Lingua inglese

Class 1 – Introduction to the course

Topics: Enterprise 2.0

Read the following extract adapted from Andrew McAfee’s book Enterprise 2.0. New collaborative tools for your organization’s toughest challenges (2009). It illustrates some of the most recent trends and developments in the world of ICT (Information and Communications Technology), with a particular focus on the World Wide Web. These new trends and developments have had a strong impact on global business over the last few years, giving rise to new challenges and opportunities in a number of fields, such as HR, PR, corporate culture and communication to name but a few.

Enterprise 2.0

Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are two terms related to how businesses are using a new set of technologies that appeared over the past few years on the Internet. To many people, these tools seemed so novel and important that they merited a whole new version number for the Web; Web 2.0 was created to describe them, and to highlight their impact on the Internet. I coined the term Enterprise 2.0 to describe how these same technologies could be used on organizations' intranets and extranets, and to convey the impact they would have on business.

The technologies involved are not simply a random assortment. Though they do differ in significant ways, they all share some deep similarities, similarities that make them all part of the same broad trend. This trend is the use of technology to bring people together and let them interact, without specifying how they should do so. While this sounds like a recipe for chaos, it's actually just the opposite; the technologies of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 have the wonderful property of causing patterns and structure to appear over time, even though they're not specified up front.

These developments were particularly unsettling, not only because they appeared so suddenly and in such rapid succession but also because they were all related to IT, a domain well outside the comfort zone of most business decision makers. The story of how businesses use technology is about to become a lot more interesting, in that a suite of technologies developed to support communities on the Web is entering companies and having a large impact on them.

The rise of Enterprise 2.0

In the spring 2006 article in the Journal Sloan Management Review, I introduced the term Enterprise 2.0 as a shorthand for the use of Web 2.0 technologies by businesses in pursuit of their goals. It caught on, and is now in fairly common use. At about the same time the article appeared, I started a blog about my work, and most of my blog posts have been about Enterprise 2.0. The phenomenon I call Enterprise 2.0 - business use of new tools of collaboration - is not confined to "new economy" companies, nor to those full of Generation Y workers; the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 are available to any organization.

As already stated above, the story of how businesses use technology is about to get much more interesting because Enterprise 2.0 offers significant improvements, not just incremental ones, in areas such as generating, capturing, and sharing knowledge; letting people find helpful colleagues; tapping into new sources of innovation and expertise; and harnessing the "wisdom of crowds".

These are critical activities, yet many organizations feel that they are currently stumbling rather than excelling at them. There is also widespread perception that the technologies currently in place to support these activities are weak, primitive, and unpopular. Because of Enterprise 2.0, the situation is already changing at some organizations. Leading companies are deploying the new tools of collaboration and interaction; changing established norms, practices, and processes; and reaping rewards.

Social vs. collaborative technologies

The adjective social is often applied to the technologies discussed in this field. This label is accurate, but unfortunate. When some managers hear talk of social technologies, they immediately think of technologies that facilitate activities like happy hour, fantasy sports league drafts, and office gossip. They hear social, in short, and think it means not work-related, or time-wasting, or productivity-draining. Because of this tendency, I rarely if ever use the word social when discussing Enterprise 2.0. I prefer instead collaborative, a term that has largely positive connotations for business leaders. People collaborate in order to get work done and solve problems, and these days there's no shortage of problems to solve. Enterprise 2.0 is all about using technology to bring brains together effectively. The new tools of collaboration and interaction provide benefits to close colleagues, professional strangers, and every level of tie strength in between.

Technological developments and Web 2.0

We first need to understand a few recent technological developments. These occurred on the public Internet, where they gave rise to the phenomenon of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is not mere hype, nor is it of interest only to e-tailers and other Internet companies. Rather, it is extremely relevant to all organizations that want to bring people together into communities that generate useful information and knowledge and solve problems effectively. Against this background, what I have termed Enterprise 2.0 is the phenomenon that occurs when organizations adopt the tools and approaches of Web 2.0.

A new version of the Web?

In September 2005, the technology writer and publisher Tim O’Reilly posted the following entry, titled “What is Web 2.0?” on his company’s Web site:

The concept of “Web 2.0” began with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O’Reilly VP, noted that far from having “crashed”, the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What’s more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have something in common. Could it be that the dotcom collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as “Web 2.0” might make sense? We agreed that it did...

O’Reilly and his colleagues examined companies, organizations, and sites that represented Web 2.0. These included the following:

• The collaboratively produced encyclopaedia Wikipedia
• Social network sites Facebook and MySpace
• Web-bookmarking resource Delicious
• Media-sharing sites YouTube (for videos) and Flickr (for photos)
• Blogging utilities such as Blogger and Typepad and the blog-tracking site Technorati
• Web search engine Google
• Location-based classified ad site craigslist

Most of these had appeared quite recently, a fact that lent support to the notion that there was in fact a new version of the Web. Further support for this idea came from the enormous popularity of many of these resources. According to the Alexa ranking service, by August 2008 six of the ten most popular sites in the world – Google, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, and Blogger – were part of the new Web described by O’Reilly. People were voting with their feet (or, to be more precise, their mouse clicks), and were migrating with startling speed away from Web 1.0 stalwarts to the Web 2.0 start-ups.

In a December 2006 post to his blog, O’Reilly offered a short definition: “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among these rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them”.

O’Reilly’s definition was very helpful. It articulated and crystallized important developments on the Internet and throughout the high-tech sector. But what about companies outside the computer industry? Did the new websites and communities, and the principles that underlie them, herald any important business changes for them? And what about executives, managers, and front-line employees who weren’t involved in building applications? What, if anything, did the new collaboration technologies and approaches mean for them? What could “normal” organizations take away from the strange and wonderful new communities of Web 2.0?

To answer this question, it’s necessary first to understand what changed – how the IT “toolkit” available for collaboration and interaction became significantly larger and better in the first few years of the millennium than it was during the era of groupware and knowledge management (KM) systems. O’Reilly's definition highlights network effects: the fact that some resources, like telephone networks and person-to-person auction Web sites, become more valuable to each member as they attract more and more members. Network effects are clearly fundamental, but nothing new; they were understood and deeply appreciated in many industries both before and after the arrival of the Internet. And network effects apply to many, if not most, communication and collaboration technologies, including e-mail, instant messaging (IM), groupware, and KM.

Three trends yield better tools

Network effects were a necessary but not sufficient condition in the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. To understand the transition more fully, and appreciate what it means for companies hoping to use technology in pursuit of business goals, we'll need to become familiar with three recent trends. On the Internet the convergence of these three trends has led to Web 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 describes the same convergence on corporate intranets and extranets. These three trends include:

1) Free and easy platforms for communication and interaction

Some popular collaboration technologies - including e-mail, mobile phone texting, and some types of IM - are what I call channels. They essentially keep communications private. People beyond the sender and receiver(s) can't view the contents of information sent over channels and usually don't even know that communication has taken place. Information sent by channels isn't widely visible, consultable, or searchable. Because no record exists on what sent what to whom, channels leave no trace of collaboration patterns.

At times, of course, this is exactly what people want. Communications that are meant to be private should indeed take place via channels. Many other communications and collaborations, however, do not need to be private and may in fact benefit from greater visibility. If a knowledge worker finds herself sending the same e-mail over and over again in response to questions from colleagues, for example, she may well want the ability to display the information somewhere public and point people to it (or, better yet, let them find it on their own). Team members may want to discuss the problems they are working on publicly, so that others can help out if they have relevant knowledge. Channel technologies, unfortunately, are not much help in either of these scenarios.

The alternative to a channel is what I call a platform. Platforms are simply collections of digital content where contributions are globally visible (everyone with access to the platform can see them) and persistent (they stick around, and so can be consulted and searched for). Access to platforms can be restricted -- for example, to only members of an R&D lab or a team working on a particular deal -- so that sensitive content isn't visible too widely, but the main goal of a platform technology is to make content widely and permanently available to its members (a familiar example of platform is KLIPS).

Digital platforms are not rare; every web site, whether on an intranet, extranet, or on the Internet, is a platform. They are not new, either; companies and people have been building web sites since the mid-nineties. To see what kind of platforms are new in the era of Web 2.0, recall journalist A.J. Liebling's mordant observation that “freedom of the press is limited to those who own one”. In the mid-nineties, the World Wide Web put a multimedia printing press and a global distribution network in the hands of everyone with a little bandwidth, a bit of money (for site-hosting fees), and moderate technical expertise (for coding HTML pages and uploading them to servers). Millions of people and companies took advantage of this opportunity. Hundreds of millions of people did not, however, even though they had Internet access.

Lots of these people, of course, had nothing to say or no desire to take advantage of the printing press offered by the Web. Many others, however, were daunted by the combination of time, expense, and technical skill required to set up and maintain their own web site. Then blogs appeared, vastly reducing the amount of work required to publish on the Web. The term weblog, which was first used in 1997, came to refer to an individual’s frequently updated web site. In 1999 the shortened form blog first appeared as a noun and a verb. By the start of the millennium, software tools were available that let people initiate and update blogs without having to transfer files to servers manually or learn HTML. With these tools, people simply used their Internet browser to enter text, links to other web sites, and the other elements of a standard blog.

Blogs let people add online content with no hassle and no knowledge of low-level technical details. They are an example of what I call free and easy platforms. In this description, free really does mean free of charge. Several advanced blogging platforms are available on the Web at no cost, so anyone with access to a connected computer can start contributing to the Internet's global pool of information.

Free and easy platforms now exist on the Web for all types of media, including images, videos, sound, and text. And many of the currently popular Web 2.0 platforms like Facebook, MySpace, and Blogger allow their users to combine many types of media -- all without having to pay anything or acquire skills beyond the ability to point, click, drag, drop, and type.

As I am writing this, one of the most intriguing new free and easy platforms on the Web takes communications that have historically flowed through channels and migrates them to a platform. Twitter is a utility that lets people broadcast short messages - no more than 140 characters - to anyone and everyone who may be interested in reading them. These messages can be sent from a computer, mobile phone, PDA, and so on. Users tell Twitter which people they are interested in following, and Twitter collects all messages from these people (and only these people) and present them to the user in a chronological list. This list can be viewed on the same range of devices from which messages are sent. Users can reply to one another's messages, but unless specifically requested otherwise, these replies are public; they become part of the Twitter platform rather than flowing through a private channel.

2) A lack of imposed structure

As the entrepreneurs and technologists of Web 2.0 were building the new free and easy platforms, they were also rethinking their own roles and making a fundamental shift. Instead of imposing their own ideas about how content and work on the platforms should be structured, they started working hard to avoid such imposed structure. In this context, structure means a few specific things, such as workflows, decision rights, interdependencies, and information.

Throughout the history of corporate computing, the norm has been to use technology to impose these work structures - to define workflows, interdependencies, decision rights allocations, and/or information needs - in advance and then use software to put them in place. ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM (customer relationship management), SCM (supply chain management), procurement, and other types of “enterprise systems” enjoyed explosive growth starting in the mid-nineties. These applications are different in many respects, but they shared one fundamental similarity: they were used to define, then deploy, business processes that cut across several organizational groups, thus helping to ensure that the processes would be executed the same way every time in every location. The applications did so by imposing all the elements of work structures listed above.

The belief that technologies supporting collaborative work should impose work structures appears, in fact, to be an almost unquestioned assumption. Technology developers and corporate managers seem to have until quite recently shared the belief that good outcomes in group-level work come from tightly structured processes. In other words, a genre of technology intended to support unstructured work has enjoyed its greatest success as a tool for imposing work structures. Knowledge management applications, for example, did not typically specify interdependencies between people or workflows, but they did tightly predefined the structure of the information to be included within the knowledge database, giving only certain people and groups the right to add to it. The work design philosophy of good outcomes via imposed structure and tight control is clearly appropriate in many circumstances, but is it always appropriate? Are there circumstances or contexts in which it is better not to try to impose control? Can high-quality outcomes result from undefined, uncontrolled processes? The early history of Wikipedia provides a fascinating case study of these issues.

3) Mechanisms to let structure emerge

Several years ago the mathematician and writer John Allen Paulos gave voice to a widespread concern about the Web’s growth with the observation, “The Internet is the world’s largest library. It’s just that all the books are on the floor.” He meant that there was no equivalent of a card catalog for the Web’s content. People who put up Web sites were under no obligation to categorize their contents accurately, and there was nothing like the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress system to classify what a site was about. Yahoo! tried to do this on its own by employing many people to look at Web sites and place them within the company’s hierarchy of online content. This approach worked for a time, but eventually the Web grew too fast for Yahoo! to keep up.