Another memory from the Intracom Conference, when talking about intranet 2.0 adoption, the role of those intranets on efficiency and colaboration and potential barriers…
If web 2.0 can be defined by uses, would it be possible to be 2.0 without web ?
And my answer is : yes but…not everywhere and not too long.
Step back in history…and consider ancient Greece agoras. A place where people gather and exchange, allowing direct and participative democraty. In fact it doesn’t rely on many things : the presence at a unique place and moment of all city life’s stakeholders, information sharing with a fluid circulation, a community of interest founding some trust. Finally, aren’t those the daily and practical goals that enterprises try to achieve when going 2.0 ?
To make in short, this sole example is the proof thats it’s possible to be 2.0 without being web.
Of course, you’ll answer me no enterprise wants to end like the Greek civilization. That when the web comes…
It’s easy to understand those uses can take place only in a restricted context, with a restricted community, in an unique place where you can gather all the people…the way the city was run couldn’t be replicated at the empire scale. I let specialists say how important it was in Greek civilization’s decline but I think it played its part.
Within the enterprise, you can find 2.0 rules that make web useless. In a very small company, in a part of a big company’s department for example. That’s to say at a very small scale, where people spend their time together, know each other, and can exchange together very often.
Enterprises face a big challenge as soon as they want to free themselves from constraints due to the size of its population, distance, asynchronous presence of people… that’s to say what others didn’t succeed to resolve centuries ago.
But, as you can guess, being 2.0 without web has no sense for an organization that wants to improve its agility despite its size and its splitted structure and that, at the era of knowledge economy must precisely turn knowledge into a performance lever.
Because the only place where XXIth century enterprise’s agora can be is its intranet.
