Entreprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 = the use of freeform Social Software within companies.

According to McAfee it consists technically of SLATES: search, links, authoring, tags, extensions, signals. More explanations in his original paper.

Definition

AIIM's definition:

"A system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise". (http://mikeg.typepad.com/perceptions/2008/04/aiim-completes.html)

Description

"‘Freeform’ in this case means that the software is most or all of the following:

• Optional

• Free of up-front workflow

• Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities

• Accepting of many types of data"

(Ross Mayfield [1], citing Andrew McAfee [2])

Why it is difficult to achieve

Ross Mayfield: "The second front, that Enterprise 2.0 is Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities, not only flys in the face of enterprise culture and convention, but previously encoded political bargains. For example, a primary property of social software is easy group forming -- but most enterprise systems expressly prevent it. To form a group, you not only need permission from IT, but complex configuration and in many cases even software development. Beyond applications, ever come across an LDAP implementation that supports easy group forming? This runs counter to the way many enterprises actually work today, where ad hoc cross-functional teams drive more than professional services organizations.

A second example is fine grained security. Content management, document management, portals and poorly designed wikis highlight per object/page permissioning. Certain expert users have the ability to control access and rights for a specific document. This harms productivity -- when a user needs to access a document to perform a task and has to incur the overhead that can unlock it, plus the overhead of locking (structure upfront) and unlocking itself. This harms knowledge sharing -- documents go undiscovered and are decidedly static, despite how the knowledge in the document is never finished. This harms competitive advantage -- any system that exhibits inertia compromises a firm's ability to adapt to it's dynamic environment." (http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2006/05/enterprise_20_s.html)

More Information

1. Check out these Video Presentations on Entreprise 2.0
2. Perhaps the best recommendations, from Dave Pollard, at

http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2009/05/29.html#a2386