Last friday Tom Davenport and Andrew McAfee had a discussion about enterprise 2.0 hosted by Jim McGee from the FastForward Blog.
The discussion did not hold very much substance. There was a discussion whether the name enterprise 2.0 was relevant or not, which to me is a completely irrelevant discussion. But the two sides (Davenport: contra enterprise 2.0, McAfee: pro enterprise 2.0) are a classic example of the hurdles you have to take when implementing enterprise 2.0 tools in your organisation. Davenport represents the traditional thinking (web 1.0) and McAfee represents the next web (web 2.0). According to Davenport it is a hype, technology has been around for decades and enterprise 2.0 is the wrong name. He agrees with the success of web 2.0 but does not seem to understand the possibilities of enterprise 2.0. He sees the tools that are clustered under the name enterprise 2.0 as tools that have to fight against Sharepoint and others. I do not think this has to be the case, since you can also use enterprise 2.0 tools like a wiki to function as an addition to the tools you already have. It does not always have to replace these systems. Because of the ease of use it is an addition.
Accepting tools from the enterprise 2.0 era is more a cultural issue than a technology acceptance issue. But you do need to have the right tools to facilitate this cultural change! The one depends on the other. Davenport says that they could have achieved the same effect years ago with tools like Sharepoint or Lotus Notes, but why did this never happen? Because these tools did not have the ease of use that the current web 2.0/enterprise 2.0 do have. According to Davenport the possibilities of web 2.0 have been around for about a decade. I think that only the theory of web 2.0 that has been around for a while, but the actual technology and actual working tools have not. This because usability is one of the key factors of the success of web 2.0.
After an hour of discussion I did not learn anything new, but the discussion subject is very current. I think anyone who is trying to implement a web 2.0 tool in their enterprise has encountered the issues Tom Davenport mentioned in this discussion.
To listen to the mp3 of the discussion, click here
