I can’t blame them…)
• Someone is studying Second Life’s audience size, probably as an opportunity to either establish their own presence for the agency, or collating info so they can advise clients
• Someone is trying to figure out the ROI on blogging (rather you than me…)
• Someone is interested in mobile social software apps

Are they giving away company secrets? Lobbying for Starbucks coffee machines, er, probably not. Corporate Second Life plans for AARF? Maybe…"

Avenue A | Razorfish’s Ray Velez responded on my blog:

"anyone can use the aarf tag and associate it with a bookmark. This potentially lets us get information from a larger audience. Which may turn out to be a bigger spam issue more than anything else. The only information that can be gleaned from this is what we think is interesting in terms of websites out there. Check out Alex Barnett’s post for a good explanation and yes I do like Starbucks coffee. If it’s a site we want to keep behind a firewall we can make it private. The tagging algorithm and keywords we use internally to add metadata to wiki content and documents is completely behind the firewall."

This exchange highlights a deep issue around the use of Enterprise 2.0 platforms, which are by their nature more open, transparent, and visible than communication channels like email.  Most of my work has stressed the benefits of using these platforms, but there are also potential drawbacks.  

Perhaps the most obvious of these goes by the label ’security.’  It’s the fear that the wrong content will show up on the platform, and/or that it will be viewed by the wrong people.  The wrong people include competitors, clearly, but also perhaps dishonest employees who would be willing to sell secrets if they have access to them.  They might also include regulators, especially if employees post the wrong content.  For a regulator, this would include information that leaped over a Chinese wall.  

For a boss, there are many more flavors of wrong content —  trade secrets, hate speech, information that gets discovered by the other side’s lawyers, information that becomes a public relations disaster, etc.,  With all these risks, Enterprise 2.0 can seem like more trouble than it’s worth.  In a November 21 story in the Times, for example, a lawyer who advises universities says that blogging by college presidents is ‘an insane thing to do.’  

At the risk of underplaying real security concerns, I want to make a case for a laid-back / laissez faire approach to security and Enterprise 2.0.  The main reason this approach will work is a simple one:  people already know how to behave appropriately, and they’re not going to be driven suddenly wild by the appearance of the new platforms.

They’ve had access to phones, faxes, copiers, USB drives, email, and IM for a while now, and so have had plenty of opportunity to wreak havoc with security.  Despite the existence of these tools, most companies haven’t seen all their secrets made public or been sued out of existence.  Shouldn’t this tell us something about the extent to which people can be trusted to use communication tools appropriately?

Granted, Enterprise 2.0 platforms bring some new challenges.  Foremost among them is probably the fact that contributions to these platforms are intended to be persistent over time and visible to all members.  This implies that training and explicit policies about appropriate and inappropriate contributions might be useful.  But I don’t think it implies that Enterprise 2.0 represents a security risk so large that it should be shunned, or approached only with great caution.

I find it telling that the new communication and collaboration platforms have taken off most quickly in high tech industries despite the huge premium tech companies place on secrecy and protection of intellectual property.  This is partly due to the fact that these companies are full of techies, but it’s also because these firms operate in incredibly dynamic environments and so have particularly acute information sharing needs.  It makes sense, then, that they’d be the first to adopt new tools that let people keep up to date with the latest developments, and with each other.  

Let me end this post by suggesting a thought experiment.  Imagine two competitors, one of which has the guiding principle "keep security risks and discoverability to a minimum," the other of which is guided by the rule "make it as easy as possible for people to collaborate and access each others’ expertise."  Both put in technology infrastructures appropriate for their guiding principles.  Take all IT, legal, and leak-related costs into account.  Which of these two comes out ahead over time?  I know which one I’m betting on.

I put out a call for case studies a while back.  I was looking for examples of deep Enterprise 2.0 penetration –  where freeform social software platforms had become so widely and deeply used that they were no-longer-exceptional parts of the company’s technology infrastructure, and its culture.

Susan Scrupski and Jerry Bowles, two of my fellow Enterprise Irregulars, came across one such example and directed it my way.        

I met yesterday with David Deal, Ray Velez, and Amy Vickers from Avenue A | Razorfish, a 1000 person, $190 million interactive services firm headquartered in Seattle.  AARF helps clients with digital marketing and advertising, with their customer-facing websites, and also with their Intranets and Extranets.  

What I found most interesting about the company was its own Intranet.  To hear David, Ray, and Amy tell it, the company’s traditional static Intranet —  the place where an employee would go to look up benefits information or peruse the latest press releases —  still exists, but has been marginalized by a suite of Enterprise 2.0 tools.  Ray fired up his laptop and showed me the company’s de facto homepage:

Let’s look at this page one section at a time.  The leftmost area of the screen, which is consistent across all of AARF’s E2.0 Intranet pages, is devoted to navigation.  Underneath the search box are two sets of pointers to other pages.  The contents of the top box are imposed, the bottom emergent.  The top box has links to many of the usual suspects:  individuals’ pages, projects, and company information.  Underneath this is a tag cloud.  Employees can tag documents they upload and pages on the Intranet and Internet with helpful words and phrases.  The most popular of these tags show up in the box in alphabetical order, with font size indicating relative popularity.

The middle column consists of two boxes.  The top one is devoted to Internet content, the bottom one to AARF Intranet content.   What Internet content shows up?  AARF has built interfaces to the bookmarking site del.icio.us, the photo sharing site Flickr, and Digg, a site where members vote on the importance of news stories.  All three use tags, or something close.  

AARF employees have learned to add the tag ‘AARF’ when they come across a web page (using del.icio.us), a photo (Flickr), or a news story (Digg) that they think will be of interest to their colleagues.  Shortly after they add this tag, the bookmark (look at the top of the box), thumbnail of the photo (middle) or headline and description of the story (bottom) show up within the AARF E2.0 Intranet.  So AARF has found a fast and low-overhead way to let its employees share Internet content with each other.  It’s also free; these interfaces with del.icio.us, Flickr, and Digg require no fees and no permissions.  I find this simply brilliant.

The bottom box in the middle of the page shows most recent documents uploaded to and pages created on the company’s Intranet.  Since the E2.0 Intranet is essentially a wiki, anyone can create a new page.  AARF uses the free, open source MediaWiki wiki software.  This software is not WYSIWYG, so users need to be comfortable with the MediaWiki markup language.  

The rightmost section of the page shows the most recent blog posts.  At AARF, these include emails to group mailing lists, which are automatically posted to a bloglike page.

Obviously, this is a highly dynamic page where most content doesn’t stick around long.  Only the leftmost part of the page remains at all constant over time; the rest of it churns constantly.  In other words, it’s definitely not the place to go to find any specific piece of Intranet content.  So how popular and useful can it be?  

Highly popular, and highly useful.  I find that the sites I visit most often these days are ones that give me ‘the latest.’  They help me stay on top of (or at least feel like I’m staying on top of) the world, the blogosphere, and my personal network of people and content.  This page does the same thing at the company level for AARF employees.  It gives them ‘the latest’ about their work environment.  And it does so in a bottom-up and egalitarian fashion.  This page doesn’t contain the latest information that the company’s senior managers, or its IT staffers, think employees should know about; it contains the latest information that employees think employees should know about.

But what about navigating all the rest of AARF’s Intranet content?  Shouldn’t the home page help with that?  If that search box in the upper left works well enough, it does.  I believe the Googlers when they say "search is the navigation paradigm."  I bet that most people at AARF can quickly get where they want on the Intranet if they start at this page and type a few words into the box.

Other pages on the company’s E2.0 Intranet display the same smart mixture of standardized and freeform content, and other intelligent uses of new tools for wading through lots of content.  Here’s Ray’s personal page:

The content at the top is imported from the company’s directory.  All the stuff underneath he added himself.

Here’s a wiki page.  The graphic in the upper right shows other pages that link to it:

And here’s the page employees use to upload documents.  They can add tags by clicking or typing:

AARF prides itself on its knowledge of how people actually consume and navigate through online content.  As I look at their own E2.0 Intranet, I think this pride might not be misplaced.  This Intranet passed a test I often use to assess technology penetration.  I asked David, Ray, and Amy what would happen if the E2.0 tools were shut down at AARF.  They looked at each other for a second, then all started laughing.  Test passed.

David had the only grey hair in the group, so I asked him if it was difficult for the more senior people at AARF to understand the E2.0 Intranet and contribute effectively to it.  His answer was intriguing.  He said that he had a nephew at college, and the only way he would consent to communicate with David was via Facebook — no email, no IM.  Because of this, AARF’s Intranet was not unfamiliar territory.  His anecdote provided more evidence that newbies think very differently about IT and collaboration, as I wrote earlier.  It also showed me that we oldsters can learn the new modes of collaboration if the incentives are in place.

AARF, of course, is an atypical company in many ways.  It’s full of people who slap together mashups in their spare time (like the one that lets AARF employees enter the addresses of lunch places near their Manhattan office so that they display on a Google Maps).  So its ‘empty quarter‘ of non-adopters is going to be comparatively quite small.  

Still, though, their E2.0 Intranet is a really nice piece of work.  I’m relieved that we finally have a clear case study of deep penetration of Enterprise 2.0 technologies across a sizable company.  And I’m optimistic that this example is a harbinger of things to come.

Slashdot has been a nexus for nerd news, and nerds themselves, for several years now. It summarizes and links to stories and sites, and hosts comments below the summaries. Summaries are proposed by readers, but evaluated and approved by the site’s editors. So there’s a hurdle to get over before content appears on Slashdot, where the slogan is "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." Because of the site’s popularity and the editorial hurdle, it’s a point of pride in many quarters to have your work ‘slashdotted.’

So I was pleasantly surprised when my recent Harvard Business Review article was summarized there. The self-congratulatory feeling lasted a few hours, until one my colleagues emailed me: "I’ve been looking over the comments on Slashdot; you don’t seem to have a lot of fans there. First Wikipedia and now this — why do people enjoy disagreeing with you so much?"

He was referring to the debate about whether Wikipedia’s "Enterprise 2.0" article should be deleted or not (The end result of this articles for deletion process was that the article should be kept, but an administrator then decided to change its title to "Enterprise social software." ). I participated in the debate (taking a predictable position), and was impressed by the extent to which this debate was about the merits of the article itself, and about the merits of the arguments for keeping or deleting it.

As I looked over the comments appearing beneath HBR article’s summary on Slashdot, in contrast, I wondered how many posters had bothered to read the article at all (this would not have been hard; the full text is available online free of charge during November). And if they had read it, I had a deeper concern: did I not make it clear enough that the article was not in any sense about managing IT professionals or software development efforts?

I was trying to help non-technologist business leaders feel in control and capable when it comes to IT; I was trying to help them get "wired." And as former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte said a little while back, "Being "wired" does not mean becoming "computer literate" any more than driving an automobile requires becoming "combustion literate.""

I agree completely. Most drivers, including very good ones, know little about how their car’s engine works, if the vehicle was assembled using just-in-time techniques, whether or not the manufacturer’s labor practices were particularly enlightened, or where the assembly line was. These are important topics, and of interest to a lot of people (particularly in the auto industry), but they’re just irrelevant to the people driving the cars.

IT products are getting more and more like cars in this respect. Their production can be tidily separated from their use. This is clearly the case for almost all hardware, and also for two of the three IT categories I discussed in the article: function and network IT. Adopting enterprise IT requires extensive configuration work which can edge into coding, so use can’t be completely divorced from production. But it’s getting closer and closer.

I think some of the Slashdot commenters have a point when they say that IT managers, at least for some development activities, need to have good technical chops themselves. Whether or not generalists can manage specialists is something we management educators think a lot about, and I’m often of the mind that they can’t, or at least shouldn’t. It’s part of the reason I don’t try to turn my MBA students into CIOs (another big part of the reason is the fact that most of them don’t want to become CIOs).

But as I read them, most of the /. comments seemed to miss the point that this was not an article about developing technology products. So The Mythical Man Month (great book) isn’t that relevant, nor are PMP certification, ITIL, etc. 

I was puzzled and a little disheartened to see that so few of the comments engaged with the contents of the article at all. "Indeed, the whole article scores a giant, "DUH!"" is as close as most of them came.  

And this brings up an interesting point.  Let’s assume for a minute that the article is in fact completely unoriginal, and does nothing more than summarize and present to businesspeople what’s actually been common knowledge among nerds(a term I’ll keep using, ’cause Slashdot does) for some time.  If this assumption is accurate, what does it imply?

To speak bluntly, it implies some combination of stupidity on the part of the suits inside companies and poor communication skills on the part of nerds.

The belief that suits are stupid was, to put it mildly, detectable in some of the comments:

"[in the ideal world] the IT staff would make the decisions and then tell management/sales/paper pushers what they are to do. Judging by the comments on Slashdot over the years, I am not the only ubergeek that thinks the IT people should be the high paid personnel and the management a*****s should be the underpaid paper pushers that we all know they are."

"For most IT projects you could better categorize them as: "decreases costs and adds efficiency to the business", "increases costs and makes things more difficult", and "is huge Enterprise overhead purchased by someone at the CxO level who’s clueless… Oh wait, that third one falls into the second category, but the magic of "I’m in charge, do what I say" comes into play and suddenly the need to determine whether or not the project is worth the money being spent flys out the window."

"Here are the real parts of IT management:

1) Risk aversion: throw amazing amounts of cash at an external vendor to manage "risk". This way, when something goes wrong, you can point your finger outside of your domain.
2) Kickbacks: because you are throwing tremendous amounts of money around in step #1, you’ll quickly find that the external vendors are willing to throw some back – strictly off the record. They’ll also pay for your prostitutes.
3) Blind decision making: since you’ve paid external vendors to take on the bulk of the risk, there is little reason for your reward (see: risk/reward). This means that you can NOT delegate decisions to the people who have the knowledge to make them as you would be left to do nothing at all. Instead, subscribe to Gartner. They’ll tell you what to do. They’ll even tell you what to do after you realize that what they told you before was wrong (see: outsourcing, buy instead of build, etc).

Rinse and repeat. Posting anonymously for obvious reasons."

The main reason to spend time on comments like these is to reflect on whether they’re actually representative of how IT people think of their roles, and of their colleagues. If they’re representative at all, they go some way toward explaining why the business-IT dialog is so broken. 

The following exchange in the Slashdot comments places a bit more of the onus for improving the dialog on nerds themselves, implying that they need to improve their communications skills:

Initial comment: "I dont think this article says much to the Slashdot audience. It is really targeted at poeple who find IT confusing and needs to get an idea of what it is. It categorises and simplifies – maybe in a useful way for people who need an introduction. But again: not for the slashdot audience. Move on."

Reply: "Or maybe for someone who has been a geek for years and is now coming into the business oriented side of things this is a good read."

When you publish a set of ideas, one happy outcome is widespread agreement about their novelty and acceptance of their importance.  Another welcome outcome is (or, at least, should be) lively debate.  This is what I experienced around Enterprise 2.0 at Wikipedia, and during a back and forth with  Nick Carr around the HBR article.  If both sides in the debate have skins thick enough to tolerate opposing points of view and minds open enough to accommodate them, then real progress can be made.  

I was eager to see what progress could be made around my ideas after they were put in front of the Slashdot community. And I’m sorry to learn that the answer is ‘not much,’ apparently because the article’s ideas aren’t novel enough to merit consideration or debate.  If that’s the case, I hope I’ve at least done the world’s IT professionals a service by writing something they can give to their colleagues on the business side to facilitate communications with them.

Could I ask a favor in return?  Could someone point me to prior work that did what I was trying to do?  At a recent conference on teaching IT to business students, my fellow B School academics largely agreed that we lacked unifying theories and frameworks to help general managers understand the range of things IT can do for them, and the different things they can do for IT.  A lot of my recent work, culminating in the HBR article, has been an attempt to address this lack.  As part of this work, I read and tried to incorporate a lot of prior literature, and didn’t find the ’silver bullet’ article, book, or site that had already accomplished what I was working toward.  Did I miss something?

Lots of recent observations, conversations, case visits, and anecdotes about the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 tools are starting to yield some conclusions.  It seems that when companies make these technologies widely available behind the firewall, the only two groups that quickly start using them are techies and newbies.

‘Newbies’ here means new entrants to the workforce; as I wrote earlier, recent graduates find it natural to socialize, collaborate, and find what they’re looking for via technology platforms (think of MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia, LastFM, del.icio.us, etc.). In addition to point, click, drag, and drop, their baseline computer skills include search, link, tag, and post.

‘Techies’ are IT staffers, and also those people scattered throughout the rest of the company who are the natural early adopters and advanced users of whatever technologies are available. My first job after my MBA was as an operations management consultant. I quickly learned to look around at each new client and find the folk who programmed Excel macros or used Filemaker Pro or Crystal Reports (yes, this was a while ago). They always had the data we needed, or could find it for us. They were the techies, and there were never enough of them.

If these observations are accurate, then a graph with technophobia on one axis and years since graduation on the other reveals who’s more and less likely to use Enterprise 2.0 tools if they’re made available:

The ‘empty quarter‘ of non-adopters is the upper right-hand section of this graph. These are the folk who are relatively unlikely to pick up new tools and run with them. 

But so what? It’s unrealistic to expect 100% adoption of any new technology that’s not mandatory, so there’s always going to be an empty quarter (I have it on good authority, for example, that there are still faculty at Harvard who have their emails printed out and brought to them.). Given this, why should a business leader care about Enterprise 2.0’s empty quarter? After all, it’s only going to shrink over time as newbies continue to enter the workforce. In addition, some of the people in the empty quarter will probably benefit from the new technologies, even if they don’t use them. They might read another employees blog and learn something, for example, even if they don’t blog themselves. So why not just leave the inhabitants of the empty quarter be?

The main reason not to is the fact a huge amount of a company’s accumulated knowledge and expertise resides nowhere else except in the heads of the empty quarter’s inhabitants. And as I and others have argued previously, Enterprise 2.0 technologies are great tools for making this knowledge and expertise more accessible throughout the organization. They do so in two ways. First, they serve as persistent and universally visible (behind the firewall, anyway) repositories of whatever information people have taken the time to enter. Tagging and linking make this information provide structure to this information, making it easier to search and helping the cream rise to the top.

If the inhabitants of the empty quarter just continue to collaborate via email, the information they exchange is not globally persistent or visible, can’t be accessed or referred to by others, and doesn’t stand the chance of becoming part of something bigger and better. It essentially vanishes without a trace. Of course, there are times when this is exactly the goal; we all want the option of communicating through private channels, so we’ll all continue to need email. But when we want to share information it makes great sense to put it up on a blog, wiki, or other Enterprise 2.0 platform rather than emailing to a long list of recipients.

The second way that Enterprise 2.0 tools help propagate knowledge and expertise within a company is simply by letting people find each other. Imagine a company where a lot of people have internal blogs, and where a lot of collaborative work happens via wikis, group spreadsheets, etc. And imagine Google-level search capability on the company’s Intranet. How hard would it be for an employee, even one who had just walked in the door, to quickly find just the right person to bounce an idea off, help with a problem, tell whether a prospective vendor is reliable, or recall what happened the last time a similar project was launched?

The great majority of companies today are far from this scenario because their empty quarters are so large. Are there effective ways to evangelize within it and convert people to Enterprise 2.0 tool use? One strategy is to keep working on the tools themselves, making them more obvious and easy to use. This is certainly a good idea, but I don’t have a lot of confidence that it’ll bear a lot of fruit in the empty quarter. Old habits die hard, and the 9X problem of email is particularly acute among non-techies.

A more promising strategy, I believe, lies at the intersection of coaching, leading by example, and policy-setting. Of these, policy setting is the least obvious and most risky — what would a pro-blogging policy look like, and what would keep it from backfiring? I’ve heard a couple clever examples. A Google employee at a conference I attended, for example, said that employees there sent a short (five line) email to a specific address each week, telling what they’d done. These became part of a searchable archive. 

I haven’t yet been able to verify that this is a widespread practice there, but if it is one of its smartest features is how lightweight it is. A five-line email is perceived as freeform and fast to compose, so it’s not a burdensome requirement.

Other lightweight Enterprise 2.0 policies might include:

• Maintain a blog for your group / department. Identify who’s in charge of it, and update it at least once a week.
• Maintain a blog for each project your lab is working on.  Post whatever non-confidential information you’d like your colleagues to know about each one.
• Keep your personal page up to date.  Make sure it lists your areas and industries of expertise.
• Use the wiki to make sure your portion of the org chart is up to date.

I suspect that these policies will work exactly to the extent that managers follow up on them and see if they’re being followed.  This is where coaching comes in –  the right way to foster adherence to Enterprise 2.0 policies is not by yelling at those who fall behind, but by nudging them a bit and reminding them why it’s important to comply.  And leading by example, of course, is an unparalleled way to build credibility.

What else works?  If you’ve succeeded at evangelizing within the empty quarter in your company, how did you do it?  Leave a comment and let us know.

Nick Carr, Neil Macheiter,  the blogger swardley and others have commented on my recent Harvard Business Review article, the full text of which is available for free online through November.  The article presents a model that non-techie business leaders can use to determine what new IT (if any) they need, and what they need to do to extract maximum value from the technologies they purchase.

Many commenters have pointed out that all models are simplifications, but that ones that are oversimplifications can be useless or harmful.  I don’t think my categorization into function, enterprise, and network IT (FIT, EIT, and NIT, respectively) is an oversimplification.  There remain pretty sharp differences between applications that facilitate tasks (FIT), and those that facilitate interactions (EIT and NIT).  There are also pretty sharp differences between enterprise technologies that pre-define interactions (i.e. that impose new cross-functional business processes), and network technologies that try hard not to (i.e. that let people and groups find their own ways to work together over time.).  

Space limitations in the article prevented me from spending time on category-spanning technologies.  Like Carr, I think such tools are potentially very important and I’ve written about them in a few blog posts.  Google Docs and Spreadsheets,  its acquisition of JotSpot, and the recent Office 2.0 conference all show that the boundary between FIT and NIT is getting quite blurry in some areas.  Generating a best practices document or a financial model is sometimes individual work and sometimes unstructured group work; new tools will let users choose between these two modes as appropriate.  

As I said at the Office 2.0 conference, however, the non-boundary spanning technologies are also very important, and are going to remain so.  In particular, ‘pure’ EIT and NIT are going to continue to be important; there will be times when business leaders want to use technology to impose lots of structure (for example, when they want to completely specify an end-to-end business process), and times when they want structure to emerge entirely on its own (for example, when they want to set up a prediction market).  

Carr makes the excellent point that a lot of companies have stopped treating CRM as an enterprise technology and started treating it as a function technology that helps individual salespeople do their jobs better.  In other words, they stopped using it to impose cross-functional interactions, and started using it to facilitate the work of a single group of employees, namely the salesforce.  

I actually see this example as supporting my categorization, not undermining it.  The label ‘CRM’ has become so broad as to be useless, because it now encompasses both task-facilitating technologies (the currently popular ones) and interaction-facilitating technologies (the historically less successful ones).  So my point is that business leaders should ignore vendor- and media-defined technology labels, and focus instead on what they want IT to do for them —  facilitate the work of a single group (FIT), impose structured interactions / business process across multiple groups (EIT), or let groups interact without imposing structure on them (NIT).  I did obscure this point a bit, however, by blithely including ‘CRM’ as a clear-cut example of Enterprise IT in the table in my article.  As Carr points out, it’s not nearly so clear cut any more.  

As a few people have pointed out, the classification into FIT, EIT, and NIT is only part of the article.  I tried hard to make sure that piece was more than what Carr calls a "dry scholarly exercise in categorization" (ow).   The heart of it is a capabilities-complements-responsibilities framework intended to make IT more comprehensible to business leaders, and show them where and how they fit in to IT efforts and contribute to their success.  

I stress that each IT category offers successful adopters a small and stable set of capabilities, and that these capabilities are difficult or impossible to acquire without IT.  Capabilities are also non-overlapping; EIT does not do the same things that NIT and FIT do.  

I highlight that what differentiates the three categories is not what goes on behind the screen (i.e. technical details of the systems) but instead what happens in front of the screen —  how the technology changes companies as they adopt and exploit it.  Drawing on previous research I identify four organizational complements of IT:  new skills, greater interdependence, new workflows, and re-allocated decision rights, and show how each IT category has a different relationship with these complements.

I recommend that business leaders accept three IT-related responsibilities:  selection (picking appropriate new tech investments), adoption (getting the technology ready for first use) and exploitation (maximizing value delivered once the system is up and running).  Rules of thumb are:

• During selection, work ‘inside-out’ by first determining what IT-based capabilities are required, then looking out at the technology landscape.  This is in contrast to an ‘outside-in’ approach that attempts to determine IT needs by examining available technologies and deciding which ones to bring in.
• During adoption and exploitation, put in place the organizational complements that will maximize the positive impact of the selected technology.  With EIT, the bulk of this work takes place during adoption.  With FIT and NIT, exploitation is the more important responsibility.

One of my main goals with the article was to move past the true-but-tired old saw that "IT-based change is hard."  I wanted to show that not all technology efforts are equally difficult, or difficult in the same ways.  Thinking in terms of complements helps uncover where the change management challenges will lie.  Thinking in terms of capabilities helps determine which IT projects will be worth the managerial effort required for success, and which will not.  

The starting point for all of this is thinking in terms of IT categories.  I agree completely with Carr that corporate IT is exciting these days, offering lots of new possibilities.  I disagree strongly, though, that current trends "get beyond old dysfunctional categories."  I believe, in fact, that systematic category-based thinking about IT is the best way to understand which of the new developments are most important for your business, and how to harness them.