The term Web 2.0 created enough noise and confusion for a good year or so ... what is it, why is it that, I don’t agree, here’s my $0.02, etc. There are still many who prefer not to use the term, but the 2.0 meme has crept into all sorts of other labels, like Marketing 2.0, Advertising 2.0, Management 2.0, and a term that was coined by Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School, Enterprise 2.0.

The term comes from the concept of ERP systems (enterprise resource planning) such as SAP, which in turn is the child of the venerable MRP (manufacturing resource planning).

2.0 signifies the second large wave of the Web’s impact as it has moved from a static representation of pages and images to a much more dynamic and interactive user experience, as in Web 2.0.

Here’s McAfee’s definition (and I guarantee you’ll find others):

Enterprise 2.0, version 2.0

I'm not satisfied with my earlier definition of Enterprise 2.0, so let's propose a refinement (I'm sorry if this feels a bit pedantic, but clear constructs are important to academics):

Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.

Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities. (Wikipedia's definition).

Platforms are digital environments in which contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time. Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people's interactions become visible over time.

Freeform means that the software is most or all of the following:

1.Optional
2.Free of up-front workflow
3.Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities
4.Accepting of many types of data

Don Tapscott (see post below) has moved the goal posts along with his recent book Wikinomics, which addresses the use of wikis as collaboration and productivity tools for organizations. His firm poured a whack of money and time into research, and has come to the conclusion (paraphrasing) that wikis are the single most important change to the core architecture of the enterprise in the past century. Other notables have suggested that “Corporate Blogging Becomes Enterprise 2.0”. There’s an Enterprise 2.0 blog (http://www.fastforwardblog.com) developed by a range of tech specialists, and any number of debates raging about both the technological and sociological aspects of implementation inside the firewall of organizations, such as those underway here and here and here.

Why do I say “coming (sometime) …” rather than “coming soon …” ?

Because there’s a tremendous lack of understanding, and consequent fear, of loss of control, of turning the keys of the asylum over to the inmates, I think. The vestiges of Theory X management, where employees can’t be trusted to focus, stay on task and act responsibly ... no self-organizing here, thanks very much.

But also because this wired, interconnected and hyperlinked world of work is here to stay ... and the younger generations of digital natives now entering the workforce will expect things to go this way sooner rather than later.

My take ? Five years or more of blogging and wikiing have shown us that what goes on online is just like what goes on offline. When focused on purposeful work activities, I’d argue that the issues of effective leadership, corporate culture and empowerment or work enrichment (call it what you will) come to the fore when considering why and how to introduce the use of social software into an organization’s knowledge work processes or ecology.

Knowledge workers are volunteers, so the saying goes. You can’t control their minds, and so the implementation of Enterprise 2.0 initiatives is about influencing people positively and addressing their often more-latent-than-it-needs-to-be interest in what they are doing.

Looking back at Enterprise 1.0 … I wonder how many C-level executives and IT managers wish that there had been more discussion and exploration (for example, on blogs) about the more often than not sociological challenges of implementing large integrated enterprise systems. Training in the use of such systems even came to be referred to euphemistically as “change management”. How many millions of dollars (per company might have been saved?

One of the key differences with respect to Enterprise 2.0 is that the costs are much much less significant, and so it’s OK even to experiment, to fail faster (in the words of Dave Snowden) and thus accelerate learning and the development of productive work designs in a networked environment. I’d have to say though that I believe the main reasons for any “fast failing” will be the sociological resistance on the part of managers who will want to control and measure everything and thus mitigate against the flow of information sharing and ideas that is a key characteristic of the purposeful use of social software.

Jon Husband

To view Jon Husband's web site Wirearchy, please click here.