There's a debate brewing around Enterprise 2.0 or the shortened moniker E2.0 (which I'll use here use since I'm lazy). As far as I can tell, it started here with Dennis Howlett's post labeling E2.0 as a bunch of crock. It spawned roundtable debates and also this question on the ebizQ forum earlier today where I threw my support behind the "E2.0 is crock" camp. (My fellow ebizQ bloggers didn't quite agree with me).
To be clear, I have used web 2.0 technologies within the corporate environment and have good experiences, especially in the use of wikis. But my point isn't whether there's any value - my point is whether the derived value of using web 2.0 related technologies in a corporate setting warrants its own category and is disruptive. Also, if you've spent any of the past decade in high tech, you're probably weary of the hype generated with every supposedly disruptive wave of technology.. at least, I am. And frankly, it's getting worse. That's why I appreciate Howlett's post and also enjoy Larry Ellison's rants against cloud computing (even if I think he's wrong).
So here's why E2.0 is bogus. And, I humbly offer the following as a test of whether a supposedly breakthrough technology is just marketing fluff, wishful thinking or truly game changing.
1. The 3 C's Definition Test - can anyone provide a concise, compelling, consistent definition of what E2.0 is? If the proponents cannot define the technology consistently or concisely, red flags should go up right away. (I realize cloud computing suffers a little from this as well). The problem is that if the industry as a whole fails to coalesce around a common definition, what results is confusion. This either limits acceptance or leads to unfulfilled expectations.
2. The Pain or ProblemTest - what is the pain that E2.0 will alleviate? What big problem will E2.0 solve that cannot be solved today Just reapplying web 2.0 technologies for "improved" internal collaboration just doesn't cut it. Businesses won't pay for a better mousetrap but they will to make a corporate "pain point" go away.
3. The $how Me the Money Test - if you cannot draw a semi straight line between the technology and its impact to either top line revenue or expense savings, you have a problem. That's the problem with E2.0 - what's the economic impact?
4. The Test of Time - E2.0 is regarded as "emerging" but in reality, it's been around for a few years now. Still we find no compelling case studies, no significant uptake in adoption, no substantive, broad evidence that it's making a difference to businesses.
Most of all, E2.0 is bogus because you don't innovate by repackaging existing technology, repositioning it and then launching it into the market in search of a problem.
What do you think? I'd love to hear from proponents and believers of the E2.0 hype - I'm open to being wrong.
I'm just a dumb old Jew, so I don't know an Enterprise 2.0 from a Web 16.2145. To me, business is simple: if you take in more than you spend, you make a profit. If you don't, you go out of business.
Hi Andre,
I'm sorry but I just can't agree with most of your points here. They not only are largely inaccurate but they are a disservice to the great many organizations using social computing to solve business problems today.
To your points:
1) Clear definition. There is no real debate right now about what Enterprise 2.0 means. It's social software in a business setting, plain and simple. Harvard's Andrew McAfee defined this back in 2006 and it stuck as a more serious term than "social media."
2) Pain points. These are different in the many organizations that use social software today. The desire for better collaboration between far-flung workers in large organizations, establishing better customer relationships, and capturing tacit knowledge in high-turnover environments are just a few of the critical use cases for Enterprise 2.0.
3) ROI. There are a number of case studies that demonstrate that Enterprise 2.0 drives new efficiencies and saves money. Just one example: The CEO of TransUnion recently cited multi-million dollar savings from deploying Enterprise 2.0 solutions internally. There are many others I'd be happy to cite if you'd like.
4) The test of time. Not sure that businesses are doing this? Just take a look at the list of 100+ major firms in the fast growing http://20adoptioncouncil.com. Aside from that we're tracking hundreds of Global 2000 firms implementing E2.0 today including Wells Fargo, Sony, Disney, CIA, Allstate, General Mills, Proctor & Gamble, Corning, Best Buy, Pfizer, Northwestern Mutual, Johnson & Johnson, ALCOA, and many others. The case studies are emerging as well and we're seeing lots of data come out this year, much of it quite compelling results. And far from being a high-tech fad, traditional businesses are actively driving some of this: I even see conservative midwestern banks rolling out employee social networks quite aggressively.
In short, it's now moving beyond an early adopter story. Enteprise 2.0 has turned into a significant industry in the last year and is fast becoming a broad business trend.
Thus, it is pretty far from bogus.
Best,
Dion Hinchcliffe
Dion
Thanks for taking the time to call me out. ;-)
You've made some really good points here. Perhaps you have a better perspective/exposure than I've been privy to. However, I'm not convinced that Enterprise 2.0 actually addresses a specific pain point but is a newer, better mousetrap argument. That may work for some early adopters who are enamored by potential transformational change but will it fly in the mainstream?
Regarding proof points - I'd love to see an ROI report but haven't seen an independent case study. If you have more info, I'd love to connect with you to discuss
Best regards
Andre
Dion - I've given this more thought and I think my position is somewhat more nuanced that it may appear in my "Enterprise 2.0 is Bogus" position.
I have trouble with the value prop of E2.0 technologies being applied for intra-enterprise productivity but less for applying web 2.0 in a customer facing perspective. Perhaps more than that, I fully believe in companies embracing web 2.0 for customer engagement, marketing, selling but I don't see the net benefit for internal, productivity driven initiatives
Would love your view on this
Interesting post and response. I've been a user of E2.0 tools in a few different organizations and can speak to the issue of the 'pain points' or the unique organizational problems they solve.
First it helps to remember that in the 90s and early 2000s, most intranets failed. Why? They were designed for centralized control, which is at odds with the nature of networks. Companies built them and nobody came. For those of us who wanted to share knowledge and collaborate in big organizations, that was a real disappointment.
In the early 2000s, IT departments became swamped by security threats to such an extent that in many organizations, the mission of the IT group fundamentally transformed from supporting users to protecting the network, which often meant protecting users from themselves and actively thwarting them. The focus on security was necessary, but it had a big downside in that many IT staff lost touch with the newest innovations in software that users were actually using, particularly social software.
Suddenly, the savviest techies in the enterprise were no longer the administrators in the IT department but were the early adopting users sprinkled throughout the organization.
So as the big, expensive, tightly-governed intranet systems failed, actual users were experimenting with lightweight, distributed, ungoverned social software.
It was a mess in a lot of ways, but it was a productive mess. Where the official intranets failed to spur lots of engagement and collaboration, the unofficial social software were more successful. At organizations where innovating was an essential part of the culture, E2.0 technologies are probably a better fit, and I think that's where you'll see a better demonstration of their value.
Meanwhile, IT departments worry about security, about having to support too many different systems, and other very legitimate concerns that unfortunately put them at odds with the innovators in their organizations -- and that's a very bad place for IT to be.
So, to the specific pain points: As a manager, I was given clunky, tightly-governed intranets that none of my staff wanted to use, even though we wanted the benefit of working in a connected online environment. When we figured out how to set up internal wikis, blogs, social bookmarking etc., it gave our team the tools we wanted without the yoke of centralized control that killed their value. And we could set them up with no real cost, so we didn't have to worry as much about getting approval from higher-ups. We could simply get our work done. Cha-ching!
But don't forget, at the same time many of us served on task-forces helping to articulate the needs and use cases that we wanted official internal systems to deal with. I think we often had great hopes of designing something kick-ass with some big vendor and their big enterprise-wide systems -- but those beautiful solutions usually ended up being too expensive. The results never lived up to the dreams.
Side note: Why was innovation so hard and expensive in these big enterprise systems? I'll have to blog about that... But, it has something to do with design by committee, and also with developing for Windows servers and desktops vs developing on Linux Apache servers for web-based environments.
Another advantage that the open-style of social software had was that as time wore on, these social softwares learned to talk with each other, to be interoperable and communicate via RSS and widgets and so on, so they became even more valuable. The big enterprise systems were slower to the punch on interoperability.
So the pain was that the official systems were not really delivering, IT departments weren't serving users needs, and the solution E2.0 provided was that it both delivered better and enabled users to take care of their needs themselves.
Another problem E2.0 helps solve is that the pace of innovation is so fast that it is difficult to make a choice of what to invest in. At annual budget time, this problem of paying a big price for something that might have a short shelf life was always an issue. Should we install Mediawiki or purchase Sharepoint or Socialtext? The lower-cost or free options are more desirable to many managers because the monetary risk is smaller. I don't want to invest huge sums in a system that will be obsolete in three years. Even if there are issues with exporting the data from the legacy system to some new system, I'll feel better if I haven't spent $200,000 dollars on something that we have to abandon after a couple years.
That's my perspective as someone "on the ground" using E2.0. In my view one of the main ways E2.0 is disruptive is that it challenges the business models of the big system integrators and big system developers in favor of smaller, more nimble developers.
John - you've made some compelling points here. I'm curious to whether your experience is mainstream and relevant to smaller companies. I find that in many midsized and smaller companies, they are doing just fine with sharepoint and basic collaboration tools.
Maybe E2.0 is really about large enterprise 2.0 i.e. larger companies that are finding an easier way to enable scalable collaboration...which is the opposite of why web 2.0 took off - individuals, small companies finding a way to share content, collaborate and communicate - individual initiative leveraging and driving the "network effect". Essentially, web 2.0 isn't just about technology - it's about enabling a participatory model. Is there a similar driver for E2.0 or is it just a better collaboration mousetrap for enterprises.