By Rob Gray, Product and Marketing Manager - Google Enterprise
August 10, 2010 - 12:59 PM
When talking about Enterprise 2.0, I think we often focus too much on the technology that enables Enterprise 2.0 (such as internal blogging, social media etc.) rather than the actual business characteristics of Enterprise 2.0 and why businesses should care about this stuff.
For me it’s not about the technology itself - it's about Business Transformation.
Business is becoming more and more competitive, the economy is unpredictable and every week seems to bring along another curve ball that could affect your business.This means that organisations need to be faster to react to external pressures that are outside of their control, they need to outmanoeuvre the competition and be faster to market with their products and services. More often than not, this requires a different way of working. For example, most of us have an increasing need to work with people in other locations, in other companies, all of whom need to work together in order to get stuff done. The key requirements of Enterprise 2.0 technology is that it needs to enable this collaboration in an easy way, preferably without the need to first ask an IT team to help you. People in the business just want to work with others, without having to battle with technology to make that happen. Most good “enterprise 2.0” technologies will enable you to do this in an easy, seamless way. That’s the point of them. There is no shortage of such tools available for anyone in a business to use, but the level of expertise across an organisation usually varies so much, that actually driving adoption of these technologies requires some level of change. For some people it will be very natural but for others, any change is a big obstacle that needs to be overcome. If there is no change, then you probably aren’t doing anything sufficiently radical enough to really drive the transformation of the business.
Employees need to be willing to adopt a new way of working, technology/IT teams need to change their job role from that of managing infrastructure to one of understanding the business strategy and how technology can be used to drive that.
Actually getting people to change is another topic altogether, but the first step is realising that change is necessary, and being open to the possibility that it may be better to work in a different way. Easier said than done!
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