What is Enterprise 2.0 and where does it fit in our SAP world? You can check out the wikipedia entry here.
If you haven't been reading Mike Prosceno's new blog, Accidentally on Purpose, you should. Mike works for SAP and his profile reads: "I run 'new' media relations at SAP. I am also a social media evangelist inside the company promoting both the internal use of social media for productivity gains as well as its use externally for reputation enhancment."
In Mike's latest post, he points to Andrew McAfee's seminal article on our subject, "Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration". This content is from MIT Sloan Management Review and unfortunately, they charge for the full text. Since it will be a snowy day in Palo Alto before I pay $6.50 for an online article, below are some interesting excerpts from the free summary. It first defines Enterprise 2.0:
There is a new wave of business communication tools including blogs, wikis and group messaging software — which the author has dubbed, collectively, Enterprise 2.0 — that allow for more spontaneous, knowledge-based collaboration. These new tools, the author contends, may well supplant other communication and knowledge management systems with their superior ability to capture tacit knowledge, best practices and relevant experiences from throughout a company and make them readily available to more users.
Sounds a bit like SDN, eh? So how do we now push this same thing into our enterprise? The "ground rules" that will need to adopted for success:
First, it is necessary to create a receptive culture in order to prepare the way for new practices. Second, a common platform must be created to allow for a collaboration infrastructure. Third, an informal rollout of the technologies may be preferred to a more formal procedural change. And fourth, managerial support and leadership is crucial. Even when implanted and implemented well, these new technologies will certainly bring with them new challenges. These tools may well reduce management’s ability to exert unilateral control and to express some level of negativity. Whether a company’s leaders really want this to happen and will be able to resist the temptation to silence dissent is an open question. Leaders will have to play a delicate role if they want Enterprise 2.0 technologies to succeed.
There is huge potential for our new "dawn of emergent collaboration". So how do we apply these ground rules?
- The first rule, starts here. SDN has already created a receptive culture for new practices. The trick now is to get our attitude to trickle into the workplace.
- We now need to gather enough momentum, interest, and feedback to get SAP involved with #2 by providing us with an easily implemented and integrated Enterprise 2.0 solution for our existing systems/data.
- Rule #3 has the same answer as #2, but it also falls onto the shoulders of individual companies to think differently and throw out old, rigid implementation processes.
- As for #4, it will be up to our community, SAP, and you to really sell managers and leadership on the advantages of this type of new information sharing.
We have kicked around ideas for some type of collaborative, Enterprise 2.0 application at Colgate, but instead of reinventing the wheel or inventing the wheel alone, we want to reach out to the fine SDN community for help.
- What are the possibilities of Enterprise 2.0?
- Has anyone out there already implemented anything related to this yet?
- If so...what was it? was it successful? what were the push backs, roadblocks, and learning experiences?
- If not, will you ever consider it? Why not?
- Would you like to see an SAP provided solution, or would you rather create your own using consultants or even in-house development?
We are interested in hearing your thoughts, as this topic will be of growing interest this year. We have started a new wiki page for Enterprise 2.0, so please come help us and share your thoughts, ideas, and experiences.
-ewH
