If there’s a big confusion around enterprise 2.0 it’s because of its perimeter, what  makes the concept very nebulous for novices and even for specialist who sometimes seem to disagree although hey are sayning the same thing in different ways.  The question is to know if 2.0 applied to business is about the whole business or only part of.

Let’s broach the issue under its two more common angles : philosophy and technology.

At the philosophy level we can consider thatthe 2.0 way can apply to the whole business. As a matter of fact, today’s businesses have to face a need for agility, have to get to grip with this worlds of informal interactions’ very nature and, whether they want it or not, have to improve the use of those informal flows in the say way they optimized material flows in the past. But let’s be true : as I and many others wrote, enterprise 2.0 is not web 2.0 and works on different basis. Levers that makes dynamics possible in one won’t operate in the other and vice versa. In brief, the point is to make the web’s brownian move business compliant. Understand that hierarchy is needed, that some walls have to be kept, and the purpose is business before all. A sort of Wirearchy or service oriented organization.

Nothing new bout all that, we’re only heading back old recipes in a new context : we’re close to Peter Drucker’s literature, of concepts like empowerment or participative managment, to what Bob Sutton explained in “The knowing Doing Gap”. Closer to us, Gary Hamel in “The future of management” didn’t say anything else.

The only thing that changes since Drucker early writins is that the world has really become what he predicted and that the knowledge worker he wrote about decades ago is now a reality even if businesses struggle to draw the right consequences, and that  a new generation of tools makes it possible to embrace this radically different context and the behaviors it implies.

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