Taking the Lead in Enterprise 2.0
Continued
Singh: So Enterprise 2.0 is potentially a game changer, not just a set of new technologies that will make people work better?
McAfee: I think it has the potential to be a substantial differentiator. If we’re being honest, we have to admit that it’s still early days for this trend. We don’t know how easy it’s going to be to deploy these technologies. We don’t know how deeply they’re going to penetrate organizations. We’re not exactly clear on the magnitude of the benefits that we’re going to get from them. I’m optimistic that companies who do succeed in deploying the new 2.0 kit are going to realize substantial benefit, and that they’re going to get a leg up on their competition.
Singh: What types of companies have been able to adopt this technology most effectively?
McAfee: To no one’s surprise, technology companies are heavy adopters of these tools. Those companies are populated by technologists and technology enthusiasts. But one of the things that I find really surprising is that I see the use of these tools cropping up in all kinds of companies that I wouldn’t have predicted. Old-line industrial companies, big, small, public, private—it comes down to the leadership of the company and how enthusiastic they are about turning on the new modes of collaboration and innovation.
Singh: What are some of the biggest barriers that are keeping companies from deploying these technologies?
McAfee: We need to make Enterprise 2.0 technologies very, very easy to use if they’re going to have any chance of succeeding. That’s essentially because they’re displacing an existing technology for collaboration, which is e-mail. It’s used by basically 100 percent of knowledge workers. They need to be convinced or to find reasons to walk away from doing all of their collaboration via e-mail and move to Enterprise 2.0 platforms. There is also a huge range of cultural factors that are going to come into play here. One is what I call the 'culture of busyness,’ which is, if you’re not doing your assigned job all day every day, are people going to look at you funny? Is that going to be potentially a bad thing for your human capital and your career, as opposed to spending some portion of your day blogging about your opinions, or blogging about what you’ve learned, or contributing to your equivalent of an enterprise user profile, or commenting on a spec that’s up on a wiki? Is that looked upon as a positive thing in your company’s culture?
Singh: What role do you see providers of enterprise solutions around technology or business applications, such as Oracle, playing in this world of Enterprise 2.0?
McAfee: This is one of the really interesting areas for a company like Oracle, because Oracle has been so successful for so long at deploying very structured technologies. They bring new workflows to organizations. They impose new workflows on organizations. They assign users into roles. They bring a lot of structure to organizations and to generating huge amounts of very structured data. There is no structured equivalent on the Web. It’s a very unstructured place. The enterprise environment, the legacy environment, is very different. The massive opportunity is to bridge the structured world of collaboration and data gathering with the unstructured world of collaboration and data gathering. Enterprise vendors like Oracle might be very well positioned to succeed at bridging that gap.
For More Information
Oracle WebCenter and Web 2.0 forum
Oracle E-Business Suite
JD Edwards World
Andrew McAfee has spoken and written extensively about Enterprise 2.0. Since joining the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School in 1998, Professor McAfee has studied how managers can most effectively select, implement, and use information technology to achieve business goals. To participate in the ongoing discussion of Enterprise 2.0 and to read Professor McAfee’s blog, go to
blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee.
Sonny Singh is senior vice president of Oracle’s Products and Industries Business Unit, which includes the applications, technology, and industry global business units. Each business unit is responsible for defining and driving Oracle’s go-to-market strategy and delivering domain expertise and business value to all customer interactions. Over an 18-year tenure at Oracle, Singh has held various leadership positions in Oracle’s field organizations.
