Mar 20th, 2009 |
I had the opportunity recently to catch up with Andrew, the person who coined the term “Enterprise 2.0″ a few years back. Andrew is a professor at the Harvard Business School, and he has just completed a book on the topic.
The takeaways from the talk with Andrew:
- The spottiness of adoption is interesting. In some sectors — software development — wikis have become a commonplace platform. But elsewhere, it’s very uneven.
- Andrew believes that leadership is very important, and often absent where Web 2.0 technologies aren’t being adopted.
- Andrew believes that Twitter is being more widely adopted where the default is openness.
- Great anecdote about Tivo, as an example as a better mousetrap that remained a niche tool. Many Web 2.0 tools fall into the 9X Effect, where the proponents overestimate the benefits by a factor of three, and those that haven’t adopted them underestimate by a factor of three.
- He mentions Euan Semple as an exemplar (see his interview, IT Is Not The Source Of Innovation.)
- Andrew asked me to look into how companies are exploring the “borders” of tools, how companies avoid (or don’t) building walled gardens.
I will certainly be speaking with Andrew many times in the coming months.
Great interview, thank you for posting it.
I couldn’t agree more about the importance of leadership in bringing about adoption of enterprise 2.0 tools. Problem is, we are conditioned to live in our email inboxes and part of that conditioning is that information flows to us — we can remain passive and still things are served up to us. Too often, E2.0 implementations fail at the level of alerting the community to the existence of new content. So not only are the E2.0 tools forcing people to abandon the tool they’re comfortable with, they’re also requiring a move from a passive state to an active one in which you have to scour your internal blogosphere for relevant content. When designing an E2.0 environment, then, we can’t overlook the importance of good mechanisms to serve up relevant content to people so they don’t have to be hunter gatherers. In my experience, the executive team is hesitant to abandon email for E2.0 until you can assure them you’ve guarded against the building of black holes.
I’ll look forward to more great material from you in the future. Best to you.
Nice video. Twitter is definitely an interesting tool when you look at the enterprise - and how there are key folks in organizations adopting this style of openness. This shift in thinking will take education, time and sponsorship by exec management. When you see the CTO of Cisco @padmasree twittering - this tells me we’re on to something big here! In terms of adoption - i believe you will see more and more sales and marketing folks adopting twitter style communication and openness. Openness falls into the views of Sales 2.0 - so we will see the barriers between sales and customers diminish and knowledge flow more freely. Very interesting stuff.
-Tom @tomcanning
Tom/
I have asked to interview Padmasree Warrior, but her folks are dragging their feet, so who knows when/if that will happen. I agree it represents something, but I don’t know how linked it is to E 2.0 adoption, even inside Cisco.
Stowe/
My 2 cents…and I will draw an analogy from my own enterprise SOA selling experiences ( Oh, bring back the the pain…:-))
Padmasree represents the early adopter inside the enterprise. She stands up to wave the flag - she is the change agent for what could represent a significant change for her company and is a lead champion for innovation. Just like the early SOA architects in F1000 a few years back - they know SOA could help all facets of the organization, so they start to explore technologies and share ideas across the organization. Whamo - they get slammed by security, governance, business, legal, IT, and network groups. Nobody knows who should own this, nobody knows who should control it and nobody wants to put their name on it. And hence it all slows down. Maybe this is what you are now experiencing?
Twitter is fast to sign up for an deploy :-) Corporations now need to figure out what tweets really are - are they IP and they need to be governed just like a web service call marching thru port 80? Or is it cool that their execs tweet and let them rip?
So - to answer your question on how it is linked to E 2.0 adoption? It’s linked by the same old processes and fears that slows any enterprise decision, purchase or engagement today. And also slows the migration for any company to E 2.0. But her twitter activity does say that their is mindset and experimentation taking place!
To seek permission is to seek denial. I hope we don’t see organizations denying execs the permission and openness to tweet. We need early adopters like Padmasree!
-Tom @tomcanning
Hello - I would really like to watch this video but it is not loading up. I push play but it continues to time out. Is there place I can access this?
Thanks! Heather Grdinic