New Feed in Learning 2.0 Reading List: Andrew McAfee's weblog
I've just added Andrew McAfee's weblog: The impact of IT on business and their leaders to the Learning 2.0 reading list.
McAfee started blogging on March 6 with this goal: This blog has two overlapping aims: to explain to non-technologist business leaders how, where, and why IT is having an large impact, and to articulate their roles in maximizing this impact. In other words, I’ll describe both what IT does for managers, and what managers do for IT.
McAfee recently published an article in the Sloan Management Review entitled: Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration (Spring, 2006 - available for purchase through the link). In it he argues that “there is a 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.”
There has been much discussion in the blogosphere around how readily Enterprise 2.0 tools will be adopted. McAfee argues in a follow-up post in his blog that:
It’s very reasonable to believe that most busy professionals are only going to blog if it helps them get their job done. But it’s also pretty reasonable to conclude that blogging will do exactly that.
Lots of knowledge workers spend lots of their time on two activities: keeping their colleagues appraised of what they’re doing, what progress has been made, what they’ve learned/concluded, etc. and trying to locate resources within their own organizations— facts, references, work that’s already been done, people with relevant smarts or experience, etc. Blogs (like the other Enterprise 2.0 tools) can help with the first of these tasks, and in doing so also help with the second. It’s not too farfetched to envision companies in which people use Enterprise 2.0 tools to report progress, collaborate, and share the outputs of these collaborations. These same people would probably also search the company’s internal ‘collabosphere’— the collection of blogs, wikis, group-level instant messages, tags, etc.— early and often in any effort.
In short, I completely agree that most workers these days feel busy, and hard-pressed to keep up with both demand and supply of information. The tools of Enterprise 2.0 can help do both.
I can think of two other plausible reasons that Enterprise 2.0 will not become a widespread phenomenon. First, most companies might not have a sufficiently long tail.
I think there’s also a long tail among people, and it relates not to willingness to consume (i.e. demand) but rather to willingness to produce. In November of 2005, the most recent month for which comprehensive stats are available, Wikipedia had over 850,000 articles in English, and 2.9 million across all languages (including more than 10,000 in Esperanto). This content was generated by fewer than 50,000 contributors in English, and 103,000 total.
If companies only get the same fraction of Intranet users to use Enterprise 2.0 tools, these tools will be roundly and rightly acclaimed as failures. Business leaders have to find ways to increase the ‘ambient percentage’ of internal wikipedians, bloggers, taggers, etc. well beyond what we’ve observed so far on the public Internet. Demonstrating that these tools will increase productivity, decrease workload, and put hours back in the week will certainly help, but I wonder if such demonstrations will be enough.
Perhaps the biggest leverage business leaders have in encouraging Enterprise 2.0 is that maddeningly vague word culture. If they can convince their organizations that using and contributing to the internal collabosphere is part of the fabric, identity, and life of the company, some interesting things will happen.
The third reason to be pessimistic about Enterprise 2.0, however, is also culture, especially as it’s defined and shaped over time by business leaders. If these leaders signal that they really don’t want open, freeform, and emergent collaboration, they really won’t get it. I predict that the diffusion of these tools is going to sharpen differences among companies as some work to foster the new styles, modes, and practices of collaboration and others work (subtly or overtly) to squelch them.
I encourage you to read all of the articles in this very interesting blog.
