One on one with Andrew McAfee

Andrew McAfee coined the phrase "Enterprise 2.0" in a 2006 Sloan Management Review article. His new book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges [1], will be published next month. McAfee is currently a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a fellow at the Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. His research investigates IT's impact on organizations' performance and competitive position. He has authored more than fifty  case studies as well as articles in Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, and other journals. We asked McAfee about Enterprise 2.0 and how it was affecting organizations.

FCM: You are credited with coining the term Enterprise 2.0. Recently, Jive began referring to its products as Social Media Software. Do you think your term has outlived its usefulness?

AM: I can't expect that everyone's going to use the term that I came up with. Some people and companies like the terms 'social software' or 'social media' instead of Enterprise 2.0. But we're all talking about the same thing: new technology tools to bring people together and facilitate their interactions, and new business practices that make use of these tools. I don't emphasize the word 'social' when I talk about these phenomena because it's not a word with a lot of positive connotations for busy, pragmatic executives. They're running organizations with deadlines and goals, not social clubs. I coined the term "Enterprise 2.0" to highlight to them that there's something new under the sun, something that can take their enterprises in a new direction. 

FCM: I noticed at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in June that many speakers seemed to mix open web tools like Facebook and Twitter with internal tools like Jive and SocialCast. How do you explain the difference between these two types of tools?

AM: I don't spend a lot of time stressing the differences between internal and external tools. It's pretty clear that the former are behind the firewall, while the latter are on the public Internet; people don't have a hard time understanding that distinction, or figuring out when one is more appropriate than the other. I spend time talking about public tools like Facebook and Twitter because of what they reveal: that people have a strong desire to build human networks and have more open interactions, and that they will flock to tools that are simple and easy to use. Designers of Enterprise 2.0 technologies should keep these lessons in mind.

FCM: What are the biggest fears and misconceptions about Enterprise 2.0 and how do you address them?

AM: The biggest fear is the vague sense that it's risky to deploy these tools, and that by doing so a company opens itself up to all kinds of exposure and bad behavior. I spend a fair amount of time in my book describing all the possible risks and threats, then showing how few of them are actually legitimate. People are inclined to be helpful and also aware of what constitutes bad behavior. And because contributions to Enterprise 2.0 environments are typically not anonymous, people don't have the ability to be jerks without being identified. As a result, horror stories are quite rare.

FCM: How are companies establishing rules and norms on internal social networks. Is it a top-down approach or are communities successfully policing themselves?

AM: It's both. Enterprise 2.0 communities typically do a thorough job of policing themselves, and of developing and enforcing positive norms. This can be combined with a bit of oversight from above. I've seen, for example, environments where discussions started to veer off-track, and a leader stepped in to remind participants of what constituted appropriate vs. inappropriate language and behavior. This worked like a charm.

FCM: Enterprise 2.0 has been called organic knowledge management because unlike earlier attempts at this technology where people were asked to write what they know, companies can gather knowledge as part of the normal social interactions people have with these tools. Do companies recognize this advantage, and if they do, how can they collect and find this information so that it's managed and useful?

AM: More and more companies are realizing that the best way to capture and share knowledge is to let people contribute content openly and freely, react to each others' content, and highlight the best stuff out there. A lot of companies are still stuck in a knowledge management philosophy of asking their people to fill in fields in pre-defined databases, but an increasing number are taking a more organic approach. They're letting people 'narrate their work,' ask and answer questions, and point to each others' contributions. The beauty of this approach is that when good search technology is applied to this type of content people can find what they're looking for easily. This kind of library, in other words, generates its own card catalog, and the amazing thing is that this card catalog gets better as the library gets bigger.

FCM: Along the same lines, Enterprise 2.0 interactions are themselves content. Do you think it's the job of the content management system to manage this content along with the rest of the enterprise content, or should it be the job of the social tools to find ways to get this content into the hands of other enterprise applications across the organization?

AM: Within enterprises at present structured data resides in entirely separate applications and databases than does unstructured Enterprise 2.0 data. Bridging these two worlds is going to be a major task, and the application providers that figure out how to do so best are probably going to reap major rewards. Right now it seems to me that the best approach is to build technologies that allow users to grab and insert snippets of structured data and business processes into unstructured environments, like what I see with Google Wave and SAP Constellation. But it's still early days, and we'll have to see what business users actually prefer. The tools that match their preferences are the ones that will succeed.