Ross Dawson crafted an article to announce the coming release of a report of its own.  I don’t know where he is now in crafting his report, but the article displays a pretty simple approach to the topic. Here are some ideas to discuss and complement Ross’s text.

A - “Enterprise 2.0″ is and remains a trendy catching word no matter the precautions you might take. We have to accept it and take it for what it’s worth: it attracts attention of senior management who finally put the issue on the agenda. Management consulting thrives on catchy words that consultants use as much as they can and throw away as fast as they seized it when required. No personal attack, its how things go.

B - If like Ross you “Find the term Enterprise 2.0 highly meaningful because it is, in addition to tapping the value of Web 2.0 in a specific context, literally about creating the next version of the organization”, then you might fall in the same trap as Andrew McAfee fell … and it is no surprise is you find Carr’s thesis irrelevant or tweack the concept. What I call a trap there is reductionism. There is too much a focus on - or limitation to - technology. Andrew’s founding definition of “Enterprise 2.0″ is just about implementing web 2.0 tools behind the firewall and that is exactly how mainstream understands it. My experience is that no matter the blogs, wikis, social nets you implement, no matter how good you technically implement them, this is time and money wasted (except for IT Consultants of course) if behavior does not match. Culture is key. It might not be there in the beginning, but it has to be there when systems go live.
Personally, I use Enterprise 2.0 but prefer to talk about Enterprise Social Computing, because social computing = social + computing. A simple and powerful equation to get people know what we are dealing with. My former colleagues at Headshift are along the same lines.

C - Now, when it comes to tweaking the concept that is another story. “Creating the next version of the organization” is a management consulting role. So we have to be careful here and Ross particularly because he cannot disclaim a practice that he dives into. I refer to using a trendy word no matter you dislike “jargon”. “Enterprise 2.0″ is the current visible side of the iceberg. What we currently see emerging now and that is crafted under “Enterprise 2.0″ is a new wave of a larger trend that encompasses all business trends since quality management (I refer to the first initial wave back in the 50′). This trend is conceptually about deconstructing the model of organization Taylorists have settle as well as the model of management Chandler has contributed to craft and that is combined into Fordism. The trend is concretely to adapt production environments to the evolution of the economy (materiality & knowledge).

• Quality Management moved management away from organization-centrism and quantity to focus on the consumer and the quality of outputs.
• OD introduced this idea that to have great products, we need great people and that the organization has to work on it too (and not only the Universities or the Governments).
• Re-engineering implemented this idea that those who matters in the organization are operations people and not middle management (an invention of Fordists as Drucker has the opportunity to demonstrate).
• KM introduced this idea of improving the way we deal with knowledge (and not only data as IT people continue to do), even if so far most of initiatives deal with information and not knowledge.

What does Enterprise Social Computing do in this management picture?

Fundamentally, Enterprise Social Computing opens door to employee and consumer voice and centricity. FeedBack 2.0 is in this sense probably the quintessence of 2.0. Read Jon’s post about the FeedBack 2.0 implementation at SNCF.

Now this implies a variety of things:

1 - Enterprise social computing is helpful is building horizontal layers of communications and co-ordination - in addition to vertical hierarchical ones - to favor peer to peer interaction (and sometimes collaboration, but that’s a different story). Jon invented Wirearchy for that.

2 - As such, Enterprise social computing is helpful in materialising the information and knowledge interactions that happen around formalised processes. Those knowledge interactions were there in real life, but denied by promotors of a system reputed perfect per se and a priori. This created massive, systematic and costly organizational schizophrenia (that the current crisis might help purge). This materialisation process started with emails and document sharing and is now enriched, renewed and improved with social computing tools.

3 - Enterprise social computing in supporting work-related interaction supports information in context ie actionable knowledge. It consequently complements the work done by IT (data) and KM (information).

4 - Enterprise social computing implementation compels to dig into details of work to formalize it contextually, build the right set of features and provide additional value. In doing so it contributes to moving the organization from a standard  organizational type [and  questions the one-size-fits all model of giant software companies that too many]. Obviously, “Enterprise 2.0 will make companies less similar” as the long tail gets behind the firewall (as I already had the opportunity to write in some occasions). As soon as you get into the details, you get specifics. As an illustration, use Google Earth and head to Brasilia. From far above it looks like a bird or plane with perfect symmetry. That’s the architects vision, live. As soon as you get at a neighborhood level, you’ll find out that the master plan has been diverted by locals to make thinks appropriate to their way of living. And when you have the chance to walk in the city, the plan is just out of the picture. Organizations are similar because they are social places that consistently evolve in a more complex and faster way that any senior management can cope with. In a knowledge economy, the value is not scalability thru standardization of tools, but localized relevance of systems so that knowledge workers can be productive and efficient. Standardization is a critical factor of success as it lowers  the barriers to circulation, but not at the wrong place. What we need is information flow standards, not information tools standards as we just reproduced the irrelevant “Black T model” thing.

5 - Enterprise social computing is therefore directly impacting both the management rules and the organizational processes. This explains why it requires much more than communication specialists or IT specialists. This explains why it requires a strong senior management buying. This explains why it hardly happens and whenever it happens it fails most of the time. To make it happen we need this absolutely rare context where regular employees are mentally and politically in a position to question their way of doing things, find ways for local improvements yet related to the overall organization and where management is modest enough to facilitate rather than dictate. This calls for education, responsibility, empowerment and hermeneutics; this calls for increased intelligence everywhere. As you can see, this is a complete shift - a revolution - in the way most organizations are being organized and managed and a big gamble on the ability to execute.

I’m pretty busy right now entering my new job in Singapore so that links are not all there. If luckily you have time to dig a bit, you’ll find numerous ideas presented here more developed in some previous posts.