I’ll be talking about my book Enterprise 2.0 at two events in the next couple weeks, and wanted to invite folk to attend. In the physical world they’re both taking place in the Boston area, which I realize limits meatspace participation. Luckily, they’ll also both be broadcast live online and archived, so anyone who’s interested can follow along at any time.

The first is a talk hosted by Harvard’s Berkman Center (where I’m a fellow) and held on Monday, December 7 at 6 pm in Harvard Law School’s Pound Hall, room 102. The event is open to the public, but registration is required. I plan to talk about the book for about 15 minutes, then answer questions and see what people want to talk about for the rest of the time. The book will be available for purchase at this event.

Then I’ll be a guest on Hubspot TV, the Web’s most entertaining live show about all things at the intersection of marketing, social media, and technology. The show takes place at 4 pm on Friday, December 18, and Hubspot invites all comers to its offices for Hubspot TV tapings.

I’d give a preview, but I have no idea what to expect. The shows hosts Karen Rubin and Mike Volpe do a great job mixing things up and keeping the webcast lively. I imagine getting interviewed by them is a bit like facing Charlie Rose and Terry Gross on crank. So I’m just going to show up and roll with it; I expect it’ll be a very….  emergent experience.

Hope to see you at at least one of these events; it would be great to hear what’s on your mind about Enterprise 2.0.

One other note: Frogpond’s Martin Koser has been ‘live reading’ Enterprise 2.0 on the Web and Twitter. I’ve heard of live blogging at conferences, of course, but live reading is new to me. Check it out and let us know what you think of the phenomena.

I’ve been thinking about what to write in the wake of the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference. One more summary seems unnecessary, since there have been so many good ones already. And the debates are starting to feel a little trumped up and warmed over, and so less fun to wade back into.

And then I got inspiration from Greg Lloyd, President and co-founder of Traction Software and longtime technologist. In addition to running his company Greg finds time to write a great blog, and his post after the conference was called “Enterprise 2.0 Schism.”

In it, he likens the current E2.0 controversies to a religious schism, and divides the community into three sects: Strict Proletarians, who believe it’s all about the people, Strict Technarians, who believe it’s all about the technologies, and Strict Druckerians, who “believe that “2.0″ should be considered a modifier of Enterprise rather than an allusion to mere Web 2.0 technology…”

Lloyd writes with a light touch and is clearly being a bit tongue in cheek, but he’s also making a smart and serious point. Two of them, in fact. The first is that advocates of Enterprise 2.0 really do believe different things about the phenomenon, and these differences matter. His second point is an argument for the Druckerian point of view: that the use of emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) is going to change organizations so much that a new version number is warranted.

This got me thinking about what I believed. I’ve been using “Enterprise 2.0” in Lloyd’s Technarian sense — as a reference to the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and approaches by enterprises. And do I also believe that such adoption is going to change companies? Sure –    virtually all technology adoptions do, to some extent. Do I believe that it’s going to change them enough to require a new version number?

Nope. I just think that’s too strong a claim. Let me try to explain why.

I yield to almost no one in my belief about the power and utility of ESSPs, but I just don’t think they’re going to transform the structure or purpose of the enterprise. As I wrote earlier, I don’t see E2.0’s tools, approaches, and philosophies making obsolete managers, hierarchies, org charts, and formal cross functional business processes.

It’s a rainy fall day in Boston, and after a wet walk into work I’m sitting here realizing that I need new boots. So maybe later today I’ll call up L.L. Bean and order a pair of Maine Hunting Shoes (Suave? No. Dry?  Yes.). I’ll talk to a customer service rep who will enter my order into an enterprise system. This system spans the call center, the warehouse, the credit card company and, in all likelihood, the marketing department. The people working in each of these areas have relatively stable job titles and descriptions that are tied to pay and benefits. And they all have bosses who manage and develop people, put together plans and budgets, and take responsibility for performance and improvement.

None of this is going to be swept away or rendered obsolete by the advent of ESSPs, even after they’re fully deployed and embraced. We can tell stories about how the new tools enable amorphous / gestalt / collectivist forms of organization that have no set structures and make their way through the environment much like slime molds do, but these stories are pure speculation, grounded in hope rather than reality or experience. They’re a type of cyberpunk science fiction (as an aside, I find it really interesting and telling that the best cyberpunk, like Neuromancer and Snow Crash, conjures up worlds where big formal organizations are more dominant, not less.).

I want to be clear: Lloyd’s post is fantastic: grounded and very thoughtful. He’s not in the enterprise-as-slime-mold camp. And I definitely agree with him that Enterprise 2.0 is a big deal. So what’s the right way to describe its impact?

Here’s my take: ESSPs will have about as big an impact on the informal processes of the organization as large-scale commercial enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, Supply Chain, etc.) have had on the formal processes.

This is not a conservative statement. Enterprise systems have been a huge deal for organizations. They’ve turned reengineering from a whiteboard exercise into an unignorable reality for many, many companies. And Drucker was right when he said that “Reengineering is new, and it has to be done.”

It’s not a coincidence that productivity in the US really accelerated starting in the mid 1990s, just as enterprise systems started spreading, and accelerated most in the industries that spent the most on IT. And a great study by Erik Brynjolfsson, DJ Wu, and Sinan Aral which I wrote about here, found strong evidence that ERP adoption leads to performance improvement.

I believe that Enterprise 2.0 will be as big a deal for corporate performance and productivity. I believe this because I believe that the informal organization is as important as the formal one for getting work done (do you agree?) and that we have historically had lousy technologies for supporting the work of the informal organization (especially outside our immediate circle of strong ties). With the arrival of ESSPs, the tools available to the informal / emergent organization have gone from lousy to excellent, just like commercial enterprise systems advanced the formal organization’s toolkit from lousy to excellent.

So while I don’t think that the impact of ESSP’s is profound enough to warrant a new version number for the enterprise, I do think that we’re on the brink of a sustained period of corporate innovation, improvement, and productivity growth enabled by these new tools. I take some comfort from the fact that some very sharp and experienced corporate leaders like Cisco’s John Chambers seem to feel the same.

Do you?  In your opinion, what’s the right way to think about the broad impact of ESSPs? Will they lead to Enterprise, version 2.0, or just to Enterprise 2.0? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.

My latest post over at HBR.org is about MIT’s use of student bloggers on its admissions website. This kind of unfiltered presentation to the wide world of an organization’s internal voices was pretty novel when the Institute launched the blogs four years ago, but it’s become more common.

It’s still far from universal, though. I’d bet that the majority of organizations still have ‘brochureware’ websites –  simple, largely static descriptions of what the company is and does, written in standard Press Release English (have all the people that write those taken the same correspondence course or something?). These websites get periodic facelifts and redesigns to keep them from getting stale, but their core content remains largely the same.

In their new book Inbound Marketing, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah do a great job of explaining to busy, pragmatic, non-technical businesspeople the shortcomings of this approach to the Web. They write:

“The reality is that most web sites look perfectly fine. The colors are fine, the menus are fine, the logo is fine, the pictures are fine, and so on. You personally do not like the look of your web site because you look at it so often. Your visitors, on the other hand, think your web site looks just fine and are not particularly interested in your site’s colors or the type of menus used. Your visitors are looking for something interesting they can read and learn about…

Save the thousands of dollars and countless hours you were goign to spend on the redesign of your web site and do three things. First, add something collaborative to your site like a blog (which is easy to update on a regular basis). Second, start creating compelling content people will want to consume (see following chapters on how to do this). Third, start focusing where the real action is: Google, industry blogs, and social media sites.”

Halligan and Shah are cofounders of Hubspot, a startup that helps organizations make their websites places that people will want to visit (Halligan is a friend of mine, but I have no financial ties to Hubspot[1]). They call this inbound marketing, and contrast it to traditional outbound or “interruption-based” marketing, where companies try to interrupt, via emails, phone calls, and mass media advertising, what their customers are trying to do (get their work done, for example, or watch TV).

I’m not convinced that mass media advertising is on its last legs; early this month, for example, there was an article in the New York Times about how digital video recorders, originally considered tech Kryptonite by broadcasters and advertisers because they let viewers skip past ads, have recently been embraced by the TV industry because they help shows become hits. But after reading Inbound Marketing I am convinced that brochureware Websites are rapidly being eclipsed by more dynamic and social destinations.

When I was signing my book at last week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco, more than a few people asked me to sign to a name different than the one on their badge. When I raised my eyebrow at this they explained that they were taking the book to their boss, who “really needs to get the message.” I was greatly flattered by this, and relieved. It indicated that I’d succeeded in not talking past my intended audience.

Halligan and Shah certainly don’t. They address themselves directly to business decision makers and pull off the tough job of presuming no technical literacy on the part of their target readers, yet not condescending to them. Inbound Marketing makes the worlds of Web marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and Social Media easy to understand. It leaves readers confident in their new knowledge, and prepared to take action.

I’m sure the authors hope that more than a few readers will take action by signing up with Hubspot, but Inbound Marketing isn’t a naked advertisement for the company. Instead, it’s a great primer about an important topic. If you’re feeling underinformed about how to spread the word about your company on today’s Web, or if you work with or for people who are making underinformed decisions, get your hands on a copy of Inbound Marketing. It’ll make a difference.

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[1] I should point out, though, that Brian has offered me his amazing Red Sox tickets a few times, and I fervently hope that this post leads to more evenings at Fenway with him.

On a recent trip to Munich I got to visit the geek paradise that is the Deutsches Museum, the largest science, technology, and engineering museum in the world. Its enormous collections were almost totally lost on me, though, because I spent just about all my time in the wing devoted to calculating devices.

This was not the plan. I intended to move on after checking out a few highlights like the Enigma machines (the legendary WWII German code machines deciphered by Polish and British brilliance) and the astonishing miniature Curtas (perfected while the inventor was an inmate in Buchenwald). But I wound up spending hours there, spellbound by the variety, ingenuity, and beauty of the devices on view.

They ranged from astrolabes to slide rules to planimeters to mechanical and electrical calculators to modern computers. I had no idea how most of them worked, or exactly what they did (even after reading the explanatory notes, many of which contained polynomials).

What was clear was that the devices on display were the fruits of centuries of human brilliance and craftsmanship, all aimed at improving our ability to calculate. They did so bit by bit, one hard-won step after another. The slide rules got a little more precise over the years, the mechanical calculators capable of handling one more digit.

And then we entered the digital era, and the situation changed utterly. Moore’s Law took hold, and calculating devices started getting twice as fast every 12-18 months. One of the crown jewels in the Deutsches Museum’s collection is a Cray-1 Supercomputer, the world’s fastest by far when it was introduced in 1976. 30 years later, the fastest PC microprocessors were over 100 times speedier (similar improvement has occurred in our ability to store data – the raw material and finished goods of calculation – in machines).

As I looked at the Cray, then down the hallway at the older devices I was reminded of Hemingway’s summary of how one goes broke: “Gradually, then all at once.” It struck me as a perfect description of how we improved our ability to calculate.

Throughout all of human civilization, professional smart people like scientists, engineers, financiers, accountants, managers, and analysts of every stripe have faced a computational bottleneck. One of the main things limiting their work, perhaps the main thing, was their inability to calculate any faster.

That might still be the case now for a few very specialized professions like large-scale climate modeling and cryptography, but all the rest of us are no longer limited by any lack of computing muscle. We have ample digital horsepower for our work. And in a world of cloud computing, high bandwidth, and mobile devices, we have access to this horsepower no matter where we are or what screen we’re in front of (I realize this is an overstatement, but it’s not a ridiculous one, and it might not be an overstatement at all for much longer).

When a change this big happens this quickly it takes a long time for all the implications to become clear. Many people remain tied to old practices and assumptions, and so are unable to take full advantage of the new state of affairs.

I don’t know all the ways that the business world is going to be changed by the arrival of superabundant computing. And neither does anyone else. It’s going to be a piecemeal process, full of trial and error. It’ll be carried out both by technology vendors and the people that deploy their offerings within companies. And it will affect every industry and every job that involves at least some knowledge work. Some of these changes will be small, but many of them will be major.

You can engage in the hard work of figuring out what digitization means for your company and its competitive situation, or you can ignore the phenomenon or hope that someone else will figure it out for you. If you take either of the latter courses I predict you’ll find your rivals pulling away from you. Gradually, and then all at once.