Ready for Enterprise 2.0?

Consider the tools that anyone with online access has at their disposal today: Wikipedia and others for collaborative authoring, Facebook for social networking, Twitter for microblogging, RSS feeds, iGoogle – the list goes on. Tools like these, the stars of what's known as Web 2.0, are, for many, an intrinsic part of daily life – at least, the part of life that does not include work. That's because many businesses have remained stuck in 1.0 mind-sets.

There is a huge gap, and it is only just starting to narrow. This technology gap is felt most keenly by the so-called 'digital natives', who have grown up immersed in 2.0 tools. Ericsson ConsumerLab estimates that a typical 21-year-old has spent a lifetime total of 3,500 hours online engaged in social networking. This employee is accustomed to being connected with his network via text message and instant message, and he expects sophisticated information and communications technology to be available to him around the clock.

This generation 'has only known the empowerment of the internet and has become accustomed to have their vote counted,' writes John Newton, chief technology officer at Alfresco (a developer of enterprise content management tools), in the Financial Times.' To try and control it can only disenfranchise them. To empower them yields an optimistic workforce, with conversation between stakeholders in enlightened collaboration.'

ENTERPRISE 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 – a term coined by Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee – encompasses a range of tools that facilitate networking, collaborating and sharing: social networking software (think Facebook); collaborative publishing tools (think Wikipedia); blogging, micro-blogging and broadcasting tools (Twitter, podcasts, etc.); social bookmarking (Delicious) and social publishing (Digg). Enterprise 2.0 also marks a shift from desktop to web-based applications – part of a trend termed 'cloud computing', which fits the needs of today's mobile worker.

The primary benefit of Enterprise 2.0 is that it facilitates collaborating, information sharing and communicating. Like Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 is about group exchanges over one-way dialogue, active vs. passive participation, and making connections with people who share commonalities, be they around the corner or across the world.

The disparate tools that Enterprise 2.0 comprises help employees share and organise information, which in turn allows them to tap into collective wisdom (whether from the project team, the global organisation or partners/customers). They broaden horizons and flatten hierarchy. And they tend to be most valuable when colleagues in large organisations are spread out across offices and time zones.

A 2008 McKinsey survey of business use of Web 2.0 tools found that respondents' uses for these tools included internal recruiting, managing knowledge, training, fostering collaboration, developing products and services, improving customer service, enlisting customer participation in product development, allowing customers to interact, acquiring new customers, tapping a network of experts, lowering purchasing costs and achieving better integration with suppliers.

Amy Shuen, author of Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide, tells Computerworld that social networking and other tools give employees 'quick access to knowledge, know-how and 'know-who.' She explains: 'It's a way of leapfrogging quickly through several degrees of separation to find out who knows something on a topic that's of importance to you.' Use of 2.0 tools also expands employees' social connections and affiliations; helps them to build a brand, identity and reputation within the company; and allows them to benchmark against others.

The deskbound technologies installed by slow-moving corporate IT departments tend to make the tech-savvy millennial workers – the generation born between 1978 and 2000 – feel as though they are regressing by several technological cycles. Many are responding by adopting free tools available online, ignoring corporate IT altogether – which underscores why Enterprise 2.0 may be a priority sooner rather than later.

Indeed, demand for change is coming not just from digital natives. Today, many employees spend their free time creating or reading blogs, writing Wikipedia entries, rating YouTube videos and catching up with acquaintances on Facebook and other social networking sites. This is furthering employees' expectations of how technology should help them function.

Forrester Research observes that the rise of 'cloud computing' – working on web-rather than desktop-based applications – will push corporations toward wider adoption of 2.0 tools. Microsoft, Google, IBM and others are all competing in this space, which means costs are likely to fall, making the financial risks of implementation low. Working in the cloud represents a fundamental shift in connecting people within big organisations, notes Forrester, as employees no longer need desktops to be in the loop.

YOUR COMPANY-PEDIA

While Enterprise 2.0 can be useful in any organisation, it is especially beneficial to large, geographically dispersed enterprises where teams of employees, partners, suppliers and outsourced labour may never otherwise interact.

The wiki concept, for example, has proved a boon to pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. 'Pfizerpedia' developed in a grassroots fashion: A researcher downloaded some wiki software and launched it with the idea that it would serve as a scientific encyclopedia for staff worldwide. It rapidly took on a life of its own: 'The wiki spread through Pfizer like a virus, filling voids, connecting dots, and attaining its own form-that of a high-level road map to research going on across the company, studded with hypertext links to detailed research,' reports Chemical & Engineering News.

'People were using the wiki to advertise their projects, and they were using search to find out about other work at Pfizer,' its creator, Christopher Bouton, told ON Magazine.' In a company this large, researchers face crucial questions: How do you prevent redundancy in research efforts and funding? How do you know what else is going on in your field? How do you share your work with others?'

A year after its launch in 2006, the wiki was getting 12,000 hits a month from 13,000 users worldwide. It was integrated with employee directories and other sources in order to facilitate people search – results show employees' basic data and also their project details, publications and seminars. Pfizerpedia also serves as a platform for document creation, allowing teams to co-develop user manuals and jointly address software bugs. In addition to the wiki, Pfizer employees also use RSS feeds to keep up with news related to their work, and the company is starting up an internal social network (informally dubbed Pfacebook).

At the US electronics chain Best Buy, 20,000 employees participate in the social network BlueShirt Nation, where people can post profiles and host forums on topics of their choosing. In the Loop Marketplace section, employees can submit ideas to Best Buy executives. One retail associate explained to Computerworld that the site serves as a social outlet and a place to discuss work issues, as well as an important way to let executives know what's happening on the sales floor: 'As with any big company, it's easy for the message of the customers to be lost when you don't turn your attention to the people who interact with them on a regular basis.'

Most important is that management support the initiatives and allow the open, collaborative processes to flourish.

CROWDSOURCING AND BEYOND

Brands generally view social networks as a way to strengthen brand loyalty. But social networks can do more than that, replacing focus groups and surveys to more efficiently and perhaps accurately gauge what customers want, identify trends, provide insights and shape marketing decisions. Del Monte's by-invitation-only community 'I Love My Dog' offers blogs, chat rooms, message boards, podcasts, photoand video-sharing, groups – all the usual 2.0 tools but harnessed to provide feedback on ideas for new dog food products. Members discuss new items and product changes, weigh in on upcoming campaigns and assess product ideas.

Del Monte used the community to test an idea for a new treat for dogs; the vitamin- and mineral-enriched Snausages Breakfast Bites were developed in just six months, with little time wasted on ideas that testing might eventually reveal to be off-base with target customers. The company checked in with the community throughout the process, and its members helped to guide packaging and marketing.

BusinessWeek is using the idea of crowdsourcing in a site called Business Exchange (bx.businessweek.com) that combines elements of a wiki and a social network. 'We're good at finding great sources of information and distinguishing what's important, but we also want to harness the very significant capabilities of our community,' Stephen J. Adler, BusinessWeek's editor in chief, told the New York Times when the site launched last September.

The site is organised by topic – anything from the housing market to 'BlackBerry vs. iPhone' (the first topic created). What's unique is that users can not only post material to a page but also create pages, subject to editorial approval. Topic pages feature material from sources that include competing media. The social network aspect is that users have profiles, which they can make public or private; these log reading and posting activity, allowing friends and other curious parties to track members' current interests (e.g. 'What's on Donald Trump's mind today?', if he chooses to participate).

Also in September, the Wall Street Journal restructured its Website to add more 2.0 elements: Users can now create profile that enable others to see what they're doing on the site, post their own discussion questions and e-mail other users. The site has the potential to become a kind of business-oriented virtual water cooler, with users networking, exchanging views and sharing advice.

WHAT IT MEANS

In the McKinsey survey just 21% of the nearly 2,000 executives surveyed worldwide said they are satisfied overall with Web 2.0 tools, and 22% said they are dissatisfied. But significantly, McKinsey found that business units are more likely to be the ones driving the selection of 2.0 tools among satisfied respondents, while dissatisfied executives are more likely to say that IT departments are taking the lead. And among companies mostly satisfied with their use of Web 2.0 tools, more than half of employees are using them, compared with about a quarter of employees overall. Mostly satisfied companies also use more tactics to encourage the use of Web 2.0 tools.

Among companies satisfied with their use of Web 2.0 tools, however, about a quarter reported to McKinsey that these tools have changed interactions with customers and suppliers, as well as the way the company hires and retains talent; one-third said the tools have changed the way the organisation is structured. 'As Web 2.0 gains traction, it could transform the way companies organise and manage themselves,' McKinsey reports.

Nevertheless, without a real culture change, technology will never be a panacea for the problems that prevent knowledge from flowing freely in organisations – power differentials, lack of trust, missing incentives, unsupportive cultures, and the general 'busyness' of employees today. But businesses may not have an option. Many observers doubt that the people now entering the workforce will freely submit to the structured information environments and silo working that characterise so many companies.

The potential benefits of Enterprise 2.0 are clear: increased innovation, shorter development cycles, more engaged employees, better communication, better relationships, more agility within the organisation. The most difficult part, however, is also clear: giving up control. This will likely prove the biggest barrier to adoption.

Enterprise 2.0 will require leaders to loosen their grip, opening the doors to a range of viewpoints and maybe even dissent. It will require putting trust in stakeholders and a willingness to empower them. And it will require enough confidence in the company to make its workings more transparent. Smart businesses will put as much focus on evolving a 2.0 culture as adopting the tools that go with it.

TEN 2.0 TERMS YOU NEED TO KNOW

1. Cloud computing – accessing technology services from the Internet (the 'cloud') rather than a personal computer or local server. It allows users to tap into the power of large networked servers and to access data and applications from anywhere. This means paying for services on a per-use basis rather than buying servers, storage and software. Google Apps is one example, but companies including IBM, Microsoft, Dell and HP are all muscling into this space.

2. Folksonomy – a combination of 'folk' and 'taxonomy' that refers to ad hoc, collaborative labeling and tagging systems. Content is categorised using keywords chosen by users rather than traditional subject indexing. Also referred to as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing and social tagging.

3. Mashup – a Web application that integrates information from multiple sources into one tool. The most prevalent type uses a mapping tool to add location information to data-for example, HousingMaps.com plots Craigslist housing ads on a map of the U.S. and Canada so that prospective buyers and renters can pinpoint locations for all listings.

4. Micro-blogging – blogging in the form of brief updates that can be transmitted via text message, the Web, instant message, etc. The most popular platform is three-year-old Twitter, a free service that allows members to send 'Tweets' of up to 140 characters to anyone who signs up to receive (or 'follow') them.

5. RSS – really Simple Syndication is a means of syndicating content to subscribers. A Web- or desktop-based RSS reader tracks the automatically updated RSS feeds to which a user subscribes. The feed may alert users to anything from new blog entries to news headlines to project updates.

6. SaaS – 'software as a service,' a component of cloud computing, refers to hosted applications-users access software via the Web for an ongoing fee rather than buying licensed applications. This frees the user from dealing with installation, set-up, maintenance, etc., and gives the vendor stronger intellectual property protection.

7. Social bookmarking – a platform for people to share their Web bookmarks with others and to store, organise and search those links, allowing access to them from any computer. Users classify their bookmarks with tags. The term was coined by the Yahoo-owned site Delicious, which claims 5 million-plus users and 150 million bookmarks.

8. Social networking – if you're on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, et al., you know what it is-and may be addicted. What most of these virtual communities have in common is that members create profiles about themselves, build networks of friends or contacts, and communicate in several ways (email, IM, the 'wall' on Facebook, etc.); many include an array of other features, such as the ability to form groups and to use forums for discussion.

9. Tag clouds – a way to illustrate the popularity of tags, showing which topics are hot (or not) on a given site. A 'cloud' comprising alphabetised tags shows the most popular ones as largest and the least as smallest; clicking on one takes the user to items associated with that tag.

10. Wiki – it's perhaps most fitting to quote Wikipedia: 'A page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language.' These multi-author databases 'involve the visitor in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration.' (The word wiki is Hawaiian for 'fast'.)

WHAT EXPERTS ARE SAYING ABOUT ENTERPRISE 2.0

These five books, all published in 2008, examine the impact of Web 2.0 tools on culture and business and provide insights on how to leverage this technology to stay ahead.

Howe, J. (2008) Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. Crown Business.

Li, C. and Bernoff, J. (2008) Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Harvard Business School Press.

Prahalad, C.K. and Krishnan, M.S. (2008) The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through Global Networks. McGraw-Hill.

Shirky, C. (2008) Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organisations. Penguin Press.

Tapscott, D. and Williams, A.D. (2008) Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Portfolio.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marian Berelowitz is a New York-based editor and writer in the Trendspotting department at JWT.

[email protected]