In my morning keynote at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference I proposed the creation of a repository of enterprise 2.0 case studies that would itself adhere to E2.0 best practices — it would be freely editable and extensible, and have an emergent rather than an imposed structure. I heard expressions of interest in the idea throughout the rest of the day, and when I sat down to dinner with my friends from the enterprise wiki company Socialtext they volunteered their software and told me they’d already grabbed a great domain name — cases2.com (disclosure: Socialtext lets me use their software for free, but I have no financial interest in the company and have done no paid work for it.).
So now we need to populate this site with all things enterprise 2.0, and we need some help getting started. Cases2.com will be publicly available soon, but it’s not yet. When we open it up, we’d like to have some compelling initial content. We need a first set of case studies that will perform the same functions as the first few dollar bills in a tip jar: encouraging others to contribute, and showing them how.
If you have a good E2.0 case study or two and would like to share your experiences, please email me (using the button at the top of this page) and tell me a bit about it. If it sounds appropriate, I’ll send you a username and password for the current private version of the site. Please use the template you’ll find there to enter the details of your case study. And if you think the template isn’t doing a good job of capturing the important aspects, isn’t sufficiently user friendly, or could be improved in any way please use the site to suggest modifications.
Once we get enough cases up, we’ll open up the site to the entire Internet and see what happens. My grandiose vision is to have cases2.com become the clearinghouse for information from the front lines on this topic. I’d also consider it a good thing if the site came to contain information on E.20 vendors, consultants, writers and writings, etc., but let’s start with case studies. Let us know if you want to share one.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Sounds like a great idea. I’ll be watching the cases2.com website to see what it finally looks like when opened.
Andrew,
Looking forward to the case studies. You are really at the forefront of Enterprise 2.0.
Edmund Ng
Hi Professor McAfee,
I’ve been following the E2.0 movement from few months ago. I’m also just about to finish my MSc thesis on it. (1 week)
Trying to be critic with my own (and some borrowed) ideas, I thought that would be very great if you could claim any time in your blog people telling their “FAILED ‘WEB 2.0′ INITIATIVES”.
I’ve always learnt better when I know what to do, but especially valuable is to know WHAT NO TO DO. Therefore, if you could use your media voice to encourage the people to tell us:
- what did go wrong?
- why do they think it went wrong?
That would have invaluable price.
(I am wondering why this initiative has not been promoted before. I am sure you may have answer to that)
Looking forward to reading you!
Rafa.
Formulating case studies and resulting best practices is the right way to avoid mistakes of the past in the future
He’s some of my thoughts on the subject:
http://www.smart-up.eu/2007/09/07/enterprise-20-best-practices/
If any of it seems interesting let me know
Great information, lets see the case studies. Case2.com must be as expected.
Hey Andrew. Great idea – seems like I’m hitting it quite late in the invention cycle. We’ve developed a fascinating E2.0 example for Deloitte Southern Africa. I’ve added it to the wiki.
What’s been happening with cases2.com? Enough interest to continue pushing?
thanks a lot for the initiative, you’ve done us a gr8 favour. and thanks to Socialtext for hosting it.
Its really true that, formulating case studies and resulting best practices is the right way to avoid mistakes of the past in the future .
Thanks
I believe this is a bright idea. Case2.com has already so many cases and they are of high quality. I did an MBA based on the case study method and I remember that getting high quality cases was costly for the school. Furthermore, the school relied mostly on existing students and alumni to write cases. Using Enterprise 2.0 should increase the diversity of cases as well as tackle more up to date business events.
nice post
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