Enterprise 2.0 and Andrew McAfee’s opinions on social media strategies
Tuesday, November 24 Technology adoption has often caused painful disruption to the way people work as CIOs introduce new enterprise systems throughout organisations. It seems the opposite is occurring in the 2.0 age where employees are just as likely to introduce new technologies enthusiastically to the disruption and concern of senior management. The introduction of a wiki to manage one project, a forward thinking product manager starting to promote their latest campaign on Twitter, or a PA suggesting the CEO should have a blog can lead a company to evaluate their entire social media strategy. It is bottom up or top down.
The adoption of new social communications 2.0 technologies by organisations “to evolve the corporate internet into a more organic, collaborative and user-driven platform” has been called Enterprise 2.0. The term was coined by Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management in his article titled Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration (currently only available for online sale).
McAfee has recently released his book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges, which explores the ways leading organisations are bringing Web 2.0 tools inside the firm. McAfee calls these tools “emergent social software platforms”—highly visible environments with tools that evolve as people use them—and he is optimistic about their potential to improve the way we work.
Here’s what the publishers have to say about the book:
"Web 2.0" is the portion of the Internet that's interactively produced by many people; it includes Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and prediction markets. In just a few years, Web 2.0 communities have demonstrated astonishing levels of innovation, knowledge accumulation, collaboration, and collective intelligence. Now, leading organizations are bringing the Web's novel tools and philosophies inside, creating Enterprise 2.0. In this book, Andrew McAfee shows how they're doing this, and why it's benefiting them. Enterprise 2.0 makes clear that the new technologies are good for much more than just socializing. When properly applied, they help businesses solve pressing problems, capture dispersed and fast-changing knowledge, highlight and leverage expertise, generate and refine ideas, and harness the wisdom of crowds. Most organizations, however, don't find it easy or natural to use these new tools initially. And executives see many possible pitfalls associated with them. Enterprise 2.0 explores these concerns and shows how business leaders can overcome them. McAfee brings together case studies and examples with key concepts from economics, sociology, computer science, consumer psychology, and management studies and presents them all in a clear, accessible, and entertaining style. Enterprise 2.0 is a must-have resource for all C-suite executives seeking to make technology decisions that are simultaneously powerful, popular, and pragmatic.
McAfee spoke to McKinsey&Company in October 2009 and here is their video interview.
