But is it Enterprise 2.0?

As business struggle to implement "2.0" tool-sets within their organizations, The question of precisely what "2.0" means in the context of tools for business is becoming increasingly important. Long-held assumptions and conventions within the corporate world can make the shift a difficult one.

Andrew McAfee (Associate Professor in the Technology and Operations Management area at Harvard Business School and coiner of the term “Enterprise 2.0”) outlines what, in his mind, defines an “Enterprise 2.0” application (a web 2.0 application for business use).

I Know It When I See It

Here are his criteria for 2.0:

• Is it freeform?
• How frictionless is contribution?
• And is it emergent?

Freeform means “that the technology does not in any meaningful way impose, hardwire, or make and enforce assumptions about
- Workflows
- Roles
- Privileges
- Content
- Decision right allocations
Instead, people come together as equals within the environment created by technology, and do pretty much whatever they want.”

Frictionless means “that users perceive it to be easy to participate in the platform, and can do so with very little time or effort.”

Emergent (in this context) means “the appearance over time within a system of higher-level patterns or structure arising from large numbers of unplanned and undirected low-level interactions […] activities that help patterns and structure appear, and that let the cream of the content rise to the top for all platform members, no matter how they define what the cream is.”

“Too many corporate collaboration environments that I’ve observed, in contrast, come up short on the frictionless and freeform criteria. They make it far too difficult for prospective users to contribute, and they persist in slotting people into pre-assigned roles based largely on the formal org chart. In many cases they also impede emergence by having many small and mutually inaccessible environments, instead of one big one.”