(Andrew McAfee is another keynote this morning at Enterprise 2.0 – what follows are my rough notes.)
Report card for Enterprise 2.0
Awareness = A
Mainstream media, these conferences, high school and college age children of executives who are spreading this meme as well. What he hears from execs is that their sons/daughters are on facebook, myspace, etc – but they (the execs) don’t know how to leverage it for business.
What are people getting?
Social software – what people are clueing into is the idea that even corporate software can be used to put people in touch with each other. (As opposed to traditional CRM/ERP massive enterprise software which you could call anti-social software).
Network effects – the idea that applications and platforms get better as more people use them (thanks to Tim O’Reilly and others)
Freeform authoring – as we get more folks on the platforms, our goal should not be to impose too much structure on those interactions. We don’t know what people want in advance, and we don’t know what people have to offer (knowledge) in advance – freeform authoring acknowledges this limitation. We also don’t know what people will want to do – some are authors, some are editors, some are gardeners.
Metadata (picking up on David Weinberger’s talk earlier) – one of the huge leaps forward in Enterprise 2.0 / web 2.0 is that the metadata is not known in advance – the taxonomy should emerge. (Not just what genus/phylum/species a given animal belongs to, but what the important categories should be).
Emergence – I used to think the opposite of an imposed structure would be chaos – (Author of Enumeracy) – “it’s the world’s largest library – the problem is all the books are on the floor” – late nineties quote – but we don’t feel that way anymore – now that is seen as a strength.
Second report card area:
Technologies = A-
Excellent progress – startups AND incumbents
Enterprise needs – we’re doing a good job here learning to work with Enterprise level security, identity management, and other needs unique to the enterprise world.
Watch out for:
- Ease of use (avoid featuritis)
- Email’s 9x challenge (100% of people use email)
Third:
Communicating Results = C
Spotty progress
We just don’t have enough case studies, benchmarks, and stories.
Let’s not run into the fallacy of huge ROI stories – 200% of roi using our software. If it is so good, why aren’t you borrowing money to buy more software. The ROI numbers are too artificial – cooking the books, so to speak.
proposal – what we need is a repository of Enterprise 2.0 initiatives or efforts.
Ground rules:
- Open the gates as widely as possible
- But with disclosure
- Clear ground rules (a la wikipedia)
McAfee volunteers to be part of whatever committee pulls this together
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