One of the reasons I was disappointed I didn’t get to Boston for this week’s Enterprise 2.0 event was to see the face off between Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport, moderated by Dan Farber, over the relevance of Enterprise 2.0. However, I would probably have been slightly disappointed again, as I was hoping that Andrew would go for the jugular and state the case with some passion and controversy. He was too polite and diplomatic for me, although all of the ingredients are there, with some great material and quotes are spread over the course of the session. If you are interested in the way the enterprise is changing with the adoption of blogs, wikis and other social networking tools, as well as the barriers that hinder the current progress, then it is well worth listening to the whole 49 minute debate.
Tom reminds me of many CIOs I talk to, who are very sceptical of the enterprise 2.0 hype, but tend to be “agnostic rather than atheist” on the subject. He isn’t exactly sure what it is, isn’t sure that it will have any sort of transformational effect on organisations, and believes that these kinds of collaboration tools have been around for 30 years. He even commented that you could do all of this with Microsoft SharePoint, so what’s the big deal? The point he and the other sceptics are missing is the ease of availability and low or zero incremental cost to deploy these techniques. If I turn the clock back 10 or more years I could build a ton of collaboration tools in my intranet, but the cost and time of the project would mean that it would never see the light of day.
Andrew, on the other hand, believes there is a real technology discontinuity that has happened just recently, and that it has enormous potential for change, although we are still just at the beginning, which is why there are so few stories and case studies around. Andrew said:
“The stuff we are contributing to with these platforms now can come from any part of the organisation regardless of where you sit on the org chart. Anyone has the potential to contribute to it, and even more interestingly, those contributions add up to something of real value over time”
Tom was trying to explain that Knowledge Management applications have given people in organisations access to shared information and allowed collaboration for a long time. Andrew argued that the difference today is that that information can be provided in blogs and wikis in a more convenient form, and crucially with the application of RSS, in such a way that he can pick and chose and self assemble just the topics and information he’s interested in. In one powerful sequence he referenced the CIO at an investment bank (JP Rangaswami when he was at DrKW I assume) where he was expecting that the structured and highly controlled environment would be a poor fit. The argument came back that the wiki approach actually helped them with compliance. If problems relating to trading issues occurred, the wiki helped them provide a date and time stamped digital trail of the problem, the issues and the resolution, which helped them enormously with the financial regulators.
He also related that he had was part of a panel at last year’s Wikimania, and had asked the other panellists and audience if they knew of any examples of bad behaviour, or vandalism associated with the corporate wikis they’d been involved with, and no-one even raised a hand. It seems that concern, often raised by the sceptics, is also groundless.
Tom voiced the concern that social tools would be used in a corporation just for social networking, although he could see some potential in staff retention from that. Andrew argued that in organisations there is a mix of social interactions, working on a specific problem we’ve got to get out of the door in time, plus finding who has got the answer to this specific question. The new tools can directly address those issues and add value, although he agreed that getting specific ROI numbers is difficult at the moment.
Both agreed that the hype cycle on the topic is way ahead of the deployment cycle in current practice, but Andrew still contends that the benefits are worth the effort, and the future potential is of enormous value. I’m very definitely on Andrew’s side with all of this.
