Harvard B-School Professor Andy McAfee is a web 2.0 Paul Revere, warning sleepy companies that the web is a game-changing technology that can improve their innovation, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and collective intelligence. Yesterday he presented his thinking to a couple of hundred of us in the auditorium at PARC.
Andy coined the term Enterprise 2.0 to describe the result of mixing business with the web and its…
- social software
- network effects
- free, easy communications platform
- lack of structure upfront
- mechanisms for evolution over time
As John Hagel and JSB have pointed out, the future belongs to platforms, not programs. I’ve described this as the importance of building learnscapes instead of courseware. Similarly, McAfee differentiates channels (like email, a one-way communication) from platforms (for example, a wiki).
Setting up a platform used to require planning, technical chops, and investment. Setting up a platform today, for instance a blog, is impromptu, easy for anyone, and free. Blogs start out structure-free and enable anyone to create content.
McAfee does not support the web 2.0 fanatics who call for transparency for everything. After all, a cool thing about this technology is that you can protect as much of it as you want behind a firewall. You needn’t show the Full Monty to the entire world.
Wikipedia and Encyclopӕdia Brittanica were found to have similar proportions of inaccuracies. The difference is that by the next day, Wikipedia had corrected its inaccuracies.
The internet lets structure evolve. Google rides on page links created by others in their own self interest. Tag clouds arise from individual folksonomies. Flickr cluster algorithms isolate and rank trends. Prediction markets do what statistical analysis can’t.
Corporate adoption of Enterprise 2.0 faces challenges, both technical and cultural. I asked if web-savvy new hires who bring their networking technology with them won’t open the gate when they get and use information faster than their unconnected peers. McAfee thinks the challenges immense.
Will adoption of the Enterprise 2.0 schema “flatten” business organizations? McAfee thinks not. Some companies will take it all; others will have none of it.
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