Shattering the Myths About

Enterprise 2.0
By Andrew P. McAfee
Almost 50 % of companies in the U. S. use some kind of Social software, and a July 2009 Prescient
Digital Media survey revealed that 47 % of respondents were using wikis, 45 % blogs, and 46 %
internal discussion forums.
Web 2.0, A term coined in 2004 to describe the Internet’s capability to allow everyone, even non-techies,
to connect with other people and contribute content. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia are the
best known examples of this trend, and they have become some of the web’s most popular resources.
Three years ago, I coined the term enterprise 2.0 to highlight the fact that smart companies are
embracing web 2.0 technologies, as well as the underlying approach to collaboration and creation of
content.
Enterprise 2.0, which I sometimes call E2.0, refers to how an organization uses emergent social software
platforms, or ESSPs, to pursue its goals (See the sidebar “what Is Enterprise 2.0?” This definition
emphasizes the most striking feature of the new technologies : They don’t impose predetermined
workflows ,roles and responsibilities, or interdependencies among people, but instead allow them to
emerge .This is a profound shift.
Most companies use applications like ERP and CRM software, which create cross-functional
business processes and specify –in details and with little flexibility –exactly who does what and
when. And who gets to make which decisions.E2.0, in contrast ,requires companies to take the
opposite approach: to let people create and refine content as equals and with no, or few,
preconditions. Using ESSPs enables patterns and structure to take shape over time .

The misuse of blogs or the possibility of information theft, for instance-seem concrete and immediate
,whereas the benefits appear nebulous and distant .
 Idea in Brief
Web 2.0 technologies are now a staple of social collaboration on the internet. In 2006Andrew
McAfee ,of the MIT centre for Digital Business, Coined the term Enterprise 2.0 to describe how
organizations use emergent social software platforms ,or ESSPs ,to pursue their goals .However
,some organizations don’t achieve the many collaboration-related benefits that internal ESSPs can
offer. After studying both successful and unsuccessful E2.0 initiative ,McAfee attributes most of the
failures to five misconceptions. The first two myths crop up before an E2.0 initiative is launched.
One is that the risks of ESSPs, most notably from inappropriate use, will greatly outweigh the
rewards .McAfee makes the case that those dangers rarely manifest in practice. The other pre-launch
myth is that the ROI of an E2.0 initiative should be calculated in monetary terms .McAfee shows
how Enterprise 2.0 can deliver valuable benefits in terms of developing human, organizational ,and
information capital without a numerical ROI yield. The final three myths arise after an E2.0 project is
deployed. One holds that people will flock to a collaboration platforms once it is built. Success
actually requires various types of top –down support, including active participation by senior leaders.
Another is that E2.0’s primary worth is in helping close colleagues work together better. In reality,
the value extends to networks of expertise well beyond a user’s inner circle. The importance of those
far reaching interpersonal connections also debunks the last myth: that E2.0 should be judged by the
information it generates. Information in indeed useful, but E2.0’s greatest advantage lies in
transforming potential ties between people into actual ones.
I have been studying E2.0 projects ,both successful and unsuccessful ,since companies started
deploying these technologies in earnest four years ago. My research shows that, despite the failures
,there have been striking successes –and that more big successes are possible if only companies
would learn to use these tools well . Most initiatives fail because of five widely help beliefs:
reasonable attitude held by well-meaning people, not the handiwork of saboteurs. Nonetheless, data,
research, and case studies show that the beliefs are wrong; they're the myths of Enterprises 2.0 .In the
following pages, I’ll refute them, starting with two that corp up before an E2.0 initiative is launched
and finishing with three that can take hold after deployment.
 What is Enterprise 2.0 ?
ENTERPRISE 2.0 IS THE USE OF EMERGENT social software platforms, or ESSPs, by an
organization to pursue its goals .Here’s a breakdown of what the term means:

• Social software ,as a Wikipedia entry roughly characterizes it, enables people to rendezvous,
connect, or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online
communities.
• Platforms are digital environments in which contributions and interactions are visible to everyone
and remain until the user deletes them.
• Emergent means that the software is “Freeform” and contains mechanism that let that patterns and
structure inherent in people’s interactions become evident over time.
• Freeform software has many or all of the following characteristics: Its use is optional ;it does not
predefine workflows; it is indifferent to formal hierarchies ;and it accepts many types of data .
 Myth 1:E2.0’s Risks Greatly Outweigh the Rewards

What if someone posts hate speech or pornography? Cant an employee use the forum to denigrate the
company, air dirty laundry, or criticize its leadership and strategy? Don't these technologies make it
easy for valuable information to seep out of the company and be sold to the highest bidder?
What if rivals use customer –facing websites to air grievances or malign our products and services?
Are we liable if people give incorrect information or bad advice on the forums we host ? Wont
employees use the collaboration software to plan social events instead of work –related activities ?

One conversation I had was particularly telling .In late 2007,when I was teaching a group of senior
HR executives ,one of them said that leaders at her company ,which employed many young people
,became concerned about how employees represented it online. When her team poked around on
Facebook, Myspace, and other sites, it found that employees almost always talked about the company
in appropriate ways. The worst thing the team discovered was a photograph of a training session in
which some account numbers were dimply visible on a blackboard. When alerted ,the employee who
posted it immediately apologized and took the photograph down. Even that wasn’t necessary ;it
turned out that the numbers were dummies.
If workers do misbehave ,companies can identify ,counsel, educate, and ,if necessary ,discipline
them. Two, participants usually feel a sense of community and react quickly if they feel that someone
is violating the norms. Counterproductive contributions usually meet with a flurry of responses that
articulate why the content is out of bounds ,reiterate the implicit rules, and offer correction. Three ,in
addition to an organization’s formal leaders ,community leaders form a counterbalance. They exert a
great deal of influence and shape fellow employees' behaviour online. Four, the internet has been in
wide use for more than a decade, so most people know how o behave appropriately in online contexts
.
Moderation process whereby executives vet contributions before they appear .

Myth 2 : The ROI of E2.0 Must Be calculated IN

• Expected cost and timeline

• Possible benefits
 Enterprise 2.0’s Benefits
HERE ARE SIX BENEFITS A COMPANY can get by developing and using an emergent social
software platform:
1. Group editing allows multiple people to collaborate on a centrally stored work products such as
document, spreadsheet, presentation ,or website.
2. Authoring is the ability to generate content and to publish it online for a broad audience. Unlike
sending e mail, authoring is a public act.
3. Broadcast search refers to the posing of queries in a public forum in the hope of receiving an
answer. People publicize not what they know, but what they don’t know.
4. Network formation and maintenance Social network applications keep people in touch with the
activities of close and distant contacts. Whenever a user provides an update ,it becomes available
to the entire network.
5. Collective intelligence is the use of technologies ;such as prediction markets, to generate answers
and forecasts from a dispersed group .
6. Self-Organization is the ability of users to build communities and information resources without
explicit coordination by any central authority. This is most remarkable benefit of Enterprise 2.0
and the easiest to overlook.
 Myth 3 : If we Build It, They will come
Web 2.0 communities like Facebook are ,they still attract only a tiny percentage of internet users. The
main task that E2.0 champions face is to draw in a greater fraction of their target audience. That’s
difficult for two reasons .One, people are busy .Few knowledge workers feel they have the time to
take on an additional responsibility ,especially one with ill-defined goals and expectations.
Two, employees don’t know how to top management will view their participation in ESSPs .will
senior executives value employees who contribute ,or will they assume that those workers aren’t
interested in their “real ”jobs ?
 Myth 4 :E2.0 Delivers Value Mainly by Helping
close Colleagues work Better
Most companies currently use ESSPs to support people who are already collaborating .The Prescient
Digital Media survey cited earlier, for example, found that E2.0’s most popular uses are employee
collaboration ( 77 % of respondents ) and knowledge management ( 71 % ) .When those are the goals
,a typical scenario is for organization to establish group-editing environments for all the units-such as
labs, workgroups, business units, client teams, and so on –that want them, or to let the entries set
them up for themselves. In most cases, these environments are closed: Nobody outside the predefined
group can see or edit the content.
However ,this approach has shortcomings .Consider the types of interpersonal ties of a typical
knowledge worker. She has a small group of close collaboration with whom she has strong
professional relationships. There's also a large set of people to whim she has weak ties: co-workers
she interacts with periodically, colleagues she knows through co-workers ,and other professional
acquaintances .Next is another, even larger set of employees who may be valuable to her if only she
knew about them. They could keep her from reinventing the wheel on her next project, answer
pressing questions ,tell her about a good vendor or consultant ,let her know that they're working on
similar problems, and so on. Finally are the people who wouldn't become colleagues of the
knowledge worker even if she had ties to them.
Picture a bull’s eye with four rings; it can represent these four kinds of ties. When an E2.0 initiative
consists of closed editing environments ,it ignores the benefits that the three outer rings can deliver.
Network formation often happens in the second ring. Authoring and broadcast search convert
potential ties into actual ones, so they extend to people in the third ring. And collective intelligence
works across all four rings; even strangers can trade with one another in prediction markets and
generate accurate forecasts.
Myth 5:0 should Be Judged by the Information
It Generates
• From A defence Intelligence Agency Analyst : “ These tools have immensely improved my ability
to interact with people that I would never have met otherwise…People that would never have been
visible now have a voice.”
• From a National Security Agency Analyst : “Earlier ,contracting other agencies was done
cautiously and only through official channels. After nearly two years of Intellipedia ,this has
changed. Using it has become part of my work progress, and I have made connections with a
variety of analysts outside the intelligence community. I don’t know everything ,but I do know who
I can go when I need to find out something.”
• From a National Security Agency Engineer: “There’s now a place I can go to for answers as
opposed to data .By using that data and all the links to people associated with that data, I can find
people who are interested in helping me understand the subject matter…Their helpful attitude
makes me want to help them ( and others) in return.”
• From a Central Intelligence Agency Analyst : “The first aspect that comes to mind is the ease of
sharing ideas and working collaboratively with intelligence professionals around the world….I am
actively involved in an early-stage project that would be impossible without these tools .”
Nelson Mandela wrote in his autobiography about a leadership lesson he learned from a tribal chief
in South Africa: “A leader ….is like a shepherd .He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go
out ahead ,whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from
behind. "similarly ,E2.0 reveals the domains in which people are adept, allows to show the way ,and
gets others to follow them when its in the company’s best interest.
 How smart companies Use Enterprise 2.0
ENTERPRISE 2.0,WHEN IT WORKS, delivers impressive results ,as these four examples show:
• Office supply company Vista print started a wiki in order to capture what a new engineering hire
needed to know. Because this knowledge base often changed quickly, the company suspected that a
paper –based solution would become obsolete. With 18 months, the wiki grew to over 11,000
pages and 600 categories, all generated by employees rather than by a knowledge –management
staff .
• Serena software encouraged its employees to create profiles on Facebook and other social
networking sites, both to learn more about one another and to interact with outside parties such as
customers and prospective employees. The company eventually attracted twice as many people to
its annual user conference- and much better candidates for its job openings .
• The U.S government had deployed ESSPs across its 16 intelligence agencies, which include the
CIA, FBI, national security Agency, and Defence intelligence Agency .An internal report
concluded that these tools ,which include blogs and the intellipedia wiki, are “already impacting
the work practices of analysts. In addition ,(They are ) challenging deeply held norms about
controlling the flow of information between individuals and across organizational boundaries.”
• A U.S gaming company set up internal prediction market to forecast the sales of new product.
Consumer enthusiasm for new titles is notoriously hard to predict, but the market provided a good
crystal ball. The 1,2.. Employees who in the market collectively generated a forecast that turned
out to be 61% more accurate than the initial prediction, which had been yielded by conventional
means .
 UNLOCK THE COLLABORTAION
TOOLBOX
• Mobile
• Social
• Visual
• Virtual

Collaboration in a post Era

 Application
 Operating Systems
 Devices
 Cloud Computing Defined

Cloud computing enables services and content to be dynamically delivered on demand –on a massive
scale and with high efficiency .This rapidly emerging computing option gives companies the ability
to deliver more interactive and more rapidly available services and content to employees as well as
customers at dramatically lower cost .
 Collaboration then and now
THEN NOW
People Inside my organisation Dispersed ,mobile teams

Communities Hierarchy Self –Organizing

Content Documents ,Text Video Voice

Context Search Information finds you

Security Inside the firewall, Walled off Inclusive selective ,policy

based

Deployment On Premise Cloud ,Hybrid

 ELEMENTS OF THE COLLBAORATION
TECHNOLOGY PORTFOLIO
Customer Care Telepresence and Video Conferencing

Messaging Collaboration Portfolio Enterprise Social Software

IP communications Mobile Applications

IP Communications : Build a strong Foundation

Mobile Application: Stay Connected on the Go

CASE
STUDY Nottingham University hospitals
Redefines Nursing with Mobile Applications
With more than 13,000 staff working across two main campuses and providing care to more than 2.5
million people ,Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust ( NUH) is one of the UK’S largest
providers of Health care. Spread across 90 acres ,the city hospitals campus to the North of
Nottingham is believed to be the largest Facility in Europe. In a workplace this large, it has been
extremely difficult for doctors and nurses to collaborate. Simply finding people when you needed
them posed a serious and time-consuming challenge .
Until recently, when a doctor or nurse needed a senior opinion from a clinician ,they used a fixed
phone to call an operator to page that person. Then they waited, and waited, for the recipient the
page, finish whatever he or she was doing, find a phone and return the call. Clinicians were
constantly interrupted ,precious time was lost and care givers ran the risk of failing to delivering the
best care.
Communication in the emergency department was especially difficult. Messages were broadcast over
a sound system, creating a constant chatter heard by all-doctors, nurses, patients and visitors. Yet
there was no guarantee the right person would answer the call. On a busy shift, the senior doctor
might get paged 10 to 12 times an hour.
Enter mobile communications .With a unified communications system ,clinicians engage in anywhere
,anytime collaboration using integrated wireless and messaging technologies, instead of pagers
,clinicians carry wireless PI phones and can reach other directly using directory-based dialling ;video
capabilities allow doctors in different facilities to meet face to face without the need to travel.
With all information exchanged over a single platform, clinicians no longer walk a mile to a ward
and discover the job was done by someone else. Patients no longer sit in the waiting room after x-ray
until a staff member notices they need to be brought back to the emergency department. Instead ,the
department is alerted when a patient is ready for transfer .
Better collaboration also helped the hospital improve clinical safety by lowering the chance a vital
instructions for patient care falling through the cracks. In the inevitable on the go communication that
happens in these wards, staff might overlook-or simply run out of time attend to-a task that’s
communicated verbally or written on a slip of paper. Now, those requests are recorder on the wireless
device, improving efficiency ,accountability, training and ,ultimately ,the quality of care.
Better staff collaboration has delivered considerably shorter patient wait times, which means NUH
can treat more patients. In fact ,NUH eliminated about 40 minutes of patient waiting time per shift for
every doctor. In gynaecology surgery, turnaround time for patients fell from 45 minutes to just five .
The solution also offers visibility into staffing needs, With increased efficiency and predictability
,NUH can clearly see how many clinicians are needed to handle the workload on a given shift. All of
these improvements add up to a satisfied staff that provides better patient care, and the hospital
expects to recoup its collaboration investment in 13 months.
 Telepresence : Lifelike Video Conferencing

CASE General Electric’s Virtual Collaboration

STUDY Spaces

General Electric ( GE) was an early adopter of telepresence for its global executive meetings, but
leaders within the company wanted more from the technology than the ability to give executive face
time for –hour review sessions. They wanted to accelerate innovation for products made by engineers in
the United States and Europe and sols to markets in China and India .GE entertained a bold concept:
Could telepresence imitate the feel of a real working room. Where groups of people come together for
several hours at a time to solve problems ? The challenge was how to capture images of peole who are
walking around the room, drawing on white boards and needing to make eye contact with an audience
that’s both in the room and virtual.
The solution ,a first of its kind virtual collaboration space that takes immersive video confercing to a
whole new level, includes:
 A telepresence system with voice –activated camera that follow a speaker around the room
 Smartboards for electric white boarding
 An online meeting capability for communicating with people who are not in one of the
telepresence rooms.
 Custom –designed collaboration furniture to crate a highly interactive environment

With 62 Virtual Collaboration spaces in use at the time of this writing ,and eight expected by the end
of 2011,the technology has transformed collaboration at GE. Instead of flying 50 employees to one
destination for intensive full day working sessions, the company can invite participants to a series of
virtual sessions. Meeting style, length and frequency can be adjusted to suit the task at hand.
“Virtual Collaboration Spaces are changing the way we work ,”says GE Chief Technology Officer
Greg Simpson. “WE might have four teams in four locations working on a problem .The teams listen
to comments in breakout sessions and pull in subject –matter experts on the fly. None of this was
possible before .”Without the need to travel, GE the luxury of spreading meetings out over a longer
period of time, and yet its teams still get the job done faster. The return on investments is all better
decisions ,stronger teams and reduced cycle time.
 Enterprise Social Software: The Rise of Social
Networking in Business
How many emails are waiting in your inbox right now ? And how long does it take to locate a piece of
information that someone has sent ?We’ve all been there. Enterprise social software turns time-
consuming information hunting into productive dialogues that solve problems .

CASE Social Conversation Deliver Fats Answers at Cisco

STUDY

Here at Cisco ,we saw an opportunity to help employees manage vast amounts of information with
enterprises social software. Our goals were four-fold:
 Connect the right people, resources and content at the right time
 Improve Communication
 Facilitate collaboration internally and externally
 Help our employees learn from one another
 Customer Care : Social CRM
Customer intimacy takes on a whole new meaning in the context of social software. Companies that
use collaboration technology for customer care break away from the reactive mode of traditional call
centres and set a new standard for customer service. Satisfaction and loyalty improve when you
connect customers with the information ,expertise and the support they need in their preferred mode
of communication .
Customer care tools include contact centre routing and queuing ,voice self –service and social media
customer care. Social media monitoring tools help you track and analyse the conversation that matter
to your businesses these collaboration to better met customer need and keep a close watch on what
customers are saying about you-good or bad.
You can also use these tools to route customers to skilled experts in the contact centre or other part of
the company to address their needs. Being proactive in this way helps your company enhance service
levels, improve loyalty and win new customers, all while protecting your brand.
Q & A The power of Enterprise 2.0 Technologies
If your competition became three times more productive and you didn’t , how worried would you be
? This is the question Dr . Andrew McAfee poses when discussing the importance of collaboration.
Author of Enterprise 2.0 ,McAfee sees great potential for a more open way of communicating in the
workplace. Here he offers leader words of advice for how to move their organization in this direction.

Q: Explain the term “Enterprise 2.0 .”Can you describe what you mean ?

Q: What advice would you give to help companies see the value of being more open to the
Enterprise 2.0 universe ?

Q: How does an organization make the shift to this way of working ?

A : The transition can not be entirely a bottom –up initiative. It requires a top-down approach in
which the formal and informal leaders signal via their actions that they honestly do want this new
style of collaboration to happen ,and they are going to do what it takes to make it succeed. It cant
be lip service. Management needs to send those signals loudly , clearly and often.
That Means using the technologies yourself. Maintain a profile on a social network. Start blogging
.Get yourself out there in video chats .
And don’t hand these activities off strictly to your PR staff because people can sniff that out very
easily. Authenticity is really important .
You should also take advantage of all the other tools we have in the managerial toolkit: rewards and
recognition ,status and incentives, performance reviews. All these steps move on organization in the
right direction.

Q: Is there an imperative for companies to embrace more collaborative technologies?

A : The imperative is competition. The world is not a sleepy place. Companies are vying with each
other for every slice of customer attention and every dollar of revenue. These technologies help
solve that age –old challenge articulated by Lew Platt, the former CEO of HP: “If only HP knew
what HP knows ,we’d be three times as productive. ”An organization that solves that challenge
and becomes three times more productive is sure to win.
 Collaboration without Boundaries: Benefits of an
Integrated Portfolio
Before you decide which technologies belong in your collaboration toolbox, consider this:
Collaboration is a bit like building a Ferrari. Greatness depends not only on the individual parts but
also on the way they are assembled.
If you want an integrated experience for all your employees –regardless of their role, location and
points of connection-recognize that decisions you make about mobile devices affect how you’ll
deploy video, and vice versa. An open, interoperable infrastructure is critical because it gives you
flexibility to bring in new technologies as they emerge in the future.
The goal is collaboration without boundaries. Forget work/life balance. This is about work/
integration. You want people working together :
 Anywhere –at home, the boardroom, the office, a hotel or a soccer game
 Ona any device-Supporting the end points and platforms that people use today, including PC’s
phones and video-enabled mobile devices such as iPads and other tablets
 Using nay content-Connecting to any media, whether its data, voice or video, in the applications
that people work in today.
 With the control ,policy and flexibility that IT requires
Best of all, there is a powerful network effect to this technology: The more pervasive collaboration
becomes, the more powerful its impact.AS people start using these tools, they become more
productive almost immediately .This new way of working has an addictive quality. Once you get
used to the integrated web-conference experience ,for example ,it seems old fashioned if you have to
revert to a phone call where you cant tell who’s speaking or collectively work on a shared document
in real time.
Start small, at a business unit level, for example ,and you’ll quickly see the potential of having the
entire organization, as well as customers and partners ,on a common platform. Once you see the
value and understand the return ,you can plot a course to the next level of collaboration .