chieftech’s blog

Open government advocates outside the technology community stress that new applications such as wikis, which are Web pages that any user can edit, are one tool for creating transparency in government, but "wiki government" is not the solution, they argue.

Some people will no doubt interpret this to mean that Government 2.0 isn't about the technology. But I think this is a huge trap that the whole two do oh meme crowd is falling into. I don't just mean in relation to Government 2.0, but including Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and all the rest that have adopted it. I mean that there is more to understanding human society than Web 2.0, there is more to management than Enterprise 2.0, and there is more to Open Government than Government 2.0.

Personally, if I was one of those Open Government advocates outside of the technology community, I would be concerned too about my agenda being hijacked.

But while Open Government might not be about the technology, Government 2.0 *is* about using technology to do 'Government' in ways that were never possible before.

You get the idea, right?

Two do oh isn't the theory of everything that some claim it to be. Its just a useful label. A flag that we can gather around for a moment to explore the possibilities new technology presents, understand how it affects others aspects of society, and try out new methods. And then we move on, because one day this will just be business as usual.

So, shake hands and make friends. Both sides have something to teach the other.

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.