Enterprise 2.0 2007 - What is Enterprise 2.0?

Enterprise 2.0 is the term for the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. It provides business managers with access to the right information at the right time through a web of inter-connected applications, services and devices. Enterprise 2.0 makes accessible the collective intelligence of many, translating to a huge competitive advantage in the form of increased innovation, productivity and agility.driven technology

Enterprise 1.0
Hierarchy
Friction
Bureaucracy
Inflexibility
IT-driven technology/ Lack of user control
Top down
Centralized
Teams are in one building/ one time zone
Silos and boundaries
Need to know
Information systems are structured and dictated
Taxonomies
Overly complex
Closed/ proprietary standards
Scheduled
Long time-to-market cycles

Enterprise 2.0
Flat Organization
Ease of Organization Flow
Agility
Flexibility
User-driven technology
Bottom up
Distributed
Teams are global
Fuzzy boundaries, open borders
Transparency
Information systems are emergent
Folksonomies
Simple
Open
On demand
Short time-to-market cycles

Yesterday I said I didn’t know what Enterprise 1.0 was supposed to be. Here is an answer, from the blurb for a conference and show on Enterprise 2.0. The table (which I’m afraid WordPress shows only as two lists) sets out where E2.0 differs from what most of us are deemed to work in at the moment.

My sense of déjà vu grows stronger. I remember doing this sort of idealised and absolutist ‘dull old world’ versus ‘brave new world’ table yonks ago. I believed in it at the time, and still do — sort of.

What I have also come to believe since then is that:
— the products themselves are a tiny part of what is needed, even though that’s where the emphasis typically lies
— vision is nice but patience, determination, ingenuity and commitment are needed, too
— much of the old way of working is not as bad as is painted
— the documented old ways are often not what is actually going on
— in some places, some of the new ways will never work or will never be accepted
— the best one can do, often, is replace just some of the old ways and technologies
— compromise is not defeat — having some of the old coexist with some of the new can be a victory.

The devisers of lists like the one from the show also need to be aware that some of these ideas and technologies will not be accepted as they are. Users will adapt them to their own needs and imaginings. They will discover new uses and methods that systems people and the products’ designers would never have thought of.

These emergent uses can sometimes be the key to a system’s success and its wider adoption. Unfortunately, traditional ROI arithmetic — one of the most depressing handicaps ever imposed on commercial endeavour — does not admit of such possibilities. Making a ‘hard savings’ case on them can therefore be tricky, if not impossible.

Being able to steer one’s new proposals though the reefs and shallows of the organisation’s budgeting and project justification systems is fundamental to a project’s survival. If you can’t navigate through or round those obstacles, everything else is a waste of time.

Just hope you can keep your projects away from people who believe that cost displacement arithmetic is the only acceptable justification method. They are fiscal Dementors, who suck the hope and creativity out of organizational change.

You will note that the Enterprise 2.0 list above does not mention the need for new thinking about justifying investments. Nor does it touch on other fundamentals, such as:
— the role of IT specialists
— the flux of power between them and users
— the fight between user freedom and the demands of compliance
— the influence of technical and trading partners and of customers
— the need to agree a safe pace of change from ‘E1.0′ to ‘E2.0′.

Perhaps these aspects are omitted because they’re unglamorous, tough to deal with and devoid of techno-glitter.

Going from E1.0 to E2.0, if only partly, will be hard. Selling dreams about it has always been easy. So has buying into them.