Book review

Implementing Enterprise 2.0: A Practical Guide To Creating Business Value Inside Organizations With Web Technologies

Review by Matthew Moore

Author: Ross Dawson
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 978-1441486905
Date: February 2009
Retail price: $195.00

Enterprise 2.0’ was the term coined in 2006, by Harvard Business School’s Andrew McAfee, to describe the use of consumer web-based tools such as blogs, wikis, RSS and social networking, inside organisations. The term has been used to refer both to the technologies themselves and the new organisational forms and activities that they are claimed to enable.

These tools are often perceived as supporting knowledge management (KM) efforts, but there has been some lively debate among KM practitioners as to whether they actually provide benefits. For some, they are the only afuture we have. For others, nothing more than a distraction. There is a need to move beyond puppy-eyed enthusiasm on one hand and cynicism on the other, which is where Implementing Enterprise 2.0 comes in.

This is a colourful and cleanly-designed report aimed at general managers without any particular experience with these technologies:

Section one outlines the basics of the challenges facing businesses, which make these tools look helpful;
Section two explains how to develop an Enterprise 2.0 strategy;
Section three deals with governance and policies.
Section four goes to on to look at the tools themselves – including the social software tool of the moment, Twitter (or microblogging);
Section five deals with business case development and getting buy-in;
Section six looks at the implications for the IT and HR groups within organisations; and
Section seven looks at some of the different providers of these tools – both open-source and commercial software tools.

The real value in here is in the sensible framework used to describe Enterprise 2.0 implementation and some of the associated templates and case studies. At the framework’s core are the principles ‘iterate and refine’, and the need for technology evangelists to work very closely with those in their businesses. Any Enterprise 2.0 project that fails to do this risks suffering the fate of many KM projects – where bright and shiny tools were ignored by users who had not been involved sufficiently in their scoping and development.

Public debate about Enterprise 2.0 is now focused around return on investment. Can we demonstrate that these tools offer benefits to organisations? These discussions mark the maturing of social software use inside the enterprise, but they are not proving easy to resolve. The report tackles this issue in a number of places. Again it takes a pragmatic approach in outlining how to create a business case and discusses other techniques that help, such as balanced scorecard and social-network analysis. It could have been helpful to get a little more detail here.

If there is a criticism to made of the report, it would be in the trade-off between overview and detail. I would have preferred a little less on the tools themselves and more on specific aspects of the framework. Ross Dawson’s two previous books, Living Networks and Developing Knowledge-based Client Relationships, were meatier in terms of content.

I have to declare an interest here. I am one of many people who think that KM and social software tools are made for each other. However, we’re still working out how to use these tools in our organisations and what the implications will be for the future of work. The more resources we have to help us, the better.

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