As I’ve talked with many different audiences over the past two years about Enterprise 2.0, I’ve noticed that the same questions keep coming up, and I wanted to capture them. I’ll talk about the best answers to these questions later, and also about which of them seem to be most legitimate — to reflect the real risks a company takes on when it deploys emergent social software platforms (which from now on I’m just going to abbreviate as ESSPs). For now I just wanted to list them, and to make sure that I’m not missing any common ones. 

For internal ESSPs, here’s the FAQ:

• What if employees use the their internal blogs to post hate speech or pornography, or to harass a co-worker? 
• What if blogs are used to denigrate the company itself, air dirty laundry, or talk about how misguided its leadership and strategy are? 
• What if nasty arguments break out in a discussion forum and the whole thing descends into name-calling and flame wars?
• Won’t people be tempted to use forums to talk about current events, review movies, ask for advice about camcorder purchases, and have other non work-related conversations? 
• What if people waste time filling up their employee profile pages with pictures of their kittens and vacations? 
• Will people just use social networking software to plan happy hour, rather than to get work done? 
• Don’t Enterprise 2.0 platforms just yield another source of discoverable content –  material that must be turned over as part of a lawsuit or other legal action? 
• If the information on these platforms really is valuable, won’t it be harvested by spies and sold to the highest bidder? 
• Won’t hackers break in to our Enterprise 2.0 platforms and steal their content? 
• Don’t these technologies make it easier to deliberately or inadvertently leak secrets to the outside world? 
• Don’t they make it too easy for confidential information to leap over our internal Chinese Walls? 
• If we give up tight control over our Intranet’s content, how can we possibly avoid running afoul of all potentially relevant regulations and laws around information sharing in all the places we do business?

The list of concerns grows when an organization also considers extending Enterprise 2.0 tools and approaches to external groups like prospective customers, actual customers, suppliers, and other community members:  

• What if an unhappy customer uses uses our community site to air their grievances, and to talk loudly and often about our lousy products or Kafkaesque customer service? Or a supplier uses them to complain about how we never pay on time? 
• Are we responsible and liable if people give incorrect information or bad advice on question and answer forums we host on our Web site?  
• If we try to take advantage of lead-user innovation and ask people to submit their ideas to us, who owns the resulting intellectual property –  do we have to share resulting revenues and/or profits with the submitter?

What am I missing?  Are there frequently-asked questions that aren’t on this list?  If so, what are they?  Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

And if you’d like to share your favorite answers to any of these, we’re all ears.

Harvard Business Review has recently updated its Web site to reflect the contents of the July-August issue, which is the second of two issues celebrating the Centennial of Harvard Business School. This one is devoted to "Honing Your Competitive Edge" and contains an article written by myself and MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson called "Investing in the IT That Makes a Competitive Difference." This is a descriptive title, but not a terribly interesting or provocative one. Erik and I tried to get the editorial staff brainstorming around titles like "Deploy, Innovate, and Propagate: How to Harness IT for Competitive Advantage." or "How, and How Much, IT Matters," but no dice. 

The title aside, we’re excited to see the article in print. It builds on and expands ideas we wrote about last year in Sloan Management Review and the Wall Street Journal, and that I’ve blogged about a couple times.

We present data showing that competition in the US has become significantly nastier, or more ‘Schumpeterian,’ since the mid 1990s, and that the increase in competitive intensity is biggest in the industries that spend the most on IT. To put it a bit more precisely, we found a positive correlation between nastier competitive dynamics and IT investment at the industry level since the mid 90s; the article includes graphs that show this relationship.

To put it a bit more loosely, we found that competition started to heat up in the middle of the last decade, and that it heated up most in industries that installed a lot of IT.

We use analogies, case studies, logic, and previous theoretical and empirical work to argue that this is not just an interesting correlation, but a story of cause-and-effect. We believe that IT is a primary engine of the observed changes in the landscape of competition. The article lays out why we believe this, and what the implications for technology-fueled competition are for companies and their leaders.

I won’t try to summarize our arguments, conclusions, or recommendations here. Instead, please read the article if you’re interested in the topic; It’s available for free for the next month on HBR’s site.

And please let me and the rest of this blog’s community know what you think. Are you persuaded by our evidence and arguments?  If not, why not?  What did we overlook or get wrong? What do you think of the paper’s recommendations to executives? Are they the right ones, or recipes for disaster? What questions did the article leave you with?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts; I’ll take up feedback in later posts. There’s a lot more to be said on this topic, so let’s start the conversation.

Last week at the Enterprise 2.0 conference I moderated a panel of early adopters. The conference organizers assembled a true group of all-stars: Pete Fields, SVP in Wachovia’s eCommerce division; Simon Revell, Manager of Enterprise 2.0 technology development at Pfizer; Ned Lerner, Director of tools and technology at Sony Computer Entertainment, and my friends Don Burke and Sean Dennehy, Intellipedia Doyen and Evangelist, respectively, at the CIA.

The first question I asked them, and the one on which we spent most of our time, was essentially "If Enterprise 2.0 tools and approaches really are so beneficial and powerful, why haven’t they spread like wildfire?"  I suggested three categories of impediment: managers, technologies, and users, and asked the panelists to hold forth.

In their initial responses all of them identified users, not bad managers or inadequate technologies, as the biggest barriers to faster and deeper adoption of Enterprise 2.0. Entrenched practices and mindsets, some degree of technophobia, busyness, and the 9X Problem of email as an incumbent technology combine, they said, to limit the pace of adoption. These factors slow the migration from channels to platforms and necessitate continued patience, evangelism, and training and coaching. 

I didn’t expect the panelists to say that the Enterprise 2.0 tooklit is so incomplete as to hinder adoption, but I was a bit surprised that none of them identified management as a real impediment in their first round of comments. So I pressed the point by saying something like "I didn’t hear any of you point the finger at the managers in your organizations. Were you just being polite, or are they really not getting in the way of Enterprise 2.0? The new social software platforms are a bureaucrat’s worst nightmare because they remove his ability to filter information, or control its flow. I’d expect, then, that each of you would have some examples of managers overtly or covertly trying to stop the spread and use of these tools. Are you telling me this hasn’t happened?"

That is in fact what they were telling me, and I didn’t get the impression that they were just being diplomatic. They said that managers were just another category of users that needed to migrate over to new ways of working, and not anything more. In other words, the panelists hadn’t seen managers in their organizations actively trying to impede Enterprise 2.0. 

This surprised me. I’ve thought that since E2.0 tools and approaches have no inherent respect for existing organizational hierarchies and boundaries the people who have ascended the hierarchy within the boundaries might be actively hostile to them. For the organizations represented on the panel, this does not appear to be the case. The most counterproductive behaviors mentioned were the reflexive desire to work in private, and the temptation to build a large number of mutually inaccessible walled gardens of user-generated content.

The panelists represented large organizations, most of which had been around for a long time and had large numbers of managers who were used to, and probably comfortable with, the status quo.  Yet no examples surfaced of these managers trying to thwart or sabotage E2.0 efforts, and no panelist told a story about a managers darkly hinting to their groups that participating in the new social software platforms might not be the best thing for a career.

I can think of three possibilities why not. First, managers in these organizations could be unaware of E2.0’s profound indifference to hierarchy and facilitation of transparency. Second, managers could be aware of these trends and displeased about them, but see themselves as powerless to stem the tide of freeflowing social information. Or third, managers could be aware and in favor of (or at least unbothered by) these developments.

This final possibility, of course, is the most optimistic. It suggests that even in large, well-established, and conservative organizations the hierarchy is not full of bureaucrats, in the narrow and negative sense of the term.

In your experience and opinion, is this accurate? Or is one of the first two scenarios above what’s actually going on?  Or is something else entirely taking place? Leave a comment, please, and let us know your thoughts and stories about management’s reaction to Enterprise 2.0…

As I’m writing this, the fourth most-blogged article from the New York Times website is "Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast," which appeared on June 14. It describes how knowledge workers at many high-tech firms feel as if they’re drowning in e-mail, and how bad habits and etiquette (like reflexively using the ‘reply to all’ option) contribute to the situation. The flood of e-mail has become such a concern that a working group called the Information Overload Research Group has been formed; members include Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Intel. 

E-mail is clearly ‘in the flow‘ for most modern knowledge workers. For many of them, it seems, it in fact is the flow. But so what?  Why is a lot of e-mail bad? If consequential things happen frequently and a knowledge worker needs to be aware of them in order to do her job, isn’t e-mail as good a vehicle as any to communicate these important developments?

According to the Times article, the problem with that argument is that a lot of e-mails actually aren’t very important. Research by Basex, a company that works at "the intersection of content, knowledge sharing, and collaboration within the enterprise," indicates that 28% of an info-workers day is spent on "interruptions by things that aren’t urgent or important, like unnecessary e-mail messages" and on recovering from these interruptions.

The problem with using e-mail for all communications is that it gets used for, well, all communications, even those that aren’t time-critical, personal, private, or salient. It also gets used to coordinate the multi-person creation of documents, presentations, and spreadsheets, a task at which it’s abysmal. I often ask audiences how many people execute multi-person collaborations by attaching the (hopefully) most recent version of a file to a group e-mail again and again. Most hands go up. I then ask how many people are happy with this mode of collaboration; very few hands remain in the air. 

The principal solutions proposed by the Times article are to shut off or otherwise walk away from email for some portion of the workday, and to rely more on face-to-face interactions. These are surely both good and perhaps even necessary ideas. Many of the writers I know go offline when they have to get serious work done (one of my colleagues goes so far as to unplug his wireless router when he needs to concentrate). Short email sabbaticals and more actual human contact are probably valuable for today’s deluged knowledge workers. 

And so are Enterprise 2.0 technologies like wikis, blogs, and social networking software, for several reasons. First, wikis and other group-level editing tools like Zoho, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and SocialCalc can be used to collaboratively build something without having to email attachments around to everyone. As this diagram popularized by Chris Rasmussen shows, working this way can save iterations, streamline work, and leave people happier in addition to reducing email volume. 

Second, E2.0 tools are good ones for project management; they can be used to track status and progress on action items, highlight new developments, and generally keep everyone on the same page. This only works, though, if everyone on the project agrees to use the 2.0 project management tools; if the boss still wants everything emailed to her and continues to use email for her updates, Enterprise 2.0 becomes above the flow rather than in it, and so likely increases interruptions rather than decreasing them. 

Finally, social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter let people tell their far-flung friends and colleagues what they’re up to without sending a single email, and also let them keep on top of their networks without opening the Inbox. These tools have a very interesting property; they let us dip into the stream of friends’ updates when it’s convenient for us, not when it’s convenient for the updater (as would be the case with email). These updates tend to be less time-critical and less private, and so don’t really belong in our personal Inboxes. Instead, they float by in an ether that we can jump into whenever we like. Leisa Reichelt calls this ability to dip at will into the lives of our friends and/or the workstreams of our colleagues ‘ambient intimacy,’ which I think is a lovely phrase.

The active blogger and social media user Luis Suarez recently launched an interesting experiment: he gave up on work e-mail. As he describes it, he "created a post in my internal blog where I was mentioning that from that day onwards I would not be answering any e-mails, nor write any e-mails myself either, but instead I would make the most out of social software tools and social computing, in general, to get in touch with other knowledge workers and collaborate further sharing and exchanging our knowledge over there." Suarez still uses e-mail for private communications where sensitive information is exchanged, but is trying hard to avoid e-mail otherwise. Initial results, he says, are that his emails have dropped off by as much as a factor of five (his blog posts to date on this experiment are here and here.).

I’d love to hear others’ experiences in this area. Are you drowning in e-mail? Or have you found ways to staunch the flow?  Are Enterprise 2.0 technologies helping at all? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

The most recent issue of EMC’s ON Magazine includes an interview with me and Tom Davenport. As the article’s subhead states, "One year after debating whether Enterprise 2.0 is truly a transformative technology or just an incremental evolution of collaborative tools, Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport resume the conversation."

Conversation is exactly the right word. Previous debates between me and Tom have featured a fair amount of disagreement, and perhaps a bit of talking past each other. This one felt different, even though he and I continue to view the ‘toolkit’ of Enterprise 2.0 in dissimiar ways. I see the constituent technologies as someting new under the sun, and Tom sees them more as incremental improvements to the digital collaboration tools that have available to companies for a long time. 

That difference in viewpoint, however, didn’t matter much. Tom and I agreed pretty violently on a few important points: the need to be circumspect about the power of these technologies to transform organizations and render obsolete traditional notions of ‘management’ and ‘hierarchy,’ the benefits of emergent over imposed approaches to communicating knowledge and expertise, and the need for ‘gardeners’ or ‘curators’ who keep the digital environments tidy and usable over time. 

I’m not exactly sure why we’re agreeing so much more now than in the past, but it’s a welcome development. As I wrote in my first blog post about Tom’s views, he is one of the most insightful and experienced thinkers about technology’s impact. It’s been a little uncomfortable finding myself on the opposite side from him on an issue I find important. So I was glad to find myself nodding my head a lot as he spoke during the interview.

After the notebooks were put away and the tape recorder turned off, Tom said to me "This was a lot more fun than disagreeing." I couldn’t agree more. 

The same issue of ON magazine also has some interesting stats on E2.0 viewpoints and penetration rates collected by AIIM International and summarized by Carl Frappaolo. Check them out and tell us what you think of them. And/or leave a comment telling us what you think of the state of the debate between on Enterprise 2.0.

The organizers of last week’s Management Lab conference on "Inventing the Future of Managment" amplified the value of the event for us attendees by persuading Google CEO Eric Schmidt to speak with us over dinner on Thursday night. I’d not had the chance to hear him before, and was blown away; he was funny, direct, engaged, and razor sharp. I was particularly impressed that instead of sticking to talking points (a common tendency among senior executives, especially those leading large, heavily-scrutinized companies) he took questions, and actually answered them.

In his initial remarks I heard him stress two elements of Google’s success: hiring the smartest people they can find, and making decisions as a group after deliberation, rather than by individual fiat. Schmidt told the story of how shortly after he was hired he had a meeting with his senior colleagues about bringing on an executive he thought would be a good fit. His co-workers disagreed, and as a result the CEO of the company was not able to hire someone he favored.

As I listened to him speak I felt one of my frustrations as a teacher surface, and decided to ask him about it. I asked something like:

"Eric, like many people here I teach at a business school, and I’ve always been disappointed with the results whenever I use Google as a case study. My executive education students always say that there’s nothing for them to learn from your company because it’s just too different from theirs —  you’re very young, you’re in this strange online industry, and you’re full of people with 145 IQs. 

I’ve been trying to push back against these arguments in the classroom, but as I listen to you here tonight I’m starting to think that my students might be right! As you’ve described it, Google seems to be a completely unique organization. So what can other companies and managers really learn from you?"

His response was unequivocal, and fantastic. As best I can recall, he said:

"They can learn to listen. Listening to each other is core to our culture, and we don’t listen to each other just because we’re all so smart. We listen because everyone has good ideas, and because it’s a great way to show respect. And any company, at any point in its history, can start listening more."

Many participants in the conference voiced the belief that a move away from authoritarian and imperial corporate leadership would be a smart move, and that we need to retire the belief that intelligence, omniscience, and infallibility rise in lockstep with height on the org. chart. It was fascinating, and encouraging, for me to hear Schmidt agree so closely with that viewpoint even though he hadn’t been present during the day; he was just the man who came to dinner. 

He gave a powerful and actionable piece of advice, and one for which the technologies of Enterprise 2.0 are tailor-made. Let’s see how many businesses and business leaders have what it takes to follow it.

And if you want to learn more of Google’s secrets, check out the article "Reverse Engineering Google’s Innovation Machine" by Bala Iyer and my friend Tom Davenport in the April Harvard Business Review.