[Andrew McAfee] polled the audience about their Intranet.  NOBODY finds their own intranet easier to find information on, than the global unmanaged Internet.  The people trying to make intranets easy to use are failing at this job.  Bad situation and a deep puzzle.

Euan Semple, knowledge manager at BBS noted that managers talked mostly about “I can’t find anything”.  They have a big content management system.  Most of it was static documents stored in “knowledge coffins”.  One problem is that the structure was determined by someone else.  If user does not have the same mental model as the person who organized it, they can’t find anything.  If they do find something, the resulting document was usually terribly out of date.

Sharing his notes from a recent conference presentation by Andrew McAfee, Keith Swenson from Fujitsu shares this all too familiar anecdote about the failure of traditional intranets.

What's amazing is that we know this is true - we've know for years. But people are still desperately trying to fix these intranets and failing despite stronger governance, best practice information architecture, the latest software upgrades, etc etc...

Maybe its time to try something else?

Things To Do

• Narrate your work. Talk both about work in progress (the projects you're in the middle of, how they're coming, what you're learning, and so on), and finished goods (the projects, reports, presentations, etc. you've executed). This lets others discover what you know and what you're good at. It also makes you easier to find, and so increases the chances you can be a helpful colleague to someone. Finally, it builds your personal reputation and 'brand.'
• Point to others' work, and provide commentary on it. When you come across something noteworthy, point to it and discuss why you think it's important. Chances are others would like to know about it. And include a link to the original source; people love links.
• Comment and discuss. Post comments to others' blogs, join the conversations taking place on forums, and keep the social media discussions lively. Doing so will let others hear your voice, and also make them more likely to participate themselves.
• Ask and answer questions. Don't just broadcast what you know; also broadcast your ignorance from time to time. Let the crowd help you if you're stuck. Most people and organizations are very pleasantly surprised by the amount of altruism unlocked by Enterprise 2.0.
• Vote, like, give kudos, etc. Lots of social software platforms these days have tools for voting or signaling that you like something. Use them; they help provide structure to the community as a whole and let people know where the good stuff and real experts are. They also make you more popular.
• Talk about social stuff going on at the company. Give a recap of the softball game, talk about plans for the holiday party, show how close the group is to its fundraising goal, and so on. Organizations are social places, and I think it's a shortsighted shame when E2.0 platforms are all business, all the time. However, it's often a good idea to give non-work stuff its own dedicated place on the platform so that people can avoid it if they want to.

I often equate introducing enterprise social software as like moving from individual offices to open plan. Its not just about changes to the physical space, but also the changes to workplace social norms that go with it.

As part of that process some people are going to say, I like the idea of a more social computing workspace...

...but what should I actually do in it?

Andrew McAfee does a nice of job of covering some do's, don'ts and also the grey areas. Focusing on the do's (see above) I think its all about positive, useful communication. But this doesn't mean it has to be all work work work.

As for the don't, here is another physical workspace habit we don't want to bring into the online social workspace.

I usually dodge questions about specific vendors and their offerings, and instead answer how I'd look at any particular deployment of collaboration software to see if it met my definition of Enterprise 2.0.

I find this pretty easy to do. I check to see if the environment meets three criteria: Is it freeform? How frictionless is contribution? And is it emergent?

It worth considering Andew McAfee's criteria for Enterprise 2.0 software - particularly as we get excited about the potential for Sharepoint 2010 for example. However, we actually need to apply this criteria twice. Once to determine if the software's architecture is able to support an Enterprise 2.0 use case, the second to determine if the organisation will actually deploy it in a way that allows those capabilities to be utilised.

Hat tip to Martin Koser.

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.