Will 2.0 learn the enterprise ?

As I wrote in a previous post, all the required conditions are gathered for serious things to begin. Most of times, when a new phenomenon emerges, it goes through the following steps : ecstasy and disorganised intiatives even if brings no benefits, rejection because nothing good has been done at the previous step and then wise and efficient use.

Knowing that one of the economic downturn positive effect, in an enterprise 2.0 perspective, is that it means the end of the first step and will dramatically reduce the length of the second one. As a matter of mact, as I wrote here, companies will have to focus on efficiency and business and do what’s needed regardless to how it’s called.

Maybe some people will found it disappointing but I’ve always noticed that the more interesting contributions on enterprise 2.0 were not from the 2.0 world but from business, organization, management or HR professionals, although there are some excpetions. Nothing but logic because, by definition, the ones are trying to find a room for tools where the others try to improve the way organizations work and, one day, consider some tools may be useful to support their approach. Happily, both always meet at the end.

Now, where is all the stuff bringing us ?

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Web 2.0 : a more realistic systemic approach

This could have passed unnoticed. In a post about Dell an the fact their online shop was more 2.0 than their ideagora Ideastorm, Tim O’Reilly made his definition of web 2.0 seriously evolve from the original one.

For your information, here his the “original” defintion as it can be found on wikipedia today.

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.

A visionnary definition that was victim of the too many interpretations it allowed and gave rise to techno-centric trends. If the web’s flexibility made it possible to get out of that, adapting the definition to the enterprise’s world, aka enterprise 2.0, which was something like “using blog and wikis within the enterprise” did more harm than good to the E2.0 concept, even if Andrew McAfee refind the termis of its definition from the use of web 2.0 tools within the enterprise to the use of emergent social tools within the enterprise and with clients and partners as I noticed in Montreal in may.

In brief, O’Reilly introduced a major evolution of its vision. Even if I often find discussions about definitions more funny than useful, what this one implies deserves that we have a closer look at it.

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