Andrew McAfee makes another great contribution to the discussion on the Enterprise 2.0 concept through his post titled Enterprise 2.0 Inclusionists and Deletionists. He makes a good argument for his original fairly strict and simple definition of Enterprise 2.0 software.
The following is his definition:
"Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.
Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities. (Wikipedia's definition).
Platforms are digital environments in which contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time.
Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people's interactions become visible over time.
Freeform means that the software is most or all of the following:
- Optional
- Free of up-front workflow
- Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities
- Accepting of many types of data"
To me the most interesting parts of his definition are the elements under his Freeform attribute because, as he made clear, those are the elements that make the software emergent.
Even though I find his definition compelling I might use it a bit differently.
I believe that software that matches his definition will become popular in the enterprise but as with any new technology there will be a transitional period and many applications will be transitional applications.
In much the same way the web standards have evolved from the crude HTML hacks of the 90’s on its way to web standards and the semantic web, we are in for a long period of coexistence with traditional enterprise applications, transitional applications and pure Enterprise 2.0 applications.
I find Andrews’s definition to be effective even though I don’t believe it will be possible to say that an application inherently meets that definition out of the box. There will certainly be applications that can be deployed in either an Enterprise 2.0 mode or a traditional mode or a transitional mode and enterprises will find a way to deploy even the purist Enterprise 2.0 web software in a way that’s not optional or egalitarian. So if you wanted to “certify” an application as Enterprise 2.0 you’d have to look at the implementation to decide whether it was Enterprise 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 Transitional or not Enterprise 2.0 at all.
And I have to comment on a statement he makes at the end of his article:
And one piece of free advice: Don't use '2.0' as part of any new term; people seem to be getting tired of it very quickly.
I know were he’s coming from on this and I’ve thought the same thing a couple of times but to be honest I’m getting tired of people talking about how they're tired of everything 2.0. Give me a break. The vast majority of people in the world have never heard the term in any context so it seems a bit ahead of the curve to get tired of something no one to speak of has even heard of.
Obviously technology and our perception of how to use it is changing all the time and the label 2.0 is just a term that some people interested in these topics find useful in discussing the next cycle of innovation. If you don’t like it or don’t find it useful it actually seems like it must be pretty easy to ignore since more than 99.99 percent of the people in the world are ignoring it right now.
