Saturday, October 27, 2007

IT C515 CSCW - Readings for Week 7

Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration,

By Andrew McAfee

What opportunities/benefit does the author claim for introducing Enterprise 2.0/Blogging technologies into the enterprise?

Currently in most companies collaborate with in the company’s intranet or internet by using email, instant messaging, and others. But still, while using this applications there were some limitations to actually fill the really collaboration with in the company workers.

The new digital platforms for generating, sharing and refining information are already popular on the internet, where they are collectively labeled as “Web 2.0” technologies. Where, Web 2.0 is a kind of buzz word for blogs, wikis, Mashups, online communities, social bookmarking (del.icio.us) and social Networking (Facebook) platforms.


Enterprise 2.0 focuses only on those platforms that companies can buy or build in order to make visible and practices and outputs of their knowledge workers. Enterprise 2.0 is as Harvard Business School Associate Professor Andrew McAfee's definition:

Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.


Furthermore Andrew McAfee's uses the acronym SLATES to indicate the six components of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. SLATES in general means, as Dion Hinchcliffe defines it:

SLATES describes the combined use of effective enterprise search and discovery, using links to connect information together into a meaningful information ecosystem using the model of the Web, providing low-barrier social tools for public authorship of enterprise content, tags to let users created emergent organizational structure, extensions to spontaneously provide intelligent content suggestions similar to Amazon's recommendation system, and signals to let users know when enterprise information they care about has been published or updated, such as when a corporate RSS feed of interest changes.


While SLATES forms the basic framework of Enterprise 2.0, it does not negate all of the higher level Web 2.0 design patterns and business models. And in this way, the new Web 2.0 report from O'Reilly is quite effective and diligent in interweaving the story of Web 2.0 with the specific aspects of Enterprise 2.0.


Therefore, in the 21st century

  • Enterprise 2.0 is going to happen in every organization
  • Effective Enterprise 2.0 seems to involve more than just a blogs and wikis
  • Enterprise 2.0 is more a state of mind than a product anybody can purchase
  • More businesses still need to educate their workers on the techniques and best practices of Enterprise 2.0 and social media
  • The benefits of Enterprise 2.0 can be dramatic, but only builds steadily over time
  • Enterprise 2.0 does not seem to put older IT systems out of business

Enterprise 2.0 technologies have the potential to usher in a new era by making both the practices of knowledge work and its outputs more visible. But still there are some challenges implementing it. For instance, busy knowledge workers will not use the new technologies, despite training and prodding. Most people who use the Internet today are not bloggers, Wikipedia’s or taggers. They do not help produce the platform – they just use it. So the question will be, will the situation be any different on company intranets?


The other challenge is that knowledge workers might use Enterprise 2.0 technologies exactly as intended, but this may lead to unintended outcomes. However the question is: Will the change be welcomed?


Because of the challenges these technologies bring with them, there will be significant differences in companies abilities to exploit them. Because of the opportunities the technologies bring, these differences will matter a great deal.


Corporate Blogging:
Building community through persistent digital talk


The real benefit of corporate blogging may be to create an informal mechanism that links disparate, far-flung parts of the organization into constructive contact. Blanchard and Horan talk about two types of virtual communities in an organization —those that reinforce physically compact communities and those that connect completely geographically dispersed communities of interest—and finds the corporate blogging more effective at creating social capital.

Corporate blogs such represent a third type of virtual community whose members are geographically dispersed, but who share a common organizational culture and identity. In such cases, the online community may reinforce the sense of belonging to the organization and consequently build more social capital than the geographically dispersed virtual communities referred to by Blanchard and Horan. That is, such virtual communities may create climate benefits to the organization beyond what social and informational benefits they create for individual participants. For large organizations, this could be especially important.

Blogging appears to create significant social as well as informational benefits for users of the system. The community benefit and the connections created begin as weak ties with values of perspective and information. Over time, stronger ties develop and social benefits are augmented. The persistence of information in blogs provides a valuable tool for executives and others to be able to “see” and learn about concerns and values of the organization. Finally, such internal corporate blogs may have organizational benefits even beyond the sum of these individual benefits.

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