Social Glass

Update: I’ve had to change the name of this post to use “and” as it seems RSS is not tolerant of special characters.
I’ve intertwined discussion around the value proposition of Enterprise 2.0 in several posts (like here and here), and thought it fitting to be clearer and more direct about areas in which Enterprise 2.0 adds value to the enterprise. I read a lot of blogs on the topic, and while we spend a lot of time covering its theoretical aspects it’s important not to forget that “Enterprise 2.0″ is intended for enterprises, and most enterprises exist to make money. In my view, then, Enterprise 2.0 will take off once:

1. A few brave and cutting edge enterprises incorporate social software into their intranet (at reduced consulting rates since they’re the first) and we begin to establish emperical “quals” (i.e. a list of companies that have done this already).
2. These early adopters show definitive gains in profitability (+$) that can be linked to their Enterprise 2.0 implementation.

At this point I think we’re waiting for the early adopters to take shape, so over the next few months I’ll be covering reasons why they should consider Enterprise 2.0.

Mergers and Acquisitions

I recently had dinner with a couple of friends of mine who are lawyers in the Mergers and Acquisitions space here in Australia. We discussed reasons why one company would seek to buy another, or why a company would wish to be sold. A lot of the reasons had to do with assets and liabilities, but some of them had to do with intellectual property.

A successful Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem augments the intellectual property of an organisation by harnessing the tacit knowledge of its workforce through a writable intranet. The augmentation is enhanced when an effective Discovery mechanism is put in place making intellectual property easy to find.

Based on this, a company seeking to be purchased would significantly benefit from having implemented an Enterprise 2.0 solution. It’s intellectual property would be tangible, content-rich and verifiable. And this means less risk for a potential buyer when the acquisition of intellectual property is a primary driver.