Social Glass

I thought I’d condense information I’ve gathered about Enterprise 2.0 (much of it from Rod Boothby’s whitepaper video), into a thesis statement on Enterprise 2.0.  So here it goes:

In this day and age where competition is global and products and services are cheap due to the increasing economic potency of emerging markets, innovation is the only means through which organizations can remain competitive.  Price is no longer an area where organizations can hope to compete.  They must instead foster an environment that encourages innovation and produces a constant stream of innovative services and solutions.  Many executives believe that they are the innovators for their companies, but in reality the capacity for 1000’s of employees to come up with innovative ideas far outweighs that of 10 or so top-level executives.

Most organizations have failed to tap into one of their richest assets - the tacit knowledge of their workforce. There is often a large distance between formal procedural documentation and how work actually is done. Furthermore, divisions within large companies often fail to collaborate effectively because they don’t know who else within the organization has similar interests or is working on similar initiatives, or they can’t find the information they need and end up re-inventing the wheel.

Enterprise 2.0 - the state of the art in collaborative software modeled after Web 2.0 techniques and patterns - provides an ecosystem that encourages innovation, facilitates the capture of tacit data, and creates a spirit of collaboration due to the participatory and social nature of its 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.