Great Enterprise 2.0 post
I have seen the shift in Technology and believe in the move toward an open, collaborative adoption of applications in the Enterprise. I have followed this topic in the blogosphere and shared my thoughts on many occasions.
There has been a lot written and communicated about Enterprise 2.0, however, I came across as an exceptional post on the subject that I wanted to share with you. The post called What is Enterprise 2.0 was written by Fred Cavazza, a French Technologist with a passion for change in the enterprise. This is a good starting point for folks looking to explore Enterprise 2.0, a great reference point for the Enterprise 2.0 work that has already started, as well as a great reference point for Enterprise 2.0 applications and strategies that we can start adopting now.
I have included some of Fred's thoughts and examples below, but I would urge you to read the complete post and visit the many reference links embedded within the post. I really enjoyed browsing thru the many Web 2.0 - Enterprise 2.0 tools and applications that will become the foundation for computing in the future.
Fred Cavazza - What is Enterprise 2.0:
"Enterprise 2.0 is above all about sharing and collaboration"
"real benefits of Enterprise 2.0 will only come from a renewed IT architecture"Enterprise 2.0 is above all about sharing and collaboration. Launching a blog, a wiki or an online workspace without anticipating collaborators' adhesion is a pure waste of time and money. The biggest mistake is to under-estimate habits' weight and change reticences. Information (the one and only) is a very rare commodity and collaborators are fighting hard for it. They stock it in files which are jealously protected by password and non-shared directory.
Working in wiki-mode, sharing know-how and experience on a blog are counterintuitive ways of working, the opposite of what we hardly learn in the enterprise "jungle": being seen by your managers as indispensable to the functioning of the enterprise. This was to date the most reliable way to advance in hierarchy and to collect end-year bonus.
But the (business) world as changed: Chinese competitors can now produce goods for 1/10th of your price and Indian competitors can provide services for 1/5th of your price. Moreover, this is only the beginning since those two countries are facing similar low-cost labor work competition (Philippine for China and Sri-Lanka for India). Conclusion: To maintain competitiveness, we must change our working habits, methods and tools. The main objective is to enhance business-critical information flow.
The biggest challenge for a collaborator is not to find the right information (because it is there, somewhere…) but to find it on a minimum of time
Let me insist for the last time on two essential rules:
- All those tools are completely ineffective if collaborators do not embrace them. Global management has to show the example by validating and encouraging necessary changes in work habits and methods. Experimentations can be made to evaluate collaborators needs, but you will be forced one day or another to convince you top management.
- Efficiency is enhanced if those tools work together. Try to imagine the power of such a portal as the one described in my chart: collaborators connect every morning on their personal start page to monitor activity or project advancement ; they have powerful social tools to quickly find information or key-competence ; with some few clicks they can access or deploy adapted online applications or build some.
But remember that tools are only supporting collaboration, only users can make it happens.
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