Enterprise 2.0: Predicting the end of "business as usual"

The way we work is changing rapidly, offering an enormous competitive advantage to those who embrace the new tools that enable contextual, agile and simplified information exchange and collaboration to distributed workforces, customers and partner networks.

Simple, collaborative technologies, such as wikis, blogs, social tagging or group messaging, are not just for consumers, but can, if a company is making long-term commitments in the Enterprise 2.0 area, drastically improve creativity, productivity, collaboration and visibility within the organisation.

While not everyone will necessarily agree that the impact of Enterprise 2.0 will be as disruptive as pioneers believe, many do expect dramatic take up of such technologies.

McAfee, the high-profile Harvard University associate professor who is now both researching and spearheading the new phenomenon that has become known as Enterprise 2.0, has coined the acronym SLATES to describe the six components of an Enterprise 2.0 technology: Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions and Signals. In practice, this means company employees or business partners can create a “loose body” of knowledge, using simple authoring tools. This content can be easily searched and authors can readily create navigational links & pointers and can tag any piece of information to help themselves or others retrieve it easily. They can make ‘extensions’ – for example, by saying, “if you found this useful, then you might also want to see this”. They can also send out signals when something is interesting – for example, with an RSS feed.

While Enterprise 2.0 clearly has the potential to improve business efficiency, communication and encourage innovation and problem solving, there may be concerns over security, confidentiality and in some countries cultural and legal issues.

Let’s first meet Charlie for a great presentation of what Enterprise 2.0 is all about!

So how disruptive will Enterprise 2.0 be?