Enterprise 2.0 communities : size matters…openness too.

I wanted to come back on this interesting discussion that took place a few weeks ago on Andrew McAfee’s blog. It’s the answer to a pertinent article writen by  Oliver Young. Even if, at the start, the conversation started on a misunderstanding, it’s  the reflection of a more and more actual questionning. It’s to know if the impact of web 2.0 technologies is proportional to the enterprise’s size, if its rather a lever for large businesses or if it can also provide SMBs with the means to improve their competitiveness.

If we consider the key principes of enterprise 2.0 we can put forward without any risk of error that the potential pool of value is more important in large businesses than in SMBs, if only because the sum of individual benefits due to increased and more intense interactions is proportional to the number of employees. Nothing new since Metcalfe who taught us years ago that that value a of network was proportional to the number of users.

This does not mean that smaller business won’t find any benefit there. They will be able to find a benefit which is proportional to their size, what means the same as larger ones according to the scale. We can also put forward that it may help them to gain a competitive advantage toward larger businesses who don’t pay attention to the phenomenon.

But all this only makes sense if we consider that the scope of use of theses technologies is restricted to its the companie’s own borders.

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Toyota : a good example of SOO that reduces business risk

First a quick summary of the Service Oriented Organization concept (SOO) : it’s about giving employees the ability (ie tools and organization model) that allows them to bridge the gap between task they have been assignedJ and thoses that are actually required by their day to day job, assuming that organization reached such an optimum in verticality that deviations, that are more and more frequents) can’t be solved verticaly but by adhoc.

A good example comes from Toyota and its integrated suppliers system. This ecosystem is so optimized that expertises, skills, are often unique. What would happen if a factory, manufacturing a piece used on every vehicle, burn ?

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Extended company is multidimensional

networkingA reflection inspired by an article in the french newspaper “Le Figaro”…

I think you’r familiar with the concept of exented company. In simply supposes that a company is not only an entity by itself but makes up a whole with its surrounding. As an example it brings a company to cooperate more with its custumers or its suppliers in order to embetter its products, stick to the market, be more reactive, anticipate… and at the end be more efficient and increase its profitability.

I’d qualifiy this side of the extended company as a “spatial side”. The article was about the importance of alumni’s network for companies and made me realize there was another dimension we often forget: the temporal side.

As a matter of fact we all know that making a company behave as a community is a guarantee of performance. We also know how networks are important to make opportunities happen. What we neglect so often is the importance of the community of people who are not in the company anymore but who are still important for it.

Perharps they may come back for a new challenge, they know people the company can hire (so it lowers recruitments costs), their experience is still valuable, they can become customers or suppliers…

When we consider a company we should integrate those people in the human capital component because they still are ressources, not the way they were before, but they still are. And when we talk about the network of the extended company we should not only consider the spatial dimension but also the temporal one, taking in account what the “ex” can give.