Make Your Mark Blog

I’m sad. Not only did I listen to this debate http://www.veodia.com/Enterprise2, I also wrote a note of it for you guys. It’s quite long but have a quick look through it.

It was a lively debate between two speakers focused on the question
whether web 2.0 and collaborative technologies will have any impact on
business and organisational performance.

Andrew McAfee Harvard Business School – coined the phrase enterprise
2.0 – thinks it does have the potential to change businesses and
organisations. Professor Tom Davenport writes a blog saying that he
thinks enterprise 2.0 is only the next small thing.

Enterprise 2.0 is defined as the use of emergent social software
platforms within companies and between companies, partners and
customers. The software is stuff that allows people to connect and
collaborate online and platforms where the interactions are globally
visible and persistent such as blogs, wikis and predictive markets.

Professor Davenport doesn’t believe the technologies will transform
organisations – a pragmatic killjoy. The social media has a place but
is not revolutionary. They will live largely on the margins of business
because they do not fit mainstream needs.

“I have yet to see any major example of how capitalist organisations
make more money as a result of 2.0 nor seen any examples of corporate
cultures being transformed. Various usages of the term enterprise 2.0 –
web 2.0 technologies are used within organisations – and I have some
problem with the idea that this means a radically new version of
enterprises. We’ve had enterprises over 1000’s of years and I think it
is highly unlikely that we have created a whole new version of these
over the last few years. I’m an agnostic about this not an atheist –
not sure what it is and not sure it will have the transformative effect
being touted – but I don’t know for sure.”

McAfee agrees it won’t be transformative for many companies – but thinks it has the potential to be transformative for some.

“It won’t lead to a new flavour of companies but these technology
platforms can take information and reproduce it widely at zero
incremental cost. This was available in web 1.0 but there is a
discontinuity with 2.0 and the reason I coined a new buzz phrase was
that the stuff we are contributing to these platforms now comes from
any part of the organisation –wherever you sit on the organisational
chart. And those contributions add up to something over time. The
patterns and structure of collaborations become visible and something
to profit from. We didn’t have this technology until recently.”

His optimism comes from the fact that these new technologies have
the potential to address deep needs in organisations. Organisations say
over and over again they don’t have the means to collaborate together
and learn from each others projects – these technologies are real
solutions to these problems. He suggests though there will be many
bureaucrats trying to shut these things down.

Davenport questioned how much functionality these ‘new tools’
provide over other technologies. Some of these emerging tools are
interesting approaches to managing knowledge within organistations but
then so was Microsoft Sharepoint. This allowed people to participate
and collaborate. Not terribly exciting stuff but more people using this
than wikis in the workplace.

“Organisations need convergent and divergent approaches to managing
knowledge. Arthur Anderson took this approach – one is for more
official knowledge and the other one is tips and tricks and something
that someone can monitor to see if there is any information that needs
to be moved over to the convergent section.”

McAfee thought organisations need enlightened leadership to let
these things happen. They need to let things filter in and upwards and
not get upset when you hear something you don’t like. These are
unfriendly tools for people who want to protect turf within
organisations. It may though be unrealistic to think that people will
surrender leadership to people who think they are doing a bad job or
think they have a better way of doing things.

Davenport highlighted that ‘searching’ facility has been there since
1976 and a major feature of the IT landscape. Links are a fundamental
part of web 1.0. Authoring, well been around but blogs and wikis are
new developments. Tagging been around since early days and is an old
concept – but social tagging and metadata has moved it on.
Collaborative filtering has been around for a while – e.g. Amazon and
MIT labs. Signals – a lot of signals are emails – been around for ages.
RSS might be new though.

McAfee thought this was fair enough but innovation is not just
something new but combining old things together in a way that hasn’t
been done before. And he hadn’t seen these things above being combined
together before a few years ago. Things keep getting added to the mix –
predictive markets – a really interesting technology. It does not fit
into the letters but they are not that emergent because you have to fix
the markets in advance. This stretches the definition of enterprise
2.0. Predicative markets are stock markets that you use to trade on
future events as opposed to the future profits of a company.

“A fascinating technology – even if you don’t have a load of traders
– these things spit out very accurate predictions about future events.
Someone has to fix it up but they are emerging and self-organising.
They do run against bureaucrats – but they are anonymous.”

The Chair asked for comments on the emergent audience for these
tools – a younger workforce - what’s the impact of the younger
generation coming into the workforce bought up using these technologies?

McAfee said we don’t know but thinks the impact will be large.

“I feel like I’m about a quarter step ahead of my MBA students these
days in staying ahead of these social technologies explaining these
technologies and I’m puzzled by that because they are a bit younger
than I am. In general grads graduated in about 2001 and almost all the
web 2,.0 sites were founded after that time. Myspace, Facebook,
delicious youtube, wikipedia, granddaddy. Very young technologies and
MBA students were not using them. When I talk to people graduating now
they find email quaint and when they are in the workforce they will
want to collaborate in very different ways.”

Will this have an impact on hierarchical workforces?

Davenport: “I would like to think that they will but we really don’t
know. I keep looking at the organisations adopting these technologies
to see what they are being used for exactly. There was an interesting
issue in the current edition of Fortune about Facebook,. It mentions a
fair number of organisations that have set this up internally but
didn’t give any detail on what people were using this for from an
organisational perspective. My children are heavy facebook users – I
try to pump them for business applications of this – they tell me I’m
missing the point. I think this will be used in organisations but will
be for more social purposes than organisational ones – retention, staff
satisfaction.”

But what happens is a mix of hard and soft relationships.

McAfee: “At Harvard when I first saw this being demonstrated the
speaker was asked by the organisation to show the differences between
using it academically and using it for social purposes and told the
audience that this distinction didn’t really occur to him – he said “I
just use Facebook” – why wouldn’t we want people to have this
frame of mind when they approach collaboration within organisations.
One of the things happening is to let them use the tools and have some
faith that some of their use will be for work purposes.

Bad behaviour on wikis?

McAfee: “I’ve yet to see a single action of bad behaviour on
corporate wikis. I stopped the audience and asked them and not a single
hand went up – I think this is overblown.”

Davenport: “opening wikis up to everyone – like suggestion boxes
before them - means you have to deal with every suggestion – not the
creation but the actioning and responding to them. I write a blog and
they are well suited to expressing yourself– but I don’t think we have
time to read them all and be a productive society.”

Davenport: “If they are such a good idea then why don’t we make them
mandatory? I spoke to one organisation that was planning this and I
asked for their objective. Is it about self-expression – are you going
to make people read them all too? Then they said it’s a pretty bad
idea.”

McAfee: That’s stupid – the point about a blog is that they can help
express opinions but that’s not all – they do lots more – it’s up to
you. You can put up any information you want on them. I don’t read a
single blog on anything to do with my work – I have an RSS feed coming
out telling me occasionally what I could look at them. I think about
all these tools we have for internal communications – and how many of
them actually get used? How many people use them? If all this stuff
were in a blog format and I could pick and choose and self assemble
this would be hugely valuable. You can have a dig, a searcher, even a
google search looking through them all for you. I think the web becomes
more useful to me as more voices are adding to it and things can float
not to the top but where I can find them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Web/Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.