What is new about enterprise 2.0?

When looking at the case studies and the product offering, it is not always clear “what is different and what is new” about Enterprise 2.0.

In the study proposal, we came up with the following table. Is it accurate? Is it complete? Is it clear enough to distinguish Enterprise 2.0?

	Traditional Enterprise apps	Enterprise 2.0
Mission	Enable pre-defined groups/teams working closely together and/or relatively formal collaborative relationships.	Enable individuals to act in loose, ad-hoc collaborations with a potentially very large number of others.
Relationship to organisational hierarchy	Tools reflect the organizational hierarch and roles within them.	Little link to organizational hierarchy
Control of structure	Centrally imposed and generally rigid controls	Emergent (=emerges and evolves)
Content originated by	Specialists with authorisation	All users – also emergent
Control over users	Users/participants are fixed and their roles pre-defined.	Roles by choice and can evolve over time (emergent)
Control mechanisms	Formal, rules	Norms, examples
Change of content timescales	Slow	Rapid
Delivery model	Typically on premise commercially licensed software	Range of delivery models including on premise, cloud, commercial, open source, stand-alone, suites or add-ins to E1.0 systems
Range of participants	Colleagues with similar or complementary job roles	Anyone in the organization and potentially outside (e.g. customers)
Links between participants	Peer or hierarchical	Links can be strong to non-existent (or ‘potential’) within the group
Typical tools	Knowledge management, knowledge repositories, decision automation	Blogs, wikis, social networking, prediction markets

Creating a Typology of Enterprise 2.0 Use Cases

I’ll admit that when I first read the term ‘typology’ in the EC’s tender for this research project I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant. I knew it was something to do with organising things by type, but beyond that I wasn’t sure. I looked it up and found that a typology is a “classification according to general type” (http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=typology) or a “systematic classification of types that have characteristics or traits in common” (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/typology). That sounded reasonable, but the thought that followed immediately was: “Is this something that can be done with enterprise 2.0 use cases?”

Prior Work

I came across two attempts to do something similar: a blog post by Bjorn Negelman explaining a classification of enterprise 2.0 use cases he created and an internal project at Headshift to catalogue and group use cases we had come across. I didn’t find either of these attempts completely persuasive: they both took the approach of trying to put the use cases into broad buckets such as ‘knowledge sharing’, ‘user engagement’ or ‘innovation management 2.0′. I felt that this was useful to an extent, but that a better approach would be to situate these archetypal use cases in a structure that spoke to something fairly fundamental about enterprise 2.0 tools.

First Attempt

After the initial research into the various use cases and a period of mulling them over, this was my first attempt at organising them:

The above attempts to define use cases by the sort of interaction they facilitate and where they facilitate them: within an organisation or between an organisation and its environment. Apart from my terrible handwriting, I didn’t think the bottom axis–degree of interaction–was quite right: one use case could contain both conversation and collaboration. The form of the representation also seemed to suggest that use cases in the bottom left are bad and those in the top right are good.

The Current Version

After discussions with some colleagues and a few more iterations I came up with this:

This representation organises use cases based on the sort of interpersonal tie they support and based on the size of the system that contains that interpersonal tie. I should point out a debt here to Andrew McAfee who first applied the idea of interpersonal ties to enterprise 2.0 (as far as I know).

I think this really does capture something fundamental about enterprise 2.0 (or at least the way I think about enterprise 2.0). Traditional IT facilitates formal processes, where the interaction is typically not person-to-person. Newer IT tools, and particularly enterprise 2.0, facilitate informal processes comprised of person-to-person connections and in so doing enable the breaking down of traditional organisational barriers.

Please do let me know what you think: have I left out important use cases? Are some of them positioned wrongly? Am I naming them at the wrong level of detail? Do you disagree with the organisation scheme entirely?

Note: I found Jacob Morgan’s collection of enterprise 2.0 case studies as well as Headshift’s own case studies useful when creating this.

SMEs collaborate less for innovation: can E20 help?

There are no official statistics of usage of Enteprise 20: actually, the whole dimension of collaboration and knowledge exchange is missing from existing statistics, which instead focus on the old paradigm of e-commerce. See the screenshot from Eurostat below.



However, I came across interesting statistics from the Community Innovation Survey on the propensity of companies to collaborate in innovation (regardless of the ICT tools). The chart below shows that SMEs are fall less keen to collaborate than large companies (source: OECD 2008 Open Innovation in Global Networks).

If collaboration is a key aspect of innovation, SMEs suffer from competitive disadvantage with large companies. So my question is:

- why are SMEs collaborating less in innovation?

- can Enterprise 2.0 software have a meaningful impact on the propensity of SMEs to innovate, and thereby on their competitiveness?

Case study recruitment – What does the response so far tell us?

We’re right in the middle of finding companies interested in being part of our research. We’ve got some very strong candidates that we think will make for some interesting case studies: more of that anon. Right now, I want to share a couple of thoughts that have occurred to me in relation to the conversations we’ve had so far.

People want to talk

The people running these projects want to talk to someone about them: they’ve been working hard trying to make the companies they work for more effective and efficient through, for example, better knowledge sharing, increased situational awareness or a more human workplace. They know they’re doing good work and they want this to be recognised, both internally and externally.

Do big companies make more use of enterprise 2.0 than small ones?

We’re trying to recruit 4 SMEs and 4 large companies but most of the companies we’ve spoken to so far are above the SME bracket in terms of size and revenue. There are a few reasons I can think of for why this might be:

1. Sampling bias: We’ve publicised our research on this blog and on the Headshift blog and we’ve been talking to our friends and contacts about who they know who could be interested. Perhaps big companies are over-represented, in relation the whole set of enterprise 2.0 users, among the people who we’re connected to via these channels.
2. Big companies want to talk more: Maybe big companies aren’t over-represented, but they are more interested in or have more time to get involved in this sort of research than SMEs do.
3. Big companies use enterprise 2.0 more: enterprise 2.0 tools, platforms and services enable human connections over a larger scale. If you work in a small company, it’s easy to talk to the people you work with. You can bump into them in the corridor or the kitchen and chat to them in the pub after work. Perhaps as a company grows in size, these sorts of face-to-face connections don’t scale and the value to the business of using enterprise 2.0 increases.

I have no idea which of these, if any, is the correct explanation and I’m not sure whether we’ll answer this question during the course of the project. Interesting to ponder though.

As I said earlier, these are just feelings based on a small number of conversations and may be wide of the mark. If you have any views, please share them in the comments.

Does E20 implies a different way to do ICT policies?

The ultimate goal of our study on Enterprise 2.0 is to give to the European Commission relevant policy recommendations.

One of my hypothesis is that Enterprise 2.0 shows that current policies for ICT in business are unfit for the 2.0 world. Indeed, even before web 2.0, government traditionally struggle to:

- promote new ICT business

- promote take-up of ICT in business

Enterprise 2.0, just like web 2.0, is not just another item on the agenda of ICT policies. It implies a different way to do ICT policy: more emergent, less self-referential, more people-centred. In general, I think that Dion Hinchliffe recommendations to CEOs apply very well to government as well:

- do nothing

- get out of the way

- keep the energy levels up

I’m curious to see whether this is true: just like conferences evolved into unConferences, we should think for unPolicies!

Case Study Candidates

As I’ve just said over on the Headshift blog, we think that enterprise 2.0 has the potential to make companies more agile and competitive: it’s changing the way that people in organisations work by giving them simple software tools that support the informal processes that are part of any healthy organisation. This change and its concomitant potential for humanising the enterprise are two important reasons why we’re so interested in being part of this research.

Headshift’s contribution to the research is twofold. Firstly, we’ll be undertaking some research into what companies are using enterprise 2.0 for, both at a broad level to produce a typology of use cases and a more specific level to produce a set of 8 case studies. The case studies will be in-depth accounts of how individual companies are using enterprise 2.0 tools: what business need they’re meeting; what technology is being used; what problems have been faced and dealt with; the costs associated with the project and what the outcomes have been for the organisation.

Secondly, we’ll be investigating the legal aspects of cloud-based enterprise 2.0 use: the legal barriers or uncertainties that prevent companies from taking full advantage of the technologies available, the common contractual relationships that exist between suppliers of cloud-based enterprise 2.0 tools and their customers and whether there are common contractual considerations that are likely to impede the adoption of enterprise 2.0 software.

Right now, we’re in the process of putting together a long list of case study candidates. To make this research as comprehensive as possible, we want to cast our nets wide and talk to people we’ve never met and who are using enterprise 2.0 tools in ways we haven’t come across before.

If you’re interested in being part of the case study research – raising the profile, internally and externally, of what you’re doing – or you know someone else who is, talk to us in the comments or drop us an email at e20eu@headshift.com. We’d love to hear from you.

First hypothesis: e20 require less investment in organisational change than traditional enterprise apps

While writing the inception report, we are starting to come up with hypothesis to be validated in the course of the project. Would love to have other people views on this.

A first hypothesis I formulate is that the “organisational changes” cost related to Enterprise 2.0 are much lower than with traditional enterprise application. Because e20 focusses on emergent behaviour, there is no need for extensive investment in things like Business Process Reingeneering.

This has major consequences when calculating the overall economic impact. It is a well known truism that in order to deliver productivity impact, a company needs to invest in organisational change five times more than in technology. It is possible that enterprise 2.0 tools not only are cheaper in terms of technology, but also in terms of accompanying investment. This would challenge a lot of the traditional assumptions about the economic impact of ICT.

Kick-off of the study

Welcome everybody. Yesterday we kicked off our study on enterprise 2.0. It was a good meeting, partners and customers are genuinely interested. Plus we start the blog to make this study “a different way of doing things”.

For more information, look in the “About” page.

More soon