According to Wikipedia (!), a couple of guys Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen defined Enterprise 2.0 as:
the use of “web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise”.
Perhaps it could be simpler, something like:
Enterprise 2.0 is the harnessing of social web platforms and behaviours to improve how the people in big organisations manage and communicate within themselves.
But I hope you get the gist (if you’re not already ahead of me on this :).
So to me, Enterprise 2.0 is utterly irresistable – it cannot be resisted. And it feels incredibly simple and right.
Not everyone sees it so simply. The trigger for writing this was a brief conversation on Twitter between Euan Semple and Alan Patrick, two solid smart thinkers and doers, that I joined in with. As you can see, Alan summarises his (and many others) reticence as:
“thats what I’m grappling with re E2.0 – given its all been known for so long, why will things change now?
Here’s the conversation (read it from the bottom up!):
You can see that my input is flippant, naive, lacking in proof. But it is bourne out of an unshakeable conviction I have, based on what I see everyday in our work with some of the biggest organisations in the UK.
They are changing towards an Enterprise 2.0 tinted-future (often whether they like it or not).
In my opinion no organisation can resist the influence of the social web as a driver of change upon its internal management, structure and communication, just as – regardless of the thickness of its skin or the stubborness of its culture – it cannot resist how the internet has evolved and disrupted its external environment and how it now needs to engage with the outside world.
Here’s why:
- People’s information and media consumption, behaviours and therefore expectations are rapidly evolving
- We all bring Social to work – people are both consumers/buyers and employees and don’t stop being themselves when they get to work
- Global competition is ever-fiercer
1. People’s information and media consumption, behaviours and therefore expectations are rapidly evolving
For a selection of loosely related mini-trends in how we’re all adjusting, see variously:
2. We all bring Social to work – people are both consumers/buyers and employees and don’t stop being themselves when they get to work
This distinction between inside the ‘enterprise’ and outside the organisations we work in is both useful and not useful. Yes, there are big, vital differences. But one of the constants is us, the people. (By the way, in my opinion the distinction between B2C and B2B is also helpful and (increasingly) not helpful – they are all people, just with different hats on and found in different decision-making settings – the family, the procurement team – but fundamentally people all, exposed to the same changing media landscape).
Increasingly the clients we work with at NixonMcInnes (who are pioneers in their organisations and industries) are finding their efforts welcomed internally in unexpected quarters, because the internal environment, the staff and people that make up their businesses, are catching up.
So businesses may find themselves turned inside out if they try to resist. It is happening – like it or not. Employees are choosing their hardware, publishing information outside of the firewall, formal control is melting away.
Although the definitions above, both the formal and my own plain English attempt, describe Enterprise 2.0 as about tools and stuff, the codeword ‘Enterprise 2.0′ actually means something much bigger and broader (and more exciting) to me.
The magical bit of Enterprise 2.0 is not the systems and platforms, but what they mean for the people, the organisational DNA, the culture.
3. Global competition is ever-fiercer
So combine the above two ingredients, and marinade them in an increasingly ruthlessly competitive global marketplace, and I think you’ve got change or die.
Thanks to the growing supply of competitors for many companies it’s getting harder and harder to win business – margins are being eroded by offshore lower cost alternatives, services are being commoditised by technology. The internet demands instaneous responses to market changes, news, customer service issues. This exacts Darwinian forces on the business community. How quickly an organisation can discover, understand and repond to these forces will determine its future.
To win, the modern Enterprise must act fast. To act fast, it needs to smooth and connect up the conduits and flows within itself. That’s what Enterprise 2.0 is to me.
See:
(As a side note, given this context and the persistence of the ‘how to measure social media’ meme, I wonder what’s the ROI on not dying?)
So that’s my opinion. It is happening. And it is utterly irresistable.
I’d always be interesting in thoughts and challenges to this in the comments (or elsewhere on the web!).
Will McInnes wrote this on 12.01.10 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Employee engagement, Enterprise 2.0, NixonMcInnes, Social media, Strategy box
As Will mentioned earlier, NixonMcInnes have hired a new helicopter commander which means that my reign as new boy (a title shared of course with the lovely Leesa), is soon to end. With this in mind, and armed with my shiny new profile shots (thanks Garage Studios), I wanted to record my thoughts on my first four months, and perhaps give our new starter an idea of what to expect. Read more…
Ross wrote this on 01.10.09 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Democracy, Employee engagement, NixonMcInnes, Recruitment box
Just a short note to say that we’ve filled the vacancy that was advertised as the Social Media Helicopter Commander role.
We feel it was our most rigorous hiring process yet, and there were some really excellent evolutions to how we hire, further emphasising our desire to give people opportunities to directly prove their skills, problem-solving approaches and characteristics rather than talk about them in a traditional interview stylee.
But there were things we learnt and can get much better at. And it was hard work for us and for the potential team mates that got involved in the assessments.
About 80% of our team were also involved directly in some way in the hiring (by directly, I mean more than saying hello or making the tea!), in keeping with our belief of the benefits and power of democratic business practices.
As is our way, our new team mate will introduce themselves sometime soon after they start :)
Until then all I can say is that their career has been working in PR in the media, technology and consumer sectors, and we’re delighted that they’ll be bringing those experiences and skills to bear in their work with NixonMcInnes’ clients.
We also met some seriously talented other interested and interesting people; people who made that final decision very very tough, and people we’re hoping we can work with soon.
Thank you to anyone who got involved or retweeted the original blurb.
Will McInnes wrote this on – 1 comment
It's filed in the Brighton, Democracy, Employee engagement, Recruitment box
During the past few weeks at NixonMcInnes we’ve made some changes to the team, and I wanted to describe why and how, in as open a fashion as possible whilst still being sensitive to people’s feelings.
A little while ago it became clear to us as a management team that we had to take a step back and think about the shape of our company going forward and probably then make some tough decisions. We had to ensure that the shape of team fitted the workload we have currently as well as being well set up for our future vision for NixonMcInnes and our clients.
In particular the things driving this were:
- The blend of work we are being asked to do by the market
- The capabilities we feel we must have in house and those that we concluded were not absolutely essential
- A necessity to grow a higher ratio of fee earners to support staff
This is because unlike many of our peers, we are not a new business. The company is in it’s ninth year of trading! We started at the very bottom of the foodchain, originally as a regional web design agency doing web stuff. So whilst longevity in business is generally thought to be a good thing, it has meant that we have had to evolve, and rapidly in more recent times. And change isn’t always easy.
Back in the day the very first book thrust into my hands when Tom and I teamed up was The Cluetrain Manifesto, a book that exactly described the future of the web and that we understood, believed and bought into from the very off. So although our clients were mainly interested in ‘getting a website designed’ or ‘doing some email marketing’ our interest has always been in the human and social aspects to the web. But we were patient.
During our time as a generalist digital agency we grew a signficant in-house high quality web development team. I don’t say that as hype: we carefully hired discipline experts rather than website all-rounders and eventually ended up with two or three specialists in each of the major web design and development areas: designers, front end developers, back end developers and producers. That was our whole team – our design and build team.
When we saw how the client community was finally readying for the social web our moment had arrived and we weren’t going to let it pass us by – we capitalised. I reckon our timing was excellent. We made significant investments in creating the market, through speaking, training, product and service development, internal learning, industry collaborating.
And during the past 18 months we have massively evolved and changed to reflect this.
Today we’re able to offer a tried-and-tested stack of services that go from the start of a client’s journey – with training, strategy development, research, all the way through to full design and build together with online pr and social media marketing – and now find the balance of services we provide weighted roughly 50/50 between ‘consultancy’ and ‘design and build’. Our consulting team has been steadily growing, matching the growing scale of our consulting work.
Importantly, demand for our consulting services is significant and steady whereas demand for our design and build serivices is much more variable and lumpy – that is, it comes in big peaks and troughs which makes planning and resourcing a challenge.
The blend isn’t showing signs of staying at a 50/50 split. So our plan is to retain our expert social web-flavoured design and build capability – which allows us to actually execute and deliver against strategies, and create the vital hubs and platforms for conversations – but to grow our consulting team in line with the demand we get for those services (which is lots, and growing rapidly).
So as a management team we agreed to make some changes to the team shape and structure to reflect all of this. I say management team which sounds grandiose and besuited, but actually in keeping with our particular culture and approach to business it was our board members (only one of whom is non-exec - so all normal people, active and on the ground) plus two ‘guest seats’ – two of the guys from the team that aren’t part of the regular board, to give us fresh perspectives, balance, reality, sanity and diversity.
So that ‘make some changes’ is the tough bit: as a group we ultimately decided that two positions from the design and build team were to be made redundant with a further person in that team going from full-time to part-time. And our full time marketing position was also made redundant to reflect our emphasis on existing clients and existing external relationships (eg with journalists, collaborators, event organsiers etc). So I guess a change of 3.5 people.
It was very hard on everyone in a tight-knit team where the culture is transparent and inclusive. We tried to be dignified and sensitive and above all to ensure that our business decisions didn’t irreversibly damage our team ethos and trust. Even so I’d say it was a pretty shitty couple of weeks.
Having made the changes, we now move forward confidently.
We are working in increasingly long-term client engagements, we are winning lots of exciting new business, we are clearer and more confident about what we do and we feel we took the difficult but vital decisions we had too.
So that’s us, warts ‘n’ all.
The future? I’m sure there will be change. As a consultancy operating in such a mentally-fast-changing world as ours, we know our areas of interest and practice will constantly evolve.
And as and when we change we will try to talk about it openly – for better or for worse.
Thanks for listening.
Will McInnes wrote this on 04.09.09 – 4 comments
It's filed in the Democracy, Employee engagement, NixonMcInnes box
I stumbled across this article from the Management Issues website which discusses a report from the consultancy Watson Wyatt, which argues that employers are missing a trick by trying to clamp down on the use of social media in the workplace. Michael Rudnick, global intranet and portal leader at Watson Wyatt who writes the report, suggests
“..employers that avoid social media altogether are missing an important opportunity and running the risk of alienating Generation X-ers and Millennials. Embracing the technology with proper planning, guidelines and change management for its use are effective approaches to ensuring success”
Instead of restricting Generation X employees from using tools they are familiar with, engaged in and enjoy using, it discusses how social media can be used to fulfil the important internal communication objective of engaging employees.
The article touches upon ways that employers can use social media to communicate information & memos to employees, and also encouraging them to participate in company-wide discussion through the use of blogs, blog feedback, wikis, podcasts and so on.
Great idea. Read more…
Anna wrote this on 19.03.08 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Business, Employee engagement, Social media, Strategy box
