Technology

Don't be afraid of Web 2.0

BY Charis Palmer

Large corporates are struggling to relinquish the control they must sacrifice in order to successfully leverage Enterprise 2.0 applications. That’s the consensus from a recent forum on Enterprise 2.0 held by the Future Exploration Network.

“Enterprise 2.0 describes how Web 2.0 tools – such as blogs, wikis, social networks, virtual worlds, and social search – are used inside organisations,” says Ross Dawson, organiser of the forum and Future Exploration Network chairman.

“Companies are striving to create more value from the participation of their employees, customers and suppliers by using Web 2.0 tools and thinking.”
Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee is credited with coining the term Enterprise 2.0 and says companies that wish to reward collaboration and innovation will be better placed to capitalise on it.

“Over time those companies are going to pull ahead of the companies that do it half-heartedly or companies that don’t even bother trying and say ‘It’s not for us’ or ‘It’s all hype’.”

McAfee says companies must take a step back from trying to deliver structure to employees, trusting them to do the right thing with the tools. “I see a little bit too much hangover from the world of imposed structure and we’re still trying to dictate terms to the user with a lot of the Enterprise 2.0 rollouts that I’ve seen so far.”

One large bank experimenting with Enterprise 2.0 tools is Westpac. The bank has deployed a staff induction program in virtual community Second Life, and has also made it possible for staff to build their own site for collaborating with others inside the enterprise. So far more than 1,000 sites have been created.

Chief technology officer David Backley says the bank has had to take a slightly different approach for Enterprise 2.0 technology.

“We as an IT function within a bank have traditionally been charged with creating large scale systems that will last for many years and that nothing will go wrong with.”

Backley says Enterprise 2.0 tools can’t be implemented in one go and then maintained occasionally over time. They also require a high level of experimentation.

“There may be four or five ways of doing something, there may be a whole stack of inputs, and there may be some failures along the way.
“If anybody in the technology space is afraid of failure then you should probably get out of the whole Web 2.0 space because you will fall flat on your face.”

Another large organisation embracing Enterprise 2.0 tools is Janssen-Cilag. The Johnson & Johnson-owned pharmaceutical giant launched a wiki for employees two years ago and today credits it with replacing thousands of emails.

Nathan Wallace, associate director of technology says the success of the tool rests on its ease of use and the ability of the company to trust employees to use it in the right way. For example, he says, “In your organisation right now who can email the CEO? Pretty much anyone. Who can pick up the phone and call them? Pretty much anyone. Who does it? Only a very small number of idiots. It’s exactly the same in this structure, so you don’t need to be afraid. Social norms will keep people under control, you don’t need technical controls.”

Dawson says senior executives are beginning to understand that effective social networks and knowledge sharing in their organisations drive business success, and so they need to find ways to support them.

But McAfee says if Enterprise 2.0 tools are not ten times better than what they are replacing then companies will simply rely on the incumbent technology. Which is why McAfee is not predicting the demise of email any time soon. “When we have an incumbent technology in place and we encounter a prospect technology … a very interesting psychological phenomenon kicks in. “We tend to over-rate the relative advantages of our incumbent technology (email), by about a factor of three and we tend to under-rate the advantages of the prospect technology (Enterprise 2.0) by about a factor of three.

McAfee says companies with a culture of transparency and collaboration will be the first to embrace Enterprise 2.0 tools. “These are going to be the places where we see Enterprise 2.0 take off first and succeed and propagate itself most quickly.”