More and more often these days I get asked “Does [offering X] from [vendor Y] qualify as an Enterprise 2.0 product?” Established vendors of collaboration software are modifying their offerings and repositioning them as social software platforms that have all the features and functions necessary to support the new modes of interacting and getting work done. Smaller companies and startups often say that the established vendors “just don’t get it” and that the new features they’ve incorporated –  blogs, wikis, discussion forums, tags, etc. –  are just windowdressing on products that are still essentially geared for Collaboration 1.0.

So who’s right?  Whose products at present come closest to enabling Web 2.0-style collaboration and interaction in enterprise environments? Honestly, I have no idea. It would be a huge amount of work just to learn about all the vendors and their offerings, let alone to evaluate them. And evaluating them “fresh out of the box” wouldn’t be that relevant anyway; collaboration software usually gets highly configured and tailored by companies before it’s turned on, with only some features activated and only some of those highlighted. One company, for example, might want its employees to be able to blog, while another wants no such thing.

Because of these facts I usually dodge questions about specific vendors and their offerings, and instead answer how I’d look at any particular deployment of collaboration software to see if it met my definition of Enterprise 2.0.

I find this pretty easy to do. I check to see if the environment meets three criteria: Is it freeform?  How frictionless is contribution? And is it emergent? To put some flesh on each of these terms…

Freeform means that the technology does not in any meaningful way impose, hardwire, or make and enforce assumptions about
- Workflows
- Roles
- Privileges
- Content
- Decision right allocations
Instead, people come together as equals within the environment created by technology, and do pretty much whatever they want.

I want to stress one more time that technologies that are not freeform are not bad or shortsighted or somehow deficient. If I were in charge of a retailer, for example, I’d want an ERP-ish system that my customer service reps used to take orders from customers, then send them to the warehouse for fulfillment and also to accounts payable. I’d want that system to have a standard order-to-ship workflow that was very hard to deviate from. I would NOT want this system to consider all employees to be equal, to assign them all to the same roles, or to give them equal privileges or decision rights. Finally, I’d want it to never accept a ZIP code that contained letters.

In addition to this system, though, I’d also certainly want to have one or more completely freeform digital platforms in which employees and other constituencies could come together as equals to decide what topics were important for the company, and how to attack them. My experience is that over time people place themselves into roles within these platforms (As USC’s Ann Majchrzak and her colleagues found in a study of corporate wiki users), but the important point is that they’re not assigned into roles up front, or by any external party.

Frictionless means that users perceive it to be easy to participate in the platform, and can do so with very little time or effort. One measure of friction is the total time required between having an idea for a contribution (while sitting in front of the computer, carrying the iPhone, etc.) and the appearance of that contribution on the platform.

Sign-ins, navigation through many web pages, and clunky user interfaces are all perceived as hurdles by a platform’s potential users, and increase friction. So does the need to massage a contribution like a blog post to look like it wasn’t put together by a complete hack. I can already tell, for example, that I’m going to post to this version of my blog more often than I did when it was hosted under the hbs.edu domain name and used a different and clunkier interface for posting. I felt like I had to tweak each entry for a long time to make it look OK, and it was a disincentive to post.

Tweetdeck, on the other hand, makes contribution to Twitter pretty frictionless. It sits on my desktop as a separate client, and I zip over to it whenever I have an idea. It’s quick and painless to send a standard tweet, a reply, a direct message, or a retweet, and to shorten and include a URL. With Tweetdeck I can convince myself to take a timeout from my deep academic thinking (coughcough) more often because each timeout is so short –  literally just a matter of seconds.

Emergent is both most intuitive of these three terms and the hardest to pin down. It really does bring to mind Justice Potter Stewart’s famous yet unhelpful definition of obscenity “I know it when I see it.” My best-effort definition of the phenomenon is the appearance over time within a system of higher-level patterns or structure arising from large numbers of unplanned and undirected low-level interactions.

I wrote about the mechanisms of online emergence here and here; they include linking, tagging, friending (as on Facebook and LinkedIn), and following (as on Twitter). These are all activities that help patterns and structure appear, and that let the cream of the content rise to the top for all platform members, no matter how they define what the cream is.

Without these mechanisms, online content becomes less useful –  less easy to navigate, consume, and analyze — as it accumulates. With these mechanisms in place, just the opposite happens; the platform exhibits increasing returns to scale, and becomes more valuable as it grows.

The Web as a whole, and especially the Web 2.0 portions of it, is wondrously freeform, frictionless, and emergent. It stands as our clearest example of the kinds of energy and benefit that can be unleashed by the new technologies of interaction, and the communities that form on top of them. Some specific sub-segments of the Web like Facebook and especially Twitter are almost perfectly freeform and frictionless, but are less able to foster all forms of emergence. As I wrote here and here, it’s hard for me to use them to separate signal from noise and let the ‘best’ content rise to the top.

Too many corporate collaboration environments that I’ve observed, in contrast, come up short on the frictionless and freeform criteria. They make it far too difficult for prospective users to contribute, and they persist in slotting people into pre-assigned roles based largely on the formal org chart. In many cases they also impede emergence by having many small and mutually inaccessible environments, instead of one big one. The tendency to build walled gardens is evidently a deep-seated one, and one that should be questioned far more often than is currently the case.

Do these three criteria –  freeform, frictionless, and emergent — make sense to you and resonate with what you’ve seen and learned about the new technology-facilitated modes of collaboration? Am I leaving out any critical properties of effective technologies for supporting Enterprise 2.0? Do you agree that an enterprise’s chances of success rise significantly if it creates digital environments that have all three? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

I lost a bet recently, and soon it’ll be time to pay up. I bet my friend Amy Senger that she couldn’t go a week without using Twitter. She’s such a prolific tweeter as @sengseng that I thought there was no way she could give it up, even temporarily.

But she did, and since turnabout is fair play she gets to dictate that I do something outside my comfort zone. According to the terms of the bet I have to tweet 100 times in a single day. This daunts me; I’ve posted to Twitter fewer than 800 times since opening my @amcafee account, so 100 sounds like a lot. I really have no idea what all I’ll tweet about, so this post is an appeal for help on that front.

What territory should I cover in my forced march of tweeting? According to the terms of the bet, my #andyasks question and ensuing replies count toward to the total, but they won’t get me close to 100. There’s a lot of room left; please leave comments with your ideas about how to fill it.  I’m all ears.

The one thing I won’t be tweeting about is the minutiae of my day. I’ve felt the urge to do so, and have succumbed to it a couple times, but I’ve promised myself not to do any more such tweets. Because I can’t see how they’re anything except blind and bland narcissism, and therefore simply without value.

As I unfortunately demonstrated, I understand the lure of using Twitter and the other 2.0 platforms to talk about oneself. After all, don’t we all consider ourselves to be deeply interesting people? But look at the following tweets, which were pulled with very little effort from the recent Twitterverse:

“Waking up mid-afternoon FTW”

“my head hurts.”

“just sittin here… watching a little tv“

“pretty much ‘cleaned up’ my facebook”

“Getting dressed for a wedding”

Honestly, don’t these sound like dialog from one of Sartre’s less optimistic plays? Don’t they fail the test of “Does the world need or want to know this?” The response to this argument, of course, is “Just don’t follow people whose updates are not interesting to you.” But I follow a lot of people because I’m hoping that many things they say will be interesting. Since Twitter is inherently oriented around people rather than topics, I get all tweets from those I follow. And their narration of their own lives clutters up my “All Friends” column on Tweetdeck.

No one stops by my office, calls me, emails me, or texts me with updates like the ones above. Nor have I met anyone who’s confessed to emailing or texting their entire social circle every x minutes with “here’s what’s going on with me now” updates. So I’m really puzzled about why this is an acceptable and popular use of Twitter. If someone could explain it to me, I’d really appreciate it (and I don’t mean that facetiously). My guess is that this behavior arises mainly because it’s so fast and easy to compose and send a tweet, but if there’s more going on please explain it to me.

Am I wrong that just a little self-policing against narcissism would increase the value of the Twitterverse immensely? I think all of us fans of this technology would do well to keep in mind Voltaire’s insight that “The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.” Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of America’s nuclear navy, quoted the admonition of an ‘unknown sage’ that “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.” So what kinds of minds discuss themselves?

At its best Twitter is a novel and unparalleled way to meet, connect with, and share good stuff with other people. At its worst, it reminds me of the great story from the evil geniuses at The Onion: “Women now Empowered by Everything a Woman Does.”

If you see me confusing narcissism with empowerment, citizenship, helpfulness, or useful sharing during my day of 100 tweets (the date of which will be announced in advance), please call me on it. And if I’m being blind or unkind with these thoughts, please let me know.

A recent tweet by @rossdawson alerted me to a new post by Oliver Young at his Strategic Heading blog titled “Web 2.0 Represents A Fundamental Rethinking Of Business, And The Theory Of The Firm.”

This is a self-explanatory title, and an accurate summary of Young’s beliefs about the impact of 2.0 technologies.  As he states:

 ”So what do I see when I look at Web 2.0, social media, social software, and whatever else you want to call this thing? I see a fundamental rethinking of the definition and function of the firm; the single biggest change since the industrial revolution” (emphasis in original)

Young believes this rethinking of the firm comes about because “businesses are opening the doors to the product development, marketing, packaging, and distribution process to customers who add value every step of the way with their preferences, ideas, and reactions. The firm is no longer creating value alone, it now has help.” (again, emphasis in original). This is in contrast to the previous model of capitalism in which “firms acquire capital, labor, and resources, combine them into a valuable product or service, and sell the product or service to individuals or other businesses who consume that value. In this system is it incumbent on the firm to create value, and the role of the buyer is to consume value. End of story.”

Young believes that “Over the next 10 to 15 years, on the back of social software, we will go from a fundamentally closed value creation system to a fundamentally open one” (emphasis, yes, in original).

Most of us who study the new technologies of interaction, collaboration, and collective intelligence agree that they have great potential to enable more open systems for creating economic value. But we need to be very careful with our claims about how closed things are at present.

It’s not useful to present our current system a fundamentally closed one in which firms work only within themselves to create value. That’s not a helpful strawman; it’s a counterproductive caricature.

Outsourcing, joint ventures, industry consortia, partnerships with academia, network organizations, vertical disintegration, a focus on ‘core competencies,’ comparative advantage, transaction cost economics, the theory of the firm, lead user innovation, and countless other trends, concepts, arrangements, and bodies of theory all predate the 2.0 Era and the current crop of social software. And they are all about ways to create value than are more ‘open’ than doing all work within individual firms.

The function of the firm is to add (and capture) economic value. This was the case before 2.0 technologies came along, and will the the case after they’re widely deployed. It’s also the case that many entrepreneurs and other innovators of capitalism have realized that they could add (and capture) more value by being more open to outside influences and outsiders, and have found very clever ways to become more open. Some of these ways have involved technology, some have not.

I am sorry if this sounds like I’m picking on Young, a very smart guy who I’ve met and whose work I find valuable and insightful. I’m singling out his post because it’s an example of a harmful tendency that I’ve seen many times over the years. This is the tendency that many of us technology enthusiasts have not so much to oversell the virtues and power of new tools, but instead to talk and write as if there was no progress on important topics before they came along.

I agree with Young that we’re headed into an era of overall higher levels of openness, but I strongly disagree that what’s coming is going to be like day after night. 2.0 technologies give us revolutionary capabilities in some areas, but they’re not going to revolutionalize capitalism. Capitalism’s been doing that to itself for quite a while now anyway.

This is my first post in my new blog home, and the first using the WordPress platform. I’d like to thank Alistair Morton of Toronto’s PeapodStudios for his excellent work on the redesign, and his patience during a laborious migration process. I’m really happy with how it looks, but would love your feedback –  please leave a comment if you have anything to say about the design and layout.

Also, please comment with anything a WordPress newbie should know –  tools, resources, tutorials, communities, etc. I am a complete neophyte here. My blogging career to date has consisted almost entirely of typing posts into a text box then hitting ‘Publish,’ and I’m eager to become more proficient. I don’t want to excessively pimp my blog, but I would like to have decent capabilities, analytics, etc. So any advice or pointers would be much appreciated.

I hope you’ll find it useful, and I hope you’ll visit often.

CHARLIE ROSE: …Here is a piece that you wrote called, in "Harvard Business Review," "Investing in IT that Makes a Competitive Difference." It`s all out there for everybody.

ANDREW MCAFEE: Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: So how does it make a competitive difference?

ANDREW MCAFEE: How could it possibly make a competitive difference if we can all buy it?

CHARLIE ROSE: Exactly.

ANDREW MCAFEE: Leo is happy to sell it to you and me if we`re direct competitors.

CHARLIE ROSE: Right, right.

ANDREW MCAFEE: The analogy I like to use is that — pick a manufacturing industry. Cell phones, lawn mowers, cars, doesn’t matter which. And let`s say that you and I were both inventors in that industry, and we had access to identical factories. Now, does anyone think that because we have access to identical factories, we`d have to turn out identical products? That doesn’t make any sense to me.

What Leo and his colleagues in the enterprise software industry do is build process factories. So instead of turning out products, we [use these digital factories to] turn out business processes — [sequences of interdependent activities that span many different people, groups, business units, geographies, etc.].

[These digital process factories] are very flexible, they are very configurable. So even if you and I buy the same basic factory from [Leo], we`re going to do very different things with it. If I do smarter things than you, I will get ahead over time.

I like this analogy, and plan to continue to use it.  It conveys the idea that today’s digital process factories don’t completely specify or pre-define all possible business processes, just like product factories don’t specify or pre-define all possible products. Instead, they both provide environments thatinventors and innovators use to bring their ideas to life.

So my question is, do you like this analogy? Do you find it helpful? More fundamentally, do you find it valid? In other words, is it missing or glossing over something important?  Is it inherently misleading? Does it need to be tweaked, modified, discarded?

I’ve done a fair amount of looking at and thinking about enterprise IT, and I think the analogy holds up.  But I’d love to hear your thoughts about it. So leave a comment, please, and let us know.