E2.0 = new KM?

Andrew McAfee recently wrote about success factors for Enterprise 2.0. It's a nice short post and gives a good list of (categorized) success factors. To comment on some of them:
  • Tools are egalitarian and freeform
For the first time I thought: should the admin rights to these tools also be given to all. I don't mean 'read/write' access, but also: being able to add participants/accounts, changing access rights for internals and externals, etc.
  • The toolset is quickly standardized
Yes, I would agree with this statement. But I wonder if this will hold in the future. People have been writing about employees being able to select their own tools inside and outside the organization.
  • Excellent gardeners exist
Interesting, is this a.o. the new role of the traditional Information Management department?
  • Slack exists in the workweek
Love this one. This is true: we need slack in our work to share, learn and act.

Listening to Andrew's presentation (his above-mentioned post is a summary of that presentation) Tom Davenport concludes ‘Enterprise 2.0’ is the new KM. As I pointed to before Davenport and McAfee had some debate in the past if Enterprise 2.0 is really changing business and if it's really new. Now he seems to agree more with McAfee. I'm surprised it took Davenport so long to see this… Seeing this he has an interesting statement on the differences between classical KM and E2.0:

The tools are largely different, for one. Perhaps the most important difference is the emphasis on emergence of content structures in E2.0, rather than specifying them in advance, as early knowledge managers had to. But I've always felt that most information environments require some mixture of structure and emergence.

I don't agree with the comment on Davenport's post by James Dellow that E2.0 "is all about the technology". Sure technology is important, but I find that E2.0/Web 2.0 is about people, social ties and… technology (finally!) really being able to support the social process. So E2.0 is all about "you".

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave a comment! Just log in using one of the formats and if you want me to get back to you. Otherwise comment anonymously.

Popular posts

Keep the Intranet Small

Image
This tweet by Jonathan Phillips ( @digitaljonathan ) triggered to finalize this post, that's been burning in my draft box. I've always been intrigued by how unsuccessful many intranets are. And there are all kinds of good reasons for intranet failure. One of the things that is hardly ever mentioned is: Shouldn't the intranet be smaller? Usually intranets are huge. Lots and lots of pages with lots and lots of content. With complex navigation. The intranet  evaluation surveys almost always show employees only use the news page and people finder. But still we build and maintain nice big intranets. Not only stats point to smaller intranets. There are others reasons as well. I came up with a few. If you have more, just leave a comment. Here's my list: -            user requirements: users don't require large intranet -            search/navigation: searching and navigating a small ...
Read more

Enterprise 2.0 Research

Image
There's not too much fundamental research on Enterprise 2.0. Deloitte recently published interesting research done on enterprise 2.0 implementations and their return-on-investment. In the EU research has also done as well. Study is being done for the European Commission and it was carried out by Tech4i2, IDC and Headshift. What was the goal of the study? Goals of the study To provide a clear definition of Enterprise 2.0 is, describe the market and the positioning of EU industry, also in comparison with US and Asia; To analyze the take-up of Enterprise 2.0, the organizational requirements, and the role on the transition to a knowledge based low-carbon economy; To collect evidence on its macro-economic impact, as a market opportunity for the European Software industry and as a productivity tool for European business; To identify and analyse both the direct and contextual challenges, including the need for Next Generation Access and the legal barriers; To analyse an...
Read more

Innovation in Turbulent Times

Image
I love reading articles about innovation. And every now and then you read one that is very interesting. "Innovation in Turbulent Times" by Rigby, Gruver, Allen (in HBR, June 2009) is one of them. This article takes fashion companies as an example for continuous, year-by-year innovation. And how successful fashion companies are usually led by two people: a left-brainer and a right-brainer. "If you don't have highly creative people in positions of real authority, you won't get innovation. Most companies in other industries ignore this lesson." They extend this to show that successful non-fashion companies have the same kind of leadership. And this kind of leadership is usually also characterized by a long-term relationship. I think this concept can also be extended to teams and projects as well. More often than not, people are good at one or the other: thinking up great concepts or ideas, or, making them. In teams and projects we can learn from this as...
Read more