I want to end this post on an optimistic note, so let's concentrate on the biggest advantage Enterprise 2.0 technologies have over email. As I wrote in my initial SMR article, email is a channel technology. It creates a private conduit between the sender and receiver. Other parties don't know that the email was sent, and can't consult its contents. Wikis, del.icio.us, Flickr, Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube, on the other hand, are all platform technologies. They accumulate content over time and make it visible and accessible to all community members.
Prior to the arrival of Enterprise 2.0 technologies, companies had few effective platforms for sharing knowledge work, and no platforms that fostered emergence. So the new tools are not direct substitutes for email; instead, they're intended to provide capabilities that email can't. Will they succeed? It depends heavily, I believe, on whether companies and their managers want technology platforms for collaboration. This desire will be an important factor in solving email's 9X problem.
"9X" refers to just how much improvement a typical user must see to be persuaded to switch from an existing solution to a new one. The early adopters of web 2.0-style work in the enterprise have a much, much lower threshold for this kind of thing. As a consequence, they tend to overestimate the speed with which any new technology will be broadly adopted.
Does that mean the enterprise will always settle for the tools they have, like Outlook and Office? Not necessarily. I believe we're seeing a senior management-level desire for innovation accelerated by collaboration. Think of how P&G is constantly singled out for breaking down the barriers between product groups to help the company deliver new products more quickly, or how Jeff Immelt's GE is as much about innovation as Jack Welch's was about operational excellence. That should provide the support for changes in the technology platforms workers use for collaboration. Whether companies elect to create those platforms soon out of new tools like wikis, blogs, search engines, and tagging, or wait for established enterprise IT vendors like Microsoft, EMC, IBM, Oracle, and SAP to subsume similar features into their existing offerings is an open question, of course.
As McAfee points out in his very next post, large companies don't necessarily make the decisions individual users on the internet might about the appropriate technological solution to a problem:
[Enterprise IT efforts] are not about the users, even though they're often positioned and discussed that way. They're about the enterprise -- what's best for the organization as a whole, what will make it more productive, efficient, analyzable, etc.
There's no guarantee that what's best for the enterprise will be best for all or most enterprise IT users. In fact, there's a near guarantee that some people and groups will be worse off after a new enterprise system (ERP, CRM, eProcurement, SCM, etc.) goes in. They'll get an application that's by definition less tailored to their specific needs than the legacy stovepipe system that's being replaced. They'll have to learn new screens, transactions, and processes, some of which are going to be less friendly or efficient than the previous ones. They'll have to go through lots of training that takes them away from their jobs. And at the end of the day they'll be encouraged (read 'forced') to use an enterprise application that gives them fewer places to hide and less freedom.
Tags: Enterprise 2.0, wiki, blog, tagging, enterprise IT
