Deliver Order from Chaos

Yesterday we saw that the state of Enterprise 2.0 in terms of acceptance and understanding among decision makers is lower than we might have expected by now. How is it working out in terms of implementation?

Dion Hinchliffe recently made a fairly large review of the situation, and supplied a list of lessons learned from attempts thus far to bring the Web 2.0 tools of generation into the workplace – exercises performed either by IT or in spite of IT.

Dion restates the theme we’ve harped on repeatedly, that Enterprise 2.0 is going to happen behind the firewall with or without management, planning, and governance. As all commentators recommend, the only way to accommodate is to embrace itproactively – the old saw of the best defense being a good offense.

Some points that Hinchcliffe elaborates deeply on include these:

• Effective Enterprise 2.0 seems to involve more than just blogs and wikis (the range grows to take in mashups, specialized apps, and inhouse custom programming).
• Enterprise 2.0 is more a state of mind than a product you can purchase.
• Most businesses still need to educate their workers on the techniques and best practices of Enterprise 2.0 and social media.

The core thing to remember with the introduction of these tools is that more is happening than simple extension of the existing computing environment. The changes themselves are partially driven by culture changes in the workforce, including at the executive level, and the key role played by knowledge in the new economy. The implementation doesn’t just happen and then end: it’s more of an ongoing and evolving circumstance across the entire enterprise, with cold and hot spots of enthusiasm and activity, seeking a more uniform distribution.

Dion Hinchliffe reports a possibly surprising result, that Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t seem to put older IT systems out of business.

“In fact, instead of competition, enabling connections to existing IT systems can provide significant benefits and allowing reports, views, and documents to be hosted by or connected to Enterprise 2.0 tools and can help make sure that there isn’t another silo of content in the organization. Having a blog post on the budget for FY 07 with the actual current numbers being displayed in an HTML table live from an RSS feed from the budget system is an example of this. In this way, Enterprise 2.0 seems to work better when it lives in close contact with existing IT systems than in isolation.” – The state of Enterprise 2.0

This makes sense as we run through the scenarios, and speaks highly for a net gain in capture and creation of knowledge across all departments as the lighter and more easily adopted tools come into play.