Enterprise 2 at 5

by Andrew McAfee on June 14, 2011

Next week the Enterprise 2.0 conference will take place in Boston, a little more than five years after my article of the same title appeared in Sloan Management Review. It’s fair to say that the use of emergent social software platforms (whatever you want to call it) has become a mainstream business phenomenon.

Which is heartening, since I’ve devoted a fair amount of my bandwidth over the past five years to understanding and talking about this phenomenon. If Enterprise 2.0 had flared and fizzled like B2B exchanges, my time might have been better spent (remember Chemdex, or the original business plans for Covisint and SciQuest? If you do, welcome to the enterprise software old-timer’s club).

The best thing about Enterprise 2.0 became clear to me during an exchange I had with ace ponderer of technology Dave Weinberger at a talk Harvard’s Berkman Center kindly hosted to help launch my book. I was outlining the business benefits of E2.0 – the good things that can accrue to companies that embrace the phenomenon, but Dave was interested in another type of benefit.

He said (as near as I can recall), “The real change here is that people now have a much greater voice inside the enterprise. They don’t have to work only within the confines of their cubicle, or their work group, or their job description.”

Dave’s comment made me realize that whether the business benefits are the cake and the personal ones the icing in your view or vice versa, E2.0 is a welcome development. When it’s working well, it makes people more central and leaves organizations better off. This is unusual for advances in corporate computing (it was certainly not the case for ERP ;) )  and is certainly good news. E2.0 helps put into practice Nelson Mandela’s advice to find everyone’s spark of genius in an organization, and in doing so helps companies know what they know. Not a bad combination…

In my short keynote at the conference, I’ll look back at the past five years and also look ahead. I’ll spend some time talking about what I see as the two biggest threats to E2.0: old-fashioned bosses and newfangled computers.

If that piques your interest, come to the conference or watch the live webcast. I’m speaking on Tuesday, June 21 at 10:45. Hope to see you there…

  • http://twitter.com/euan Euan Semple

    Might adopt “ponderer” as a tag line and then aspire to the epithet “ace”! 

  • Anonymous

    Look forward to hearing your talk. Old-fashioned bosses are likely to have short careers as their companies lose out to more enlightened competitors.

  • http://twitter.com/EphraimJF Ephraim Freed

    When I managed Oxfam America’s intranet I liked to say that “our social intranet gave every employee a face and a voice.” 

    Above all I think E2.0 has humanized the workplace. It gives everyone a voice and opportunities to speak up and requires leaders listen. We’re seeing a resurgence in “knowledge management” because E2.0 has brought people – the holders of knowledge – to the forefront and made them easy to find and connect with, rather than trying to codify every bit of knowledge in databases. 

    Enterprise 2.0 could have been called “Enterprise Human.0″ just like “social business” is really just people-centric business: http://bit.ly/gBBZ5j

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  • http://twitter.com/immunity Andrea Baker

    I will see you there. I am anxious to see what the world of Enterprise 2.0 or whatever we are going to call it next year will be like in your vision. 

  • jacob morgan

    See you there!

  • tploucks

    Andrew – old friend.  You are way too idealistic.  Do you really think that most firms want every employee to have a voice?  And know what the raises are that their cohorts in other locations around the globe are getting?  2.0 is a major threat to the status quo of the corporate world we know today.  It’s about leveling.  And leveling is a dirty word in the private equity/big bank world we live in today….

  • Andrew Carusone

    I’m eager to hear you speak. As Lowe’s continues to embrace new ways of working through the use of collaborative technologies, we remain fully aware of the transformational change needed to fully realize it’s benefits – far beyond simply “installing” the technology.

    While the stakeholders of the status quo are often resistant or even threatened by the new openess E2.0 fosters, remaining focused on increases in employee capacity and overall enterprise performance keeps them in the game. In the end, the status quo “costs too much”. Eventually, as a new set of behaviors are valued and rewarded, stakeholders will realize they can no longer afford to do things the old way.

    What keeps me up at night, is pondering the long term implications on employee communication strategy and human capital management.

    Andrew, I remain a fan and eager to hear you speak in Boston.

    Andrew Carusone
    Lowe’s Companies, Inc.

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