Can Enterprise 2.0 really work ?

I have been a strong proponent of Enterprise 2.0, and I thought, with the new year and all, I would take this opportunity to re-evaluate my position and study ideas and views that reside on the other side of the fence.

In search of articles/blogs that spoke out against Enterprise 2.0, I came across an old article by Tom Davenport . In the article, Tom called "Enterprise 2.0" the "next small thing" and he argued that Enterprise 2.0 software and internet will not democratize or transform an organizational hierarchy alone. Below is a direct quote from Tom's article :-

The absence of participative technologies in the past is not the only reason that organizations and expertise are hierarchical. Enterprise 2.0 software and the Internet won't make organizational hierarchy and politics go away. They won't make the ideas of the front-line worker in corporations as influential as those of the CEO. Most of the barriers that prevent knowledge from flowing freely in organizations – power differentials, lack of trust, missing incentives, unsupportive cultures, and the general busyness of employees today – won't be addressed or substantially changed by technology alone. For a set of technologies to bring about such changes, they would have to be truly magical, and Enterprise 2.0 tools fall short of magic.

Tom hits a direct nail about the common traits that fall into a typical organization. Organizational hierarchies often hinders free flow of information due barriers.

I would like to take this point further to stress that while Tom is right in pointing out Enterprise 2.0 software and tools lack that magical silver to transform an organization, it is actually not the software, but rather the culture that fosters participation and utilization of E2.0 software that will transform the organization. E2.0 softwares are just tools, and though it plays a big part, it is essentially useless without user participation.

Being a proponent of Enterprise 2.0, I do not possess the utopian view that E2.0 is the silver bullet towards everything. Often, as pointed out in my other blog post about Misconception about Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 is primarily about a set of philosophies and cultural changes, that when brought forward into organizational strategy & execution plan, can benefit the companies in terms of boosting innovation and staying ahead of the game. It is more about fostering tacit interactions between employees in the organization more than anything else. The McKinsey Quarterly, in their article "8 Business Technology Trends to Watch" for example, has listed the following as some of the eight technology enabled trend to watch out for that will empower businesses:-

1. Distributing Cocreation
   
2. Using consumers as innovators
   
3. Extracting more values from interactions

Enterprise 2.0 technologies provide the necessary technology enabler to foster the above trends within an enterprise. For example, a WIKI allows collective intelligence to be gathered within a firm. As the report puts it :-

As companies learn to use these tools, they will develop managerial innovations—smarter and faster ways for individuals and teams to create value through interactions—that will be difficult for their rivals to replicate.

For Enterprise 2.0 to work, every company will need "Champion users" in driving the cause of such systems to comprehend the success of the execution of E2.0 strategy in the firm. Champions are typically leaders that promote the use of such systems. Ideally, the champion will be someone from the top of the organizational hierarchy (not necessarily the C-levels, but managerial levels are perhaps the most effective in encouraging participation).

As Enterprise 2.0 poses cultural change challenges to the organization, the other point to note are incentives for users to actually use such systems. Put it simply, an employee can simply ask "Why do I have to use the WIKI ? I am happily comfortable with attaching documents and send it to a list of 20 different people in the company."

Overall, I always tend to view that Enterprise 2.0 == Technology + Strategy. The technologies surrounding it are enablers for fostering innovative ways for employees to collaborate with each other. The strategic part is about enhancing collaboration, and the results of it being better extraction of value from the collaborative efforts (a.k.a innovation). Communication has always been a critical key to the rise and fall of organizations. Effective communication can be aided by a new set of collaborative tools and technologies.

I believe the emergent technologies of Enterprise 2.0 can satisfy that need to harvest innovation collaboration. Afterall, to survive, one needs to innovate.