Social Glass

Andrew McAfee, Dion Hinchliffe and Rod Boothby have been fundamental in shaping my understanding of Enterprise 2.0 (I particulaly like Dion’s diagrams). McAfee’s SLATES (Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions, Signals) approach outlines fundamental elements that must be present in an Enterprise 2.0 solution. I would also include Social Networking as a vital feature of Enterprise 2.0. Enterprises are constituted by people, and people are inherently social, and although the SLATES approach is socially oriented, Social Networking applications (i.e. myspace.com, facebook.com) are explicit in their goal of linking people together.

McAfee shows that increased efficiency is the principal business benefit gained from Enterprise 2.0. Rod Boothby, on the other hand, holds that the fostering of an environment that encourages innovation is the chief value proposition.

I think both are correct and I’d phrase the Enterprise 2.0 value proposition like this:

Enterprise 2.0 provides an environment that encourages innovation, facilitates the capture of tacit data, and creates a spirit of collaboration due to the participatory and social nature of said technologies. This allows enterprises to become more efficient due to increased sharing and discovery of knowledge, and helps enterprises maintain competitive advantage by fostering innovation from within.

In a very abstract sense, an Enterprise 2.0 solution must facilitate two fundamental capabilities so that the value proposition may be realized, Discovery and Collaboration:

We can then apply the SLATES methodology to this model to understand where the components fit. Discovery is about more than finding content (i.e. enterprise search), it’s also about finding people. Knowledge workers must have a means to discover other knowledge workers with interesting skills and experiences laterally. After discovery, after knowledge workers have found interesting content and have found individuals, collaboration happens. Knowledge workers create a social network with their newfound colleagues and bounce ideas off each other through wikis and blogs. With discovery and collaboration in place, enterprises can achieve increased efficiency and have fostered an environment in which its employees can innovate.