Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration

The bandwagon is getting bigger. The Spring issue of the Sloan Management Review has an article, Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, by Andrew McAfee on how the “new wave of business communication tools including blogs, wikis and group messaging software — which the author has dubbed, collectively, Enterprise 2.0 — that allow for more spontaneous, knowledge-based collaboration. These new tools, the author contends, may well supplant other communication and knowledge management systems with their superior ability to capture tacit knowledge, best practices and relevant experiences from throughout a company and make them readily available to more users.”

I doubt if the author was the first to do this dubbing but he makes ome good points anyway. Although I great deja veux with what we used to say about implementing KM over ten years ago.

“First, it is necessary to create a receptive culture in order to prepare the way for new practices. Second, a common platform must be created to allow for a collaboration infrastructure. Third, an informal rollout of the technologies may be preferred to a more formal procedural change. And fourth, managerial support and leadership is crucial.”

He does make some more useful points. He notes that knowledge workers use channels (e.g., email) more than platforms (e.g., portals) but these channels cannot be accessed or searched by anyone else. Also, visits to channels such as portals leave no usable trace. So answers to questions like who is working on my problem now are difficult to find.

He goes on the say that with web 2.0 tools there are platforms that focus not on capturing knowledge (the largely unrealized KM quest) but on the practices and outputs of knowledge workers. The new platforms make these putputs and practices visible to those whop need to see them.

I have discussed this advantage in different terms, the combination of a searchable archive with workspaces that teams or individuals structure (e.g., (blogs, wikis, and social bookmarking) for such tasks as project management. With this combination you get the accessible record of knowledge work as a byproduct of using the tool. The need to convince people to capture and upload their knowledge into a structured system as a separate work step largely goes away.

I like the way that McAfee frames this transition. enterprise 2.0