Is McAfee's definition of Enterprise 2.0 flawed?
McAfee's definition of Enterprise 2.0 is flawed. It is missing what made the social web to the social web - the people, not the technology.
I'm not sure this is entirely true, however it may be that the term coined by McAfee doesn't reflect how people want to use it or where they want to place emphasis. For example, in McAfee's 2006 paper he does say:
These new digital platforms for generating, sharing and refining information are already popular on the Internet, where they’re collectively labeled “Web 2.0” technologies. I use the term “Enterprise 2.0”to focus only on those platforms that companies can buy or build in order to make visible the practices and outputs of their knowledge workers.
I think that depending on the organisation, the organisational change related to Enterprise 2.0 is really either a reflection of the latent demand ("we need better tools!") or a disruption of existing industrial era hierarchical information flows ("Information is power!"). At the time McAfee warned us about the latter, but didn't really explore the demand side of the former.
However, its important to remember that McAfee placed Enterprise 2.0 in the context of improving the productivity of knowledge workers in the light of the failure of the previous generation of collaboration, information management and knowledge management tools (rather than organisational change because of some external driver). In a way I see McAfee's work as an extension of Tom Davenports ideas about Human-Centered Information Management from way back in 1994. The people are there, because people and the social web are really at the centre of the information systems we create - so lets give them tools that reflect that.
However, recasting Enterprise 2.0 as something that is just about people and organisational change is a different matter entirely. I have no problem with the subject matter, but I do wonder where the plain old discourse on the topic of "management" in our digital era ends and the buzz word of "Enterprise 2.0" begins. If instead we remove out expectations of McAfee and re-frame this discussion as a management issue it does serve as a reminder that this stuff is complex - the technology, organisational and people elements are related, not separate - and one size will never fit all.
