Enterprise Too, not 2.0

Richard MacManus reports on some of the devel­op­ments around Enterprise 2.0, the applic­a­tion of some Web 2.0 tech­no­lo­gies and approaches to big business. There’s some debate over whether Web 2.0 is a pure consumer phe­nomenon and that there­fore Enterprise 2.0 is a dif­ferent animal.

I don’t think it is.

While many of the poster children of Web 2.0 are res­ol­utely consumer — digg, youtube, myspace, wiki­pedia — their approach, and the 2.0 approach gen­er­ally is about making things better for users, har­nessing their input and aggreg­ating them in clever ways. There’s nothing intrinsic to this agenda that segreg­ates it from the business world. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Users are not just your cus­tomers, they are also you and your fellow employees. Practices, tools and tech­no­lo­gies which make life better for users are good for everyone. The sep­ar­a­tion between consumer and business applic­a­tions is, in some senses, artificial.

If RSS makes it easy for con­sumers to read their favourite pub­lic­a­tions, then it is just as easy for employees to pick up the latest company inform­a­tion anywhere, on any device without logging into the intranet. If AJAX allows for more com­pel­ling, smoother and more imme­diate results for website cus­tomers then the same might be true of your CRM database. If mash-​​ups allowing the com­bin­a­tion of maps and house prices work well for con­sumers, then mash-​​ups that bring together inform­a­tion from sales, accounts and mar­keting data­bases into a cent­ral­ised overview are equally good news for managers.

The Wisdom of Crowds approach, for example, is not one that would typ­ic­ally be asso­ci­ated with mul­tina­tional busi­nesses. However, as I’ve noted before, cor­por­a­tions are already waking up to the idea that decisions and inform­a­tion can be better with input from a wider range of sources than the board room. Google, Microsoft and Eli-​​Lilly already use pre­dic­tion markets as internal decision-​​making tools. Prediction markets are a form of stock exchange in which members might bet on the best-​​selling products and other strategy decisions. The belief is that if the members of the decision-​​making pool are autonomous, have a variety of insights and are self-​​interested, then their col­lective decision-​​making power will be extremely successful.

Other com­panies such as First Direct, BT, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Mini and Nokia are using Wikis, real-​​time col­lab­or­ative websites that can be gen­er­ated and updated on-​​the-​​fly. Unlike intranets, they don’t require layers of per­mis­sion and encourage employees to ‘chip-​​in’, cor­recting and expanding on other people’s know­ledge. Built-​​in profile pages and complete doc­u­ment­a­tion of all changes encourage the devel­op­ment of rela­tion­ships between con­trib­utors and a sense of responsibility.

These are for used internal com­mu­nic­a­tion, to create a know­ledge base or replace emails for important inform­a­tion. They’re also used for com­mu­nic­a­tions with cus­tomers, as a tech­nical support or inform­a­tion tool that is co-​​created with users. Over 2000 organ­isa­tions already use the SocialText paid-​​for Wiki service. Research firm Gartner predicts that Wikis will become main­stream col­lab­or­a­tion tools in at least 50% of com­panies by 2009. In some com­panies, says SocialText, meeting times and email volume have already been cut by 50% through the use the col­lab­or­ative tool.

Web 2.0 services such as CRM systems like salesforce.com or office applic­a­tions like Google Spreadsheets have quite obvious business applic­a­tions because they directly mimic tools that are already in use in the offline office. However, while switching to web equi­val­ents can help cut costs, they truly become powerful to busi­nesses with new approaches involving mobility, device agnosti­cism, openness, col­lab­or­a­tion and real-​​time access to devel­oping events and information.

Perhaps it’s the res­ist­ance to change that makes a new name, Enterprise 2.0, seem neces­sary. But perhaps what that really describes is the organ­isa­tional change that needs to happen in order to get value out of any of these things, rather than the tech­no­lo­gies them­selves. For many busi­nesses, I suspect, col­lab­or­a­tion, lack of hier­archy, customer input and sharing are pretty foreign, scary concepts. In those cases, it’s not what sits on their com­puters that will be the big change.

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