Professor Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School famously introduced the term and concepts behind Enterprise 2.0 last year and it’s had a heady ride across the industry and in the press ever since. Initially defined by McAfee as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers”, the broader global community has attempt to expand, reinvent, and co-opt Enterprise 2.0 with varying degrees of success. But the essential, core meaning has largely stayed the same: Social applications that are optional to use, free of unnecessary structure, highly egalitarian, and support many forms of data. ^{link »}

Enterprise 2.0 takes most of the potent ideas of Web 2.0, user generated content, peer production, and moves them into the workplace. Did the original articulation of Enterprise 2.0 have the right focus and point us in the best direction? And has the conception of it evolved from this vision to reflect that which we’ve learned along the way? Going back again to our two questions that will inform us as to the state of Enterprise 2.0; what have learned from our experiences with the early platforms and initial rollouts of Enterprise 2.0 and what does it teach us? ^{link »}

Lesson #1: Enterprise 2.0 is going to happen in your organization with you or without you. ^{link »}

Lesson #2: Effective Enterprise 2.0 seems to involve more than just blogs and wikis. ^{link »}

Lesson #3: Enterprise 2.0 is more a state of mind than a product you can purchase. ^{link »}

Lesson #4: Most businesses still need to educate their workers on the techniques and best practices of Enterprise 2.0 and social media. ^{link »}

Lesson #5: The benefits of Enterprise 2.0 can be dramatic, but only builds steadily over time. ^{link »}

Lesson #6: Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t seem to put older IT systems out of business. ^{link »}

Lesson #7: Your organization will begin to change in new ways because of Enterprise 2.0. Be ready. ^{link »}

How to access the benefits while minimizing the risks will continue to be a major topc in the Enterprise 2.0 community. In the meantime, I’d like to try an experiment and extend the SLATES mnemonic a bit. My biggest issue in using it in its present form to communicate Enterprise 2.0 is that it doesn’t itself capture the social, emergent, and freeform aspects that we know are so essential and so I’ve added these. I know SLATES is supposed to be capability based but it also needs to convey the intended outcomes clearly, and social capability in particular is missing. Thus, I’ve used an anagram generator to create another (hopefully) pithy mnemonic, FLATNESSES, which itself captures yet another important aspect of Enterprise 2.0, its egalitarian nature. FLATNESSES is depicted in the diagram below containing these three key aspects added to SLATES as well as a fourth which I discuss below. I hope you find this a useful conception to discuss the vital elements of Enterprise 2.0 in your efforts and would love your feedback. ^{link »}

tags: feb 09, blogs.zdnet.com

blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=143 · Original page