Connected Knowledge

Book Review:
Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges

Andrew McAfee
Harvard Business School Press, 2009
ISBN-10: 1422125874, ISBN-13: 978-1422125878

In 2003 publisher Tim O’Reilly began using the term “Web 2.0” to describe the emergence of the “participatory web.”  Blogs, Wikis, reviews and recommendations were turning passive consumers into active contributors.  O’Reilly sponsored a conference around the concept and a buzzword was born.  For the past couple of years, MIT’s Andrew McAfee has been championing the use of these tools behind the firewall as a means to foster innovation and efficiency within organizations.  McAfee has summarized his research into the participatory enterprise in his new book Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges.

Enterprise 2.0 isn’t yet a full-fledge buzzword, but it’s getting there.  Enterprise social computing platforms are all the rage (there’s even an Enterprise 2.0 Conference) and vendors like SocialText, Jive and even Microsoft have rushed new platforms to market that promise to usher in a new age of openness and collaboration for even the stodgiest of corporations. A lot of organizations are drinking the Kool-Aid and rolling out these tools without much thought as to what they hope to accomplish, much less how Web 2.0 will help. This was the fatal flaw of the knowledge management frenzy of the 90s.  Too much emphasis was placed on tools and technology and too little on the people they were supposed to benefit.  This point is not lost on McAfee.  It is in fact the central premise of his outstanding book.

Enterprise 2.0 is not primarily a technological phenomenon.  … The appearance of these novel tools is a necessary but not sufficient condition for allowing new modes of interaction, collaboration, and innovation. … the mechanisms of emergence are organizational and managerial, rather than purely technical.  In other words, leaders can’t simply assume that healthy communities will self-organize and act in a coherent and productive manner after Web 2.0 tools are deployed.

Throughout the book, McAfee uses case studies of organizations such as  Google, Serena Software, VistaPrint and the US Intelligence Community, to demonstrate the central concepts of Enterprise 2.0, their benefits and pitfalls and how best to approach their adoption. He defines Enterprise 2.0 as “the use of emergent social software platforms by organizations in pursuit of their goals.” These Emergent Social Software Platforms (ESSP) encompass all of the tools making up Web 2.0, but the concept goes beyond a roster of applications and services.

Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer mediated communication and to form online communities.  Platforms…are digital environments in which contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time.   Emergent means that the software is freeform and contains mechanisms like links and tags to let the patterns and structure inherent in people’s interactions become visible over time.

Since any new paradigm is only as good as the number of catchy acronyms it fosters, McAfee organizes the six most common technical features of these tools under the sobriquet SLATES (Search, Links, Authoring, Tagging, Extensions, Signals). The first four of these features are by now familiar to most people on the web, but the terms Extensions and Signals may not resonate immediately, even though we likely use them daily.  Extensions are the semi-automated classifications and recommendations that drive the “you may also like” features of  Amazon.com, Netflix and StumbleUpon.com.  (ie.  “If you liked this, then by extension you would like this.”)  Signals are simply notifications of new content such as RSS feeds and SharePoint alerts.  While this list of characteristics provides a useful framework for the discussion of Enterprise 2.0  the real value of McAfee’s work is his analysis of how they can be used to achieve an organization’s goals.

Central to McAfee’s conception of ESSPs and the connected enterprise is the concept of tie strength as first articulated in Mark Granovetter’s 1973 study “The Strength of Weak Ties”  (SWT).  I discussed SWT briefly in an earlier post, but in a nutshell tie strength refers to the different levels of relationships we maintain in both our personal and professional lives. These range from close friends (strong ties) to casual acquaintances (weak ties).  McAfee also accounts for those people who would be valuable associates if only we knew about them.  Taken together these various types of interpersonal relationships form the “Enterprise 2.0 Bull’s-Eye”.

Most enterprises attempting to promote collaboration focus on teams, usually through providing new tools or sponsoring rope-climbing retreats.  The idea has always been to build tight-knit groups; to reinforce strong ties.  McAfee argues that while these relationships are critical and should be supported, say through the adoption of collaborative authoring environments, weak ties should not be neglected.  The problem is that everyone in a tight-knit group already knows everyone else.  It is far less likely that all my close friends or teammates (strong ties) have relationships with my casual acquaintances (weak ties) the people on the outer-edge of my social network.  Even though my association with these folk of the fringe is tenuous, those relationships provides a link between my core group and others that might not otherwise be available. “Strong ties are unlikely to  be bridges between networks,” McAffee says. “Weak ties are good bridges”  He goes on to cite Granovetter.

The weak tie between [a person] and his acquaintance, therefore, becomes not merely a trivial acquaintance tie but rather a crucial bridge between the two densely knit clumps of close friends…these clumps would not, in fact be connected to one another at all were it not for the existence of weak ties. …  social systems lacking in weak ties will be fragmented and incoherent.  New ideas will spread slowly, scientific endeavors will be handicapped, and subgroups separated by … geography or other characteristics will have difficulty reaching a modus vivendi.

McAfee also draws on the work of anthropologist Robin Dunbar to bolster his claims about the corporate value of social computing.  According to Dunbar the theoretical maximum social group size for humans is between 100 and 230 people, probably settling at around 150.

The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us.  Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.

By reducing the time and effort it takes to keep track of other people’s activities, both personal and professional, social computing platforms have the potential to dramatically increase the number of people with whom you can have a social relationship, in essence increasing your memory capacity for potentially valuable contacts. Organizations which are too focused on strong ties fail to see the value of these “low-density” networks.  As a result, the platforms that nurture and sustain them, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, are viewed with suspicion and are generally considered an unprofitable time-suck for their staff.  McAfee’s case studies give some excellent counter examples, such as Serena Software’s decision to move their entire corporate Intranet to Facebook and bring in the staff’s teenage children to train employees on “Facebook Fridays.”

Organizations often attempt to tap into the third ring of McAfee’s bull’s-eye by creating elaborate, centralized expertise directories.  My experience with such directories has always been that they are extremely difficult to initially populate and even harder to maintain.  As a result, their utility drops off quickly after launch, unless people can be induced to take ownership of their own profiles and keep them up to date on their own initiative.  That is not to say they are not a worthwhile endeavor, but McAfee highlights some interesting alternatives (or at least supplements) that may already be in place, such as document repositories, but that are underutilized.  McAfee demonstrates the successful conversion of potential ties into productive collaborations in both the Google and US Intelligent Community case studies and elaborates on those efforts throughout the book.

The introduction of many of these tools may seem to be old-hat to many readers, but it is a necessary level-setting for the broad readership to which the book seems targeted.  McAfee’s tool overviews are effective and engaging.  They provide all the orientation necessary for newcomers while still treating veterans to fresh insights.  This is important as the real value of the book is found in Part II: Succeeding With Enterprise 2.0. In these final three chapters, McAfee addresses the standard objections to adopting Web 2.0 tools (Won’t staff just use it to gossip? What if somebody says something bad about our company?  Doesn’t this expose us legally?) A long list of objections is presented and while the risks can’t necessarily eliminated, they can generally be adequately mitigated.  On balance, the benefits more than counterbalance the cost. McAffee sums up his advice by saying, “For most organizations, in fact, I believe that these benefits outweigh all the risks.”

Chapter seven lays out a roadmap for succeeding with Enterprise 2.0.  McAfee is quick to point out that successfully adopting these technologies and techniques “can’t be reduced to a single step-by-step recipe.”  Rather he offers recommended steps and a few warnings.  First and foremost is managing your own expectations of how quickly or fully people will embrace a new way of working even if it does make their lives easier.  A new tool or process needs to provide at least a ten-fold improvement over the status-quo in order to be accepted. McAfee cites the research of Harvard Marketing professor John Gourville to support this assertion.

Many products fail because of a universal, but largely ignored, psychological bias: People irrationally overvalue benefits they currently possess relative to those they don’t. … [This] leads to a clash in perspectives: Executives, who irrationally overvalue their innovations, must predict the buying behavior of consumers, who irrationally overvalue existing alternatives.  The results are often disastrous: Consumers reject new products that would make them better off, while executives are at a loss to anticipate failure.  This double-edged sword is the curse of innovation.

McAfee advises a go-slow approach with a “long haul view.” Determining what you are trying to accomplish in advance of deploying tools is critical, as is reconciling yourself to the fact that the benefits will likely take quite some time to fully realize.  Even when those benefits do materialize they may difficult to quantify.  McAfee advises against attempting to calculate a Return On Investment for Enterprise 2.0 initiatives.  It is much more important to measure progress.  As he says “these [initiatives] require sustained management attention, not just a periodic contest among business cases in which the highest ROI figure wins.”  As I prepare my budget and capital funding requests for the coming year, I will be be passing this book along to both my superiors and subordinates with this passage underlined.

Purchase Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges at Amazon.