Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges [Hardcover]

Andrew McAfee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 16, 2009

"Web 2.0" is the portion of the Internet that's interactively produced by many people; it includes Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and prediction markets. In just a few years, Web 2.0 communities have demonstrated astonishing levels of innovation, knowledge accumulation, collaboration, and collective intelligence.

Now, leading organizations are bringing the Web's novel tools and philosophies inside, creating Enterprise 2.0. In this book, Andrew McAfee shows how they're doing this, and why it's benefiting them. Enterprise 2.0 makes clear that the new technologies are good for much more than just socializing-when properly applied, they help businesses solve pressing problems, capture dispersed and fast-changing knowledge, highlight and leverage expertise, generate and refine ideas, and harness the wisdom of crowds.

Most organizations, however, don't find it easy or natural to use these new tools initially. And executives see many possible pitfalls associated with them. Enterprise 2.0 explores these concerns, and shows how business leaders can overcome them.

McAfee brings together case studies and examples with key concepts from economics, sociology, computer science, consumer psychology, and management studies and presents them all in a clear, accessible, and entertaining style. Enterprise 2.0 is a must-have resource for all C-suite executives seeking to make technology decisions that are simultaneously powerful, popular, and pragmatic.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“If you’re intent on positioning your business for the future, and would rather lead than follow, you need to read this book.” -Gary Hamel

We'd recommend this book to any under-appreciated CIO seeking self-improvement, and to executives trying to extract greater value from their IT spending… —ZDNet UK, October 12, 2009

From the Inside Flap

Harness New Collaborative Technologies for Competitive Gain

Most organizations realize that to succeed in today’s turbulent world, they need to perform as an integrated whole to tap into innovations and good ideas. Yet many still find it difficult to capture the collective intelligence of their employees and customers. Companies don’t know what they know—but they need to learn soon.

Thanks to a new class of collaborative technologies, organizations can now leverage information in valuable new ways, including: capturing accumulated knowledge; connecting employees who need information with the experts who have it; and enabling the best ideas to emerge organically. These technologies—labeled “Web 2.0”—first appeared on the Internet, where they powered successful social communities and collaborative platforms like Facebook and Wikipedia. Web 2.0 tools, practices, and philosophies are now being deployed by a wide range of organizations, making them more agile, productive, and innovative. This is the phenomenon of Enterprise 2.0.

In this compelling book, Andrew McAfee—a veteran researcher and writer on the business impact of technology, and the originator of the phrase “Enterprise 2.0”describes the power of Enterprise 2.0 and shows readers how to harness it. McAfee weaves together case studies, discussions of technological change, and multidisciplinary research to:

• Show how early adopters like Google, the BBC, and the CIA have profited from Enterprise 2.0
• Specify the concrete business benefits that arise when Web 2.0 technologies are properly deployed
• Reveal where the real risks and roadblocks are with Enterprise 2.0, and why most concerns are unfounded
• Guide companies through an Enterprise 2.0 deployment

Enterprise 2.0 is written not for technology experts, but for pragmatic decision makers in any kind of organization. Dispensing with hype, it takes a practical look at the competitive challenges facing so many organizations today and explores how they can be met and conquered with the right combination of novel technologies and enlightened leadership.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business School Press; 1 edition (November 16, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1422125874
• ISBN-13: 978-1422125878
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 0.9 x 9.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #672,233 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Andrew McAfee, author of "Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges," studies the ways that information technology (IT) affects businesses and business as a whole. His research investigates how IT changes the way companies perform, organize themselves, and compete. At a higher level, his work also investigates how computerization affects competition itself - the struggle among rivals for dominance and survival within an industry.

He coined the phrase "Enterprise 2.0" in a spring 2006 Sloan Management Review article to describe the use of Web 2.0 tools and approaches by businesses. He also began blogging at that time, both about Enterprise 2.0 and about his other research. McAfee's blog is widely read, becoming at times one of the 10,000 most popular in the world (according to Technorati). His Twitter identity is @amcafee

In the July / August issue of Harvard Business Review McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson published "Investing in the IT that Makes a Competitive Difference," a summary of their research investigating IT's links to changes in competition. This work was the first to reveal that competition began to heat up in the US in the mid 1990s - to become faster paced, more turbulent, and more winner-take-all - and that this acceleration was greater in industries that spent more on IT. This research continues, and continues to highlight that technology appears to be significantly reshaping the landscape of competition.

McAfee is the author or co-author of more than fifteen scholarly articles and ninety case studies and other materials for students and teachers of technology. This work has convinced him that modern information technology is the most powerful tool available to business leaders, yet also the most misunderstood and under-appreciated resource at their disposal.

In 2008 McAfee was named by the editors of the technical publishing house Ziff-Davis number 38 in their list of the "100 Most Influential People in IT." He was also named by Baseline magazine to a separate, unranked list of the 50 most influential people in business IT that year. He was invited by Prof. Gary Hamel to join a 'renegade brigade' of thinkers in the task of assembling a set of Moon Shots for Management, which was published in the January 2009 Harvard Business Review.

He speaks frequently to both academic and industry audiences, and has taught in executive education programs around the world.

McAfee is currently a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a fellow at the Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

He received his Doctorate from Harvard Business School, and completed two Master of Science and two Bachelor of Science degrees at MIT.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 61 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Enterprise 2.0 better article than book - sorry to go against the grain December 28, 2009

By Mark P. McDonald TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Writing this review has been is one of the hardest things I have had to do. I wanted to like this book, it's a great subject, a knowledgeable an author and great prior reviews. Unfortunately this book does not deliver making this review tough to put together. I would not suggest using this book to introduce Web 2.0 to the business. I know that this review may draw some heat from the other reviewers but here are the reasons behind my review and why I recommend reading McAfee's HBR article rather than investing the time in this book.

The book covers an important topic and a critical time in its formation. What is the impact of social computing technologies like Wiki's, blogs and other forms of social media. McAfee defines Enterprise 2.0 as the use of emergent social software platforms by organization s in pursuit of their goals. (p.71) McAfee says that Enterprise 2.0 is not primarily a technology issue. This is not born out in the text as majority of the book spends time defining the technology behind E 2.0 (chapter 3 and 4) and the capabilities provided by the technology (chapter 5).

McAfee treats E 2.0 technology at a high level. Its is as if, McAfee does not believe a business person would be interested in how the technology works, which makes the web 2.0 technologies seem trivial. If McAfee had expanded the view of technology to include the integration of business processes and information with these technologies he could have provided powerful business based descriptions.

McAfee intended to write a business book about Enterprise 2.0 but he concentrates the vast majority of pages on emergent social software platforms (ESSP). There is little discussion of the business impact of the software, how it applies to major business processes or activities and how these platforms change the way business work at a strategic, market, financial, product, organizational or operational areas. These are all questions business executives have and they are not treated sufficiently in this book. This is one reason why I would not suggest using this book as a platform for launching new social software initiatives.

Business books relies on case studies to illustrate their points and while McAfee has case studies from Google, Serena Software, the CIA, and Vista Print which should provide a solid foundation. However, the cases talk about how these people implemented Espy's in a generic fashion saying that company A implemented a blog to solve their problem. Only the description of Google's adoption of predictive markets constitutes a strong case. The limited use of practical or detailed examples is puzzling, as it does not give the reader access to McAfee's experience and insight.

McAfee further weakens his argument as the book draws on academic frameworks outside of E 2.0 and technology to answer critical issues. Normally, this is where a strong case study would illustrate how people have addressed these challenges. However, McAfee chooses strong academics including discussion of theories of Granovetter (Strength of Weak Ties), Hayek and Harford (Theory of Knowledge), Gourville (Behavioral economics and slow rates of adoption) to make his points. This unfortunately weakens the book's business impact and credibility. Not that the ideas of these thought leaders are weak, its just that they give the book a stronger academic feel than other business books. While the case studies are a good touch, the examples involve implementing relatively generic web 2.0 a wiki for one, a blog for another. While the cases do discuss the results achieved, the cases would have been stronger if the case studies provided more detail about how the cases used these technologies to achieve these results.

Finally the book seems to be stitched together from three separate research pieces. The best part of the book is actually the final chapter. It describes the book that I believe you should have read as it hints at the business, financial and other issues opened by Enterprise 2.0. The tone, content and focus of the final chapter is distinctly different from the rest of the work. If the whole book could have been like the last chapter this would have been one of the best business books of the last three years.

The first five chapters of the book are more descriptive of the phenomenon and suffer from McAfee's desire to assert his brand of the terms Enterprise 2.0 and ESSP. This assertion comes from his frequent use of the first person to define and drive the book forward, I believe this or I see that. This weakens the book and gives it a self-referential style that does not go over well with a business audience.

In chapters six and seven the book branches off into a discussion of the business value of IT and refuting Nicholas Carr's IT doesn't matter argument. This part comes out of the blue and discuses IT in general rather than the specifics of how ESSP changes the definition of IT and its role in the enterprise. Another opportunity lost in my estimation.

The introduction of Web 2.0 and social software into enterprises is a significant opportunity for every organization. This book has the potential to introduce business to these technologies in much the same way that Hammer and Champy set the stage for re-engineering, or Negroponte and the internet. However after thinking about this review for more than a week, I felt that the book does not do this and I cannot recommend it as the way of introducing ESSP's to the enterprise. I do not intent to criticize the author, his knowledge or his experience as I am sure that McAfee knows more about how to make this technology work to create value, it just did not show in this book. Sorry to offer a different view on this book, but I hope that you can see the reasons behind this review.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Worth it even if you're already an Enterprise 2.0 believer November 15, 2009

By Bryce Williams

Format:Hardcover

I was a little concerned when I started reading the book, being that I am a self-proclaimed Enterprise 2.0 "convert", that it may feel a bit like "preaching to the choir." But in reading Part 1, even though some pages are spent on introducing concepts and benefits with which I am already familiar, reading the book has been time well spent. And here's why:

- Andy uses 4 real world case studies that demonstrate how Enterprise 2.0 collaboration methods can be valuable, and if you are involved with trying to drive adoption of similar tools within your organization, these case studies are great examples to recall. Also, the examples of the US government looking to open collaboration capabilities in response to some communication failures that led to 9/11 make for great reading.
- While understanding how various 2.0 style tools work and how organizations have leveraged those tools in the past is important, having the ability to analyze existing organizational inefficiencies and identify effective collaboration methods/tools to aid those problems is where you can separate yourself. Andy provides a well thought out mapping between relationships within professional networks (Strong Ties, Weak Ties, Potential Ties and No Ties) and how Enterprise 2.0 methods/tools can be applied to build/strengthen those ties in ways that can positively impact an organization's issues. So instead of blindly throwing a wiki at a business problem, for example, you'll have the background to identify other potential tools that may be a better fit to help a specific business problem.
- While reading, I thought to myself on multiple occasions, "That's exactly what I have been trying to tell people, but now I have examples, human behavioral studies as evidence and a credible resource as another weapon in telling my story." If you have responsibility for driving adoption of 2.0 tools, trying to make a business case, or approving the business case for evolving an Enterprise 2.0 agenda, this book will be very helpful for you.

I couldn't put the book down getting through Part 1, and I am anxious to complete Part 2 having read that it is even more valuable for Enterprise 2.0 practitioners than Part 1.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A "Groundswell"-like introduction to an important business topic November 23, 2009

By John Caddell

Format:Hardcover

Length: 6:09 Mins

A 6-minute video review of Andrew McAfee's book "Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools For Your Organization's Toughest Challenges." Covers book's theme, the SLATES acronym, the use of different E2.0 tools for different types of ties between colleagues, McAfee's cautions, and Model1/2 behaviors and how they connect with E2.0 platforms.

TRANSCRIPT:

I'm John Caddell from Caddell Insight Group [...].

We're here today to talk about "Enterprise 2.0" by Andrew McAfee. He is with MIT, used to be at Harvard Business School. Just switched over a couple of months ago. He writes an excellent blog on IT and business, that I'd recommend you read if you haven't come across it yet. And so, he's just produced his first book. To explain the title, Enterprise 2.0 is a term he coined to refer to using web 2.0 tools like Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and similar tools in a business context.

The book is a lot like a recent book, "Groundswell," that explained to general business people how social tools affected customers and markets and how to use those to communicate and listen. Communicating from inside the business to outside. "Enterprise 2.0" performs a similar task, focusing on using those tools inside the business, more for collaboration and tapping the collective intelligence of employees. And so it takes this marginal topic and moves it to a general management-type discussion. Which I think is really important, to get it out of the IT discussion into the management discussion.

So as part of that objective he does a really good job of explaining how these tools work and also what ties them together because if you think about tools like Flickr or YouTube or a blogging platform or a messaging platform or a wiki there are a lot of differences among those but he's tied together the common threads, using an acronym called SLATES (search, links, authoring, tags, extensions and signals). Signals, for example, like RSS that allows people who follow these platforms without having to log on to them every single hour to see what's changed.

Another important part of the book is in putting the different tools into a context in terms of how useful they'd be for different organizational problems. He uses a bullseye metaphor focused on the strength of ties between colleagues to explain that. At the center of the bullseye are strongly-tied colleagues meaning people who work together in the same department, in the same location, all the way out to the edge of the bullseye. meaning colleagues who have no relationship at all. Different tools apply at different levels of the bullseye. In the center, people with strong ties would use tools like wikis, or collaborative development tools, like Google Docs.

Midway out the bullseye are colleagues with weak ties. People who know each other but don't get together often, who don't talk often, but would like to keep apprised of each other's activities for the purposes of sharing knowledge, best practices, identifying solutions to problems, and so forth. For that ring of the bullseye, Facebook-like tools are very useful.

At the outer edge of the bullseye, where colleagues have no relationship other than that they work for the same company, a prediction market is a useful tool, that gathers people's guesses about the possibility of certain things happening like a certain sales volume being reached or likelihood an innovation will succeed in the marketplace and aggregating that information to get a better answer than any individual would come up with themselves.

He doesn't go overboard in terms of enthusiasm for how great these things are and how it'll change companies overnight, and he has a pretty clear-eyed view of how difficult it is going to be to bring these tools to wide use. It just takes a long time -and he dwells on that at some extent - how long it takes for revolutionary innovations to take hold, and he doesn't think this is any different, though he is optimistic that it'll happen eventually.

And finally in the book he talks about kind of different management models or practices that work well with these tools, and by contrast he talks about typical Model 1 behaviors which are more command-and-control type behaviors, self-protecting behaviors and less-collaborative behaviors, which don't go well with these new tools. To really utilize these new tools, people have to adopt what he calls Model 2 behaviors, which are collaborative, not so much focused on self-protection but looking out for the best interests of the company. Quite a different model than what most people have seen where they work. And I think that heaps underline the challenges in getting these systems adopted and in wide use.

It's an excellent book, very well-organized and well-written. It takes an important topic and brings it into the mainstream. I really enjoyed it and I think you will too.