McAfee and Davenport: Value of Enterprise 2.0
This morning I moderated the debate between Andrew McAfee and Thomas Davenport on the merits of Enterprise 2.0 (watch the video of the debate). The two professors agreed that Enterprise 2.0 is in its infancy, but disagreed on the potential for it to transform how people work in corporations.
McAfee, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, coined the term “Enterprise 2.0” which he defines as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.” In his definition, ‘emergent’ means that the technology offers “mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people’s interactions become visible over time.”
More practically, Enterprise 2.0 is about the deployment of blogs, wikis, social networks, and more freeform, egalitarian collaborative technologies that tap into the collective mind within enterprises. McAfee further identified search, links, authoring, tags, extensions and signals as characteristics of Enterprise 2.0 technologies.
During the debate McAfee acknowledged that Enteprise 2.0 is at an early stage, with few proof points to substantiate his theory at this juncture. Davenport, a professor at Babson College and the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management, contended that Enterprise 2.0 transforming proof points will remain elusive–it won’t overthrow the traditional hierarchies and power structures that have governed corporate culture for centuries.
He has expressed that view in his blog, “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.”
McAfee agreed the transforming culture is a significant challenge, and said that enlightened leadership would pave the way to Enterprise 2.0 deployments. He said that Enterprise 2.0 technologies would continue to seep into companies, and that the new generation brought up on digital technologies coming into the workforce, could be an accelerator to acceptance of the technologies and culture changes. McAfee suggests that Enterprise 2.0 provide managers with the opportunity to foster lateralism, egalitarianism, crowd sourcing, innovative ideas and collective intelligence in a corporate setting.
Davenport countered that Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t offer much new and it’s not revolutionary. Tags, search, knowledge management, email and links have been around for years, and haven’t done much to democratize corporate cultures, he said.
That’s like saying the Internet is not new. Yes, it’s been around since 1969, but in the last decade the Internet has revolutionized communications globally. That’s new. Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t have to be completely new to have a significant impact on corporate culture, productivity and competitiveness. Imagine Facebook in a business context, mashing up people and information in ways that help companies run faster, smarter and more efficiently.
In the end, and as a user of Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 technologies and services, I have to side with McAfee’s sense, as opposed to empirical evidence, that Enterprise 2.0 will eventually become mainstream. [Source: ZDNet]
