Ansu Sharma suggests that Enterprise 2.0 is same as Web 2.0.
I disagree:
- Web 2.0 works from the bottom up, while enterprises are most emphatically top down.
- You gain power on the next generation web by sharing information. You gain power in an enterprise by having information, and withholding it.
- With Web 2.0, we can all engage in role diversification. Be whomever and whatever you want: a web designer, professional photographer, journalist, mashup developer, memoirist. Be all those things at the same time. In the enterprise, specialize: you are a software developer or a marketer, an accountant or an HR representative, a secretary or CEO, but never two or more at the same time.
- In Web 2.0, the individual is the new group. In the enterprise, there is no new group. There is the old group, the old organization, the old department. In the enterprise, the group subsumes the individual.
Okay, Ansu is talking technology, and I am talking social dynamics. But the social dynamics are what will prevent a straight-across translation of Web 2.0 into the world of large organizations.
7 Comments
Yuh! This is a train of thought demanding a presentation and longer treatment. I think with a few examples for each point, it’d make a good and extremely constructive chunk of thought to help people innovate and effect change in companies.
I also wonder if these principals apply to any maturing organizations: even rainbow and sandals ones like open source communities.
Anne,
Good points. In fact, I am making the distinction between traditional Enterprsie and Enterprise2.0. The traditional enterprise has limitatins including social dynamics that you point out. Therefore, true Enterprise2.0 has to be much more like Web2.0. The whole point of my blog post was to communicate that Enterprise2.0 should look, feel, behave and be consumed similar to Web2.0, and that is different from traditional enterprise software.
i agree, and would go even further and say that web 2.0 is not readily definable as an entity–and is an emergent (and still negotiated) catchall phrase or even metaphor for a cultural phenomenon. Yes, it refers to instrumental technologies, but it refers also to a new way of communicating, representing, interacting, and even socially “becoming” that seems to define our networked world. In short, it describes a shifted experience in communicating and being.
Of course, this more philosophical approach is so broad as to not necessarily be useful in every context–but I do see lots of attempts to define this thing that is or is not web 2.0, and the difficulty lies directly in the social/cultural aspects–as you point out.
I would also say that all web 2.0 technologies can be appropriated in just the same heirarchal way as you describe for enterprise 2.0 (for instance U Penn’s “innovative” use of blogs for incoming student academic essays–they are asked to write a blog, but the blog is completely private, comments closed off–all interactive components removed. Blogs become just traditional “papers” used for surveillance and evaluation purposes. Or the use of course management/learning system software to reproduce traditional pedagogies–lecture notes online, and still not interaction). In this sense, we could say that Enterprise 2.0 is just one tiny facet of the broader “thing” that is web 2.0–but certainly not analogous to it. As soon as we read meaning off the technology itself–this system *is* or *isn’t* web 2.0–and remove context of use, our definitions fall short.
thanks for the chance to mull, Anne. I will certainly think about this a bit more having only scratched the surface of the issue myself.
Cote’: yes, I’m looking forward to diving deeper into this. I had many concrete examples in mind when I wrote it, and hope to introduce them in future posts. Does it apply to any maturing organization? I guess Wikipedia comes to mind, which does seem to be taking on some characteristics of a big enterprise (e.g., top-down governance). I’d like to look into some social science theory and research to add to this, because I think the key to introducing Web 2.0-esque capabilities depends on working with, and not against, the social reality of enterprise work.
Anshu: I confess, I used your blog post title rather than your content as a foil.
You said, “The whole point of my blog post was to communicate that Enterprise2.0 should look, feel, behave and be consumed similar to Web2.0, and that is different from traditional enterprise software.” At a purely technological level, I agree with you, but I take Joy’s point that “Web 2.0″ can be defined in various ways. When I consider it as a social revolution, I have a hard time seeing how a similar revolution could take place in large, mature organizations.
I hope to spend more time with this, at the technological and social levels and any other levels I can think of. It’s a rich area to explore, and the best way to do it is collaboratively, Web 2.0-style. So thanks to you, Anshu, and you, Joy, for your comments.
Anne
Anne - Web 2.0 (whatever it is) and Enterprise x.0 (whatever THAT is) will probably always be different in the ways you describe. But there are often pockets within enterprise where the social network (and it IS still people working in enterprises) will deliver a more “Web 2.0″ experience - sometimes with technology, sometimes without. This is where you need to look - those places where the “top-down” managers aren’t looking, or more enlightened ones are turning a blind eye because results are happening.
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[...] For the last few weeks, after encountering a couple of blog-posts on the subject, I’ve been mulling over this concept of “web 2.0.” I am wondering why and how the term carries so much (at least in the blogosphere) currency right now, and fascinated by the myriad of recent posts that attempt to define what is, and (even more interestingly) what is not, web 2.0. (Anne 2.0; Anshu Sharma; Ian Delaney; Stephen Downes to refer to just a few) [...]