Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 visualizations

Over the last months I noticed a couple of cute visualization takes on the Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 space. Now, as I’m putting together the materials for a presentation I am holding next week I thought I’d share some of them …

Here we go, first up there’s this Web 2.0 in a Chart by the Sunlight Foundation, connecting a lot of trends related with web 2.0 (real big pdf, hence there’s no useful thumbnail).

Then, there’s FirstPartner’s take on the Enterprise 2.0 market. I appreciate how it tries to integrate and employ value-chain thinking, but I am skeptical if it’s really useful. Anyway, it’s a cute effort, found via SocialComputing Magazine:

Welcome to the FirstPartner Enterprise 2.0 Market Map. Enterprise 2.0 is a term which many struggle to define and understand. We have therefore developed this market map to articulate the different attributes of this emerging sector.

and

[This shows] the flow from the end-customer through the complete value-chain – covering blogs, wikis, collaboration tools, social networking and bookmarking through to RSS readers and Open APIs/Mashups.

FirstPartner Enterprise 2.0 Market Map

An Enterprise 2.0-sided take on visualization comes by Stephen Danelutti, who proposed an Enterprise 2.0 meme map (building upon the well known O’Reilly web 2.0 meme map).

enterprise20mememap_klein.JPG

This I must say is my last favourite, as it mingles and mixes terms and concepts and lacks clear structure (but that is true for the O’Reilly meme map and others as well).

And finally, my favourite, is by Ross Dawson of the Future Exploration Network who proposed a Web 2.0 framework, that nicely captures what Web 2.0 is all about and collects the variety of players in the Web 2.0 ecosystem:

web 2.0 framework

This framework provides a concise view of the nature of Web 2.0. While one can debate whether all important issues are collected, this visual approach lends itself to kicking off discussions (where one can elaborate further on). It provides a nice starting and reference point, and this is essential: When advising on the ideas and concepts of Enterprise 2.0 in the corporate world, I’m experiencing that it’s best to explain both instruments (methods and tools, i.e. the “how”) and goals and visions (paradigms and principles, the “why”) intertwined …

Pursuit of busyness (and customized implementation)

Andrew McAfee on the adoption challenges of enterprise 2.0, when web2.0-style tools are seen as superfluous, must-not-have and an “unproductive thing to do”:

people who use the new tools heavily – who post frequently to an internal blog, edit the corporate wiki a lot, or trade heavily in the internal prediction market — will be perceived as not spending enough time on their ‘real’ jobs
[…]
In environments that value ‘busyness’ enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts can be seen as laggards, goof-offs, and people who don’t have either enough to do or enough initiative to find more real work to do.

This is not surprising, as we all know that this organizational pathology of “you’ve got to be busy” is both widespread and (ironically) utterly unproductive …

Yet, he makes perfectly clear that especially knowledge based organizations can profit from enterprise 2.0 oriented collaboration support, so when introduction is not easy, management guidance and leadership is are even more essential.

Companies that are full of knowledge workers and that have built cultures that value busyness face a potentially sharp dilemma when it comes to E2.0. These companies stand to benefit a great deal if they can build emergent platforms for collaboration, information sharing, and knowledge creation. But they may be in a particularly bad position to build such platforms not because potential contributors are too busy, but because they don’t want to be seen as not busy enough.

And even if the leaders in such companies sincerely want to exploit the new tools and harness the collective intelligence of their people, they might have a tough time convincing the workforce that busyness is no longer the ne plus ultra. Corporate cultures move slowly and with difficulty, and it will take a lot more than a few memos, speeches, and company retreats to convince people that it’s a smart career idea, rather than a poor one, to contribute regularly and earnestly to E2.0 platforms.

Besides, this illustrates that enterprise 2.0 tools and methods must be intertwined and knitted into daily work processes and routines to ease adoption – when they are added-on superficially, one runs into exactly the problems Andrew notes.

Update: Marcel de Ruiter adds his thoughts to the “no time” excuse that threatens to keep participation low, arguing that the benefits of social software for an individual knowledge-worker should be pointed out more. I second that and observed that similar issues have been part of failed past knowledge management efforts, mainly those that focussed on corporate (and down to group) uses, both in the design of knowledge management solutions and in the design of implementation and change projects (“we the company know what is needed”).

So, please, don’t let us make the same mistakes again, start bottom-up (and add top-down support as much as possible). This CEO and CIO support is essential, because strategic issues are touched and need to be sorted out. One example is that it’s mandatory for the acceptance of internal social networking, to facilitate the transfer and exchange of corporate social networks between different employers (you know, this is no longer a world of “IBM now, IBM forever”). While this is all about individual benefit trumping official corporate policy, it’s also deeply logical as value creation processes cross inter-organizational frontiers anyway all the time.

Wiki Workplace

Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams in BusinessWeeks wikinomics series on the “Wiki Workplace”, i.e. online collaboration and decentralized knowledge collection, refinement and distribution. Besides, the article notes some examples of good corporate use, e.g. by companies like Xerox, IBM (see here for more on Innovation Jams) and (again) Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.

Thanks in part to younger workers, more companies are using social computing tools to aid collaboration and to foster innovation and growth.
[…]
The information and communication technologies that are transforming media, culture, and the economy are also reshaping how companies and employees function. New social computing tools such as wikis and blogs put unprecedented communication power in the hands of employees.

I would hold that this is no question of age, but of disposition, i.e. willingness to participate, to share and to commit ourselves, it’s a people issue from the start, it’s a big task, yet the goal is worthwhile:

Clear goals, structure, discipline, and leadership in the organization will remain as important as ever and perhaps more so as self-organization and peer production emerge as organizing principles for the workplace. The difference today is that these qualities can emerge organically as employees seize the new tools to collaborate across departmental and organizational boundaries, and, yes, “the power of human capital” can be unleashed.

Podcast on Motorolas wiki use

Dan Bricklin writeups a podcast (mp3) with Toby Redshaw of Motorola on their continued wiki use. Sound quality is not that good, it’s a telephone call recording after all, but it’s OK for me.

We learn about Motorola’s internal usage of wikis and blogs, the ways of implementation, actual usage in the organization, the role and usefulness of wiki gardeners and yet more on success factors :

They prune old and unused content, sometimes having a blog that lasts just a very short time. They work hard to keep it all fresh and up to date. They have knowledge champions in various areas who help do this. He feels these “domain owners” are an important part of facilitating the “quality” of the information and its organization. This is internally oriented, which has everybody with the same mission of advancing the company’s goals and under the same governance to keep out bad behavior, etc. This is not Wikipedia on the public web.

I also like this take on the further ways of Enterprise 2.0 concepts as they make inroads into all corporate environments (given that Motorola has probably a high geek-factor in its workforce anyway):

Toby sees an evolution towards “enterprise mashups” with business process management, enterprise information management systems, structured data management systems, data warehouses, and wikis. Process management data that shows a choke point or other problem in a process can link back automatically to a search of wiki data to find prior material relating to that situation and even identify individuals to be called in. They are trying to use both structured and unstructured information.

And there’s more interesting stuff, worthy 45 minutes.