Talking with McAfee

Andrew McAfee’s (website and blog) is one of the main advocates in the Enterprise 2.0 movement. He actually coined the term and recently he released a book entitled “Enterprise 2.0” which I reviewed here. Enterprise 2.0 is the use of next generation collaboration tools in the enterprise or as he describes it the “use of emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) by organizations in pursuits of their goals”

McAfee believes in the potential impact of Enterprise 2.0: “ESSPs will have about as big an impact on the informal processes of the organization as large-scale commercial enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, Supply Chain, etc.) have had on the formal processes.”

I met him recently and I heard a few things:

-          During the last 5 years collaboration technology tools have gone from bad to good. (However still email is the dominant collaboration tool; and email is “where knowledge goes to die.”) These new tools allow for creativity and less structured interactions.

-          However organizations still don’t have the recipe to rollout these capabilities.

-          Two recipes for failure:
     o   overstructuring offerings from the beginning (need to keep open)
     o    thinking “if they build it they will come”

-          A few ideas for success
     o   need to make sure individuals know why it is good for them (incentives may be good or they may help kill an initiative)
     o   make it very easy to use (which is hard to do)
     o   be patient and adjust user expectations downward
     o   use success stories (ROI is difficult to quantify)