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the Free CMSWire NewsletterThinking of deploying Enterprise 2.0 solutions in your organization? Here's a little advice on how to do and how it increases productivity — especially if you include access via mobile devices.
What Is Enterprise 2.0
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Software, Enterprise Web 2.0, E2.0, ESSPs — these are all terms used interchangeably by many. Instead of coming up with yet another definition, I’ll take a short-cut to help with the level-set and quote Wikipedia.
What many regard as the seed definition was provided by Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor, Harvard Business School in 2006 and is what this Wikipedia entry references.
Social Software for an Enterprise must have the following functionality to work well:
- Search: allowing users to search for other users or content
- Links: grouping similar users or content together
- Authoring: including blogs and wikis
- Tags: allowing users to tag content
- Extensions: recommendations of users; or content based on profile
- Signals: allowing people to subscribe to users or content with RSS feeds
- Freeform function: no barriers to authorship (meaning free from a learning curve or from restrictions)
- Network-oriented function, requiring web-addressable content in all cases
- Social function: stressing transparency (to access), diversity (in content and community members) and openness (to structure)
- Emergence function: requiring the provision of approaches that detect and leverage the collective wisdom of the community
Of course there are plenty of nuances out there — and I would encourage any definition refinements or clarifications. Please add your thoughts to the comments section, after all — the advantage of leveraging a cumulative knowledge source is what E2.0 and this post is about!
Introducing Enterprise 2.0 into Your Company
Introducing E2.0 is a significant change in direction for many companies that will require some level of culture adjustment by the grumpy laggards within your organization, and (of course) a good internal communication and phased roll-out plan for the transition to be successful.
The most critical component of success is adoption and usage, so make sure you take some time to seed some content in the new tool (an initial proof of concept prior to general roll-out is a good idea) and tell people that you are sun-setting the old way of doing business. (Also read: Three Things to Consider in Your Enterprise Collaboration Strategy).
When introducing the concept, remember that because you have spent the last six months researching the field and available products you are likely to talk above your audience (making the entire exercise pointless).
Instead, pretend no one has heard of E2.0 before and make sure you set up some training sessions for the new tools. Once you think you’ve done a good job of socializing everything, remember that no one has questions during the first training session, because no one has been compelled to use the tool until then. So, follow-up with another training session about 1 month post roll-out to help those that are struggling.
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