You are right, nothing is static. Your feedback an...

2009-08-31T11:38:01.698+01:00

You are right, nothing is static. Your feedback and a second thought makes it obvious. I've updated my blog post to adjust this err.

Enterprise 2.0 needs to be seen more as a process, a way to transform enterprises by leveraging their social capital so they can become more agile, productive, innovative...whichever the objectives of the specific enterprise.

Mostly agree, except that as a systems practitione...

2009-08-31T11:03:59.584+01:00

Mostly agree, except that as a systems practitioner I'm always very wary about any notion of 'state'.

Nothing is static: there is no state. So might a more accurate term might 'focus' or 'emphasis' or 'direction'.

For 'Enterprise 2.0' itself, it may be more useful to go back to the core terms, 'enterprise' and '[Web] 2.0'. 'Enterprise' is a social structure; 'Web 2.0' is a primarily about a particular style of interoperation - in essence, two-way/multi-way interaction between peers rather than one-way transaction from 'producer' to 'consumer'. Some aspects of '2.0' do describe specific characteristics that typify '2.0'-style tools, but they're actually technology-agnostic: the 'technology' might be online, but could just as easily be a physical market or face-to-face information-sharing community.

As Jakob Nielsen makes clear in his review of 'Social networking on intranets' ( http://bit.ly/1aoYhR ), the main factor limiting success with 'social intranets' is not the technology but the organisation's culture. Hierarchical models ('Enterprise 1.0', in a Taylorist sense) can clash horribly with peer-to-peer models. Hence yes, one way to view 'Enterprise 2.0' is as a process of transformation, with the 'social computing' tools as interventions on behalf of that transformation.

But as Gil Yehuda puts in "Denial is a river full of crocks", it's naive to think that social-computing tools will automatically bring on a peer-to-peer organisation, or even to assume that such a structure is even desirable in every case. ("Definitely not", as you put it.) Instead, we need to move back at least a couple of steps, and consider more carefully why we would want such a transformation, and where in in what aspects of the enterprise we could and should implement it.

Just as Taylorism has real value in specific parts of the enterprise but is a disaster-area when applied rigidly to the whole, exactly the same applies to the 'sharing and caring' myths about 'Enterprise 2.0'. Sometimes we need strict hierarchies; sometimes we need to impose defined standards; and sometimes we don't. We just need to be very clear as to which is which, and where each applies. Which is where enterprise-architecture comes into the picture - by which I mean a real 'architecture of the enterprise', not solely of the enterprise IT.

We do need a replacement term for 'Enterprise 2.0': McAfee's definition is too IT-centric and too misleading to be in any way useful in the real enterprise, and has now slumped to the level of a meaningless buzzword for vendor hype (if it was ever anything more than that?). But even 'social computing' is suspect, because the emphasis needs to be on 'social' rather than 'computing', and, as you say, it needs to take more account of the differences between the broader society and the more constrained world within the organisation.

Seems to me that the (misnamed) 'Enterprise 2.0' is more a process than a state: and a definition itself seems too static for what we need. In an interesting recursion, is the debate about terminology itself the term that we need? :-)

Comments on The Content Economy: Enterprise 2.0 is a process, not a solution

You are right, nothing is static. Your feedback an...

Mostly agree, except that as a systems practitione...