The blogosphere moves quickly. You can find many excellent summaries of the events of the 2009 Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. But only now are more reflective posts emerging. What is the point of Enterprise 2.0? Can its benefits be measured?
Michael Krigsman started things by writing about the Kumbaya effect. The opportunities for better communication and collaboration afforded by Enterprise 2.0 technologies are interesting, but are they valuable?
Susan Scrupinski followed up with some soul searching on the same subject. She makes the excellent point that E2.0 advocates’ fondness for dismantling the classic hierarchical structure of business is deeply threatening to senior management. And those are the same people that have to approve the use of these tools within the organization.
And just yesterday, Gil Yehuda lampooned E2.0 evangelists for getting absorbed in trivial debates while ignoring the big issue: Is there a need for these tools in the enterprise? Or do they just make us feel good? (Them’s fightin’ words, Gil!)
This has been the dominant, if unspoken, theme of the Enterprise 2.0 conference for the past few years. There are those who “get” Enterprise 2.0 and those that don’t. How do we get those that don’t get it to get it?
A movement or a business?
If I had to pick a starting point for Enterprise 2.0, I’d pick April 1999 and the publication of a provocative essay called The Cluetrain Manifesto. Its premise was that the rise of the Internet would change the nature of the marketplace. It predicted the decline of mass media and mass marketing. It asserted that companies would need to find new ways of interacting with their customers if they wanted to remain relevant — and profitable.
Many cyberutopians got the point right away. But it’s taken much longer for the rest of the business community to understand the implications of better communications and information sharing. It’s also taken some time to winnow the practical ideas from the more extravagant claims made by the manifesto.
Ten years after the publication of the Cluetrain Manifesto, we can see that the markets are changing, and that competitive pressure is forcing companies to interact with customers in new ways. Organizations now have corporate blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts. So far, so good.
But Enterprise 2.0 advocates go beyond the Cluetrain by positing that better communications and information sharing can also transform the internal operations of a business, not just the portions of it that interact with the outside world.
That’s a more difficult proposition. Internal operations don’t face the same competitive or social pressures that outward-facing portions of the business do. While there may be indirect links to productivity, effectiveness, and (ultimately) ROI, the case for E2.0 technology inside the company firewall is difficult to make.
So if you’re a line-of-business manager, you’ll naturally prioritize a project with measurable return higher than one without.
Which leaves most Enterprise 2.0 advocates simply arguing that these technologies will improve the working environment for the average Joe. It’s good for employee morale, or for talent recruitment and retention. And (whisper it quietly) senior leadership responds with, “Why should we care? We pay their salary. They do what we tell them to.”
So maybe we should consider Enterprise 2.0 a movement, a management style, or a vibe, instead of something intrinsic to the way business will be done in the future. Maybe we ought to treat it like the label “green company” or “family-friendly workplace.” A nice badge to wear when recruiting on college campuses. Something to make employees feel good, like sponsoring a softball team. Perhaps something worth a few remarks at the all-staff meeting.
A movement and a business
If Enterprise 2.0 is to be something more than a few throw-away sentences in the annual report, perhaps we ought to look at things differently.
I think there’s a place for these Enterprise 2.0 tools within organizations, but I’m not sure they are organizational tools.
The primary benefits of increased knowledge sharing and communication are individual benefits: I am more productive with these tools. I can find the information I need. I am better connected to my peers and coworkers.
So maybe the right thing to do, if you believe in E2.0, is to engage directly with knowledge workers themselves. Maybe the business of Enterprise 2.0 is not about selling the CEO, CIO, or IT director on the merits of transparency, immediacy, and authenticity. Maybe it’s about winning the hearts and minds of business professionals with tools that make their work easier.
Maybe Enterprise 2.0 isn’t about the enterprise at all.
Link to original post