Earlier this summer, a Wikipedia article called Enterprise 2.0 was created. I first discovered it early in the morning of August 14. It had a "deletion notice" at the top of the article, so I saved the page. Later in the day of August 14 or on the 15th, the article was removed from Wikipedia. So here is how the article looked in its final moments.
First, this comment was embedded within the saved article. It contains the timestamp of the page I saved.
Anyway, here's the article I saved:
It is proposed that this article be deleted, because of the following concern:
concept not very notable. original research?
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Introduction to Enterprise 2.0
Enterprise 2.0 is a term used to describe how social software can be, and is being used to evolve the corporate intranet into a more organic, collaborative, user-driven platform. The term was coined by Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School in the Spring 2006 MIT Sloan Management Review. His article, currently only available for online sale and titled Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, helped articulate and define the concept. This paradigm was based on field research at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, where he previously developed formal case studies on the use of Socialtext.
McAfee went on to define Enterprise 2.0 as the use of freeform social software within companies. 'Freeform' in this case means that the software is most or all of the following: Optional, Free of up-front workflow, Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities and Accepting of many types of data. Freeform, or unstructured use, does not impose barriers to collaboration and enables the structure to emerge out of use.
Concepts
A central concept in Professor McAfee's paper is called SLATES. This is an acronym to indicate the six components of Enterprise 2.0 technologies, this are: Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions, and Signals. McAfee's (2006) paper explains how the components of this acronym work together in building a knowledge sharing and cross unit innovating company.
While the six components are intertwined, Search and Links are directly related by McAfee. While search on the public internet benefits from a rich and evolving link structure, intranets lack this high quality metadata to inform results. With a link structure, search technologies such as Pagerank leverage diverse feedback.
Authoring enables user participation, information sharing and contributes a dense link structure. While on the public internet, personal publishing is in many cases free (you can edit this page, for example), authoring is typically restricted within an intranet. Intranets typically have an editorial process managed by a small group.
Tags, or tagging enable bottom-up contribution of metadata, a user-friendly act akin to labeling. Tags have become a common feature in enterprise wikis, weblogs and social bookmarking. As tags are contributed over time, a folksonomy emerges which augments search and affords social discovery.
Extensions, according to McAfee, take tagging one step further by automating some of the work of categorization and pattern matching. Amazon recommendations is a simple analogy, saying, "if you like that, you might find this interesting."
Signals is necessary to overcome information overload, letting users choose what information they want to subscribe to and be notified upon changes. RSS and the Atom (standard) syndication feed formats, combined with [feed reader]]s support Signals.
Comparison with Enterprise 1.0
Traditional enterprise software imposes structure prior to use. The primary objective is to automate business processes to drive down costs and gain competitive advantage.
Stenmark argues that intranets are not similar to the internet, except in technology. They embody Taylorism management, seeking to control and measure. The primary objective of an intranet is to present management's view of corporate culture, while fulfilling the value proposition of saving time looking for information.
Imposing structure serves as a barrier to adoption and contribution. By contrast, email as an unstructured modality provides a path of least resistence for knowledge workers and has gained widespread use. Research by IDC suggests that 90% of business collaboration occurs within email. While the productivity benefits of email are arguable given the rise of spam and information overload, the organization benefits little beyond communication.
Enterprise 2.0 and Knowledge Management
Improving the productivity of knowledge workers is one of the most important challenges for companies that face the transition from the industrial economy to an economy based on information and knowledge (Drucker, 1999).
It is becoming increasingly apparent that some value intrinsic to both the underlying culture and frontline applications driving Web 2.0, which has been called an architecture of participation and user democracy [1], could be employed to address the evolving role of knowledge management in the corporate context.
Enterprise 2.0 Tools
Web 2.0 provides many tools that can be used to implement Enterprise 2.0 in your organization. Below is a list of the kind of Web 2.0 tools that have been adapted for enterprise use.