Harvard Business Publishing

I felt like an atheist at a Baptist convention. I was at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston to debate Andrew McAfee, a professor at Harvard Business School and the movement's high priest. My mission was to deny the existence of this faith-based initiative, or at least to argue that it's not going to be our salvation.

I tried to make a few points:

• That it's not even clear what Enterprise 2.0 is. Some argue that it's the adoption of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, but Web 2.0 has itself been a fuzzy concept for years. McAfee uses a nifty acronym to define its components -- SLATES -- the pieces of which I would quibble with for various reasons:
S is for search, which has been around since the dawn of IT and can hardly be classified as new or exclusive to E2.0;
L is for links, which was a key component of Web 1.0;
A is for authoring (meaning blogs and wikis): OK, I'll grant Andy that social authoring is somewhat enhanced by these new tools, but it's hardly as if people couldn't collaborate on documents before;
T is for tagging, which also has been around for eons, but let's say he means social tagging of Web sites;
E is for extensions, which seems to mean collaborative filtering technology, although again, that's been around since the early years of Amazon;
S is for signals that tell you there's something new to look at, which often seems to involve email, another ancient technology.

• That Enterprise 2.0 technologies will not, by themselves, revolutionize organizations and make them more democratic. I argued that no technology (including email and the Web in China) has ever changed a political structure by itself, and that hierarchy seems to be an extremely persistent feature of organizations.

• That Enterprise 2.0 technologies produce too much content for their own good. Blogs in particular (this one notwithstanding!) take too much time and attention to read, so inevitably most of them will be wasted on the world.

• That there is no business benefit from social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace other than giving people something to do at work when they get bored. Witness the article on Facebook in the current issue of Fortune. It lists the number of Facebook subscribers at various corporations, but doesn't list a single business application.

I used the old reductio ad absurdum trick on Andy, arguing that if these technologies are so cool, why not mandate that everybody in an organization use them? I related the story of one media company I'd talked with that considered forcing everyone to blog. "For what reason?" I asked. "Self-expression?" "And will you make everyone read them, too?" The executives quickly realized this made no sense. Andy, however, stuck with his untenable position.

Actually, Andy was a gentleman, and never once insulted me. If you want to find out more about this phenomenon, his is the work to consult. At several times in the debate, we even agreed. Mostly I believe that this is something worth studying and researching, and maybe some organizations will get some benefit. But it's way too early to call it a revolution. What do you think?

HARVARD BUSINESS ONLINE RECOMMENDS:
Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration (SMR Article)
The Future of the Web (SMR Article)
Competing on Analytics: Unlocking New Sources of Growth, A Cost- and Time-Effective Briefing on a Critical Emerging Best Practice Featuring Thomas Davenport (CD-ROM)