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Is Enterprise 2.0 a crock?


By Alex Handy
November 4, 2009 — 
The Web 2.0 revolution has gone out into the technology wild. Today, newfangled ideas are frequently labeled “2.0,” and as such, the Enterprise 2.0 conference kicked off today in San Francisco with a keynote panel that explored whether or not this buzz-number is really warranted when it is used to refer to social networks, instant messaging and dissolved hierarchies.

David Berlind, chief content officer of TechWeb, the company hosting the conference, chaired a panel of speakers pulled from enterprises that have attempted to embrace Enterprise 2.0 technologies, such as social networking, Microsoft SharePoint Server and Twitter-like microblogging. He asked this panel, point blank: “Is Enterprise 2.0 a crock?”

Claire Flanagan, senior manager of enterprise social collaboration at CSC, said that Enterprise 2.0 may be just a buzzword for the types of changes enterprises have long dreamed about. What has changed is that the technology now makes such pie-in-the-sky projects possible.

“I came from knowledge management,” said Flanagan, “and it was a system you had to go to and store information in. These new technologies are letting workers store knowledge from within their work stream. We're capturing the knowledge as they're engaging in their business process.”

Jamie Pappas, manager of social media strategy at EMC, said that her company has used Enterprise 2.0-style collaboration tools to cut costs. She said that employees are more invested in cost-cutting measures they themselves come up with, and that social technologies enable management to discuss such measures with the entire company, rather than simply decreeing new policies from on high.

She also said that such collaborative technology took great organizational-wide effort to deploy. “We've started bottom-up with some forward-thinking folks who'd get right on board at the start," she said.

"That wasn't going to be the only solution for us, though. We had to find managers who saw the value in this as well. This is not a cure-all or a fix-all type transformation. It's not like now we have Enterprise 2.0 and we're now open and transparent. It's just an enabler to get folks to that stage. You really have to have those advocates across the organization."

That being said, even the most valiant of management alliances can't do much without money to back up their proposals for installing Enterprise 2.0 technology. Megan Murray, community manager and project coordinator at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, said that her company was able to place a value on existing, ineffective communication techniques, and that this helped to exemplify the need for new “2.0” systems.

“We had a four-month-long e-mail 'reply-all-a-thon' on a 3,000-person mailing group," she said. "Someone copy/pasted the biggest thread they could find, applied some analysis to it, and said, 'Here's how much time it takes to reply to all, how much time it takes to hit delete, etc. Let's count all the people and figure out how much it costs us consultants to deal with this.'

"The end result was US$250,000. If something as small and insignificant as a 'reply all' can have that dollar amount attached to it, imagine how much the big things cost."

As if to address this very problem, Enterprise 2.0 also held a keynote given by members of the Google Wave team, who explained how accountability and collaborative tools will enable Wave to replace e-mail systems within enterprises.

Enterprise 2.0 continues today and tomorrow at the San Francisco Moscone Center.


Related Search Term(s): enterprise


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