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Is Enterprise 2.0 ready for the 4C's?

Remco Kroes, July 2007 Summary

Currently new technologies arrive on the market with the promise to improve the waycompanies work together and share information. These technologies are grouped underthe umbrella term Enterprise 2.0. In this article I address the use of Enterprise 2.0 tofacilitate enterprise wide Collaboration, Communication, Compliance and Control (4c’s).Especially the latter two dimensions seem to receive little attention in many Enterprise2.0 deployments. I argue that companies must adopt the 4c perspective. I further arguethat Enterprise 2.0 solutions must unify all employees. This view is based on the processperspective that emphasizes that one must look at

all

the activities in organizations. OftenEnterprise 2.0 solutions provide benefits to a single department or project team.Furthermore, I argue that Enterprise 2.0 provides a new way of thinking on howprocesses get structured. I propose the view that processes get organized because of theinput of many. This is contrary to the current approach where processes are structured bya small group of people.

Introduction

XXX (company name undisclosed) ‘uses a wide variety of systems.This causes a lot of attention for coordination and additionalreporting models to consolidate the relevant figures. A lot of manualwork is still necessary and the process can easily be disrupted. … Thegoal is to implement one integrated standard software package tosupport our business, which includes functionalities for CRM, finance, HRM and projects.’

This quote was taken from tender from a large international consultancy organizationwith about 3500 employees worldwide. It shows that companies are making efforts tointegrate and align individual departments and subsidiaries in order to realize theirbusiness objectives.In the last few years we saw the emergence of platform technologies such as portals tofacilitate integration. These platforms, such as MS SharePoint or Lotus Notes, imposedstructure on the organization by introducing for example content management, electronicworkflows, roles and rights into the organization.Recently a new term was raised that has great potential to improve the way employeeswork together and share information. This term, Enterprise 2.0, refers to the usage of socalled emergent social platforms within companies. Enterprise 2.0 looks at integrationfrom a new perspective. It seeks integration by facilitating ‘

platforms that initially imposelittle or no structure on interactions, but that contain mechanisms to let patterns and structure emerge over time

’

2 In this paper I will address this technology and its impact on the way employees work together and share information. I present a view that looks at Enterprise 2.0 from fourdimensions: collaboration, communication, compliance and control.Especially the latter two dimensions seem to receive little attention in many Enterprise2.0 deployment debates. I argue that processes cannot be viewed only from thecollaboration and communication perspective. Processes must be designed in such a waythat they support a company’s strategy and objectives. To this extend processes must ahave a degree of uniformity and measurability to maintain control over the process.Moreover, processes must be able to comply with internal or external regulations.Enterprise 2.0 technologies seem to be especially interesting to those employees whobasically rely on e-mail and MS excel to organize their work. Based on practicalexperiences I argue that in many organizations, and especially in SMB companies, onlytwenty percent have access to structured information. Typically this is the companies’ERP environment. The majority of the organization uses non-integrated databases, e-mail, MS Excel, or even paper archives to do their work.Structuring previously unstructured information is not an easy job. Especially, if youapproach the traditional way view of structuring information from a top-downperspective. In this perspective, structure is imposed on the organization centrally. Suchstructures are often rigid and only changeable by a few employees.The deployment of Enterprise 2.0 solutions offers a new perspective and can break thistop-down tradition and enable bottom-up creation of structure. Just think of howWikipedia structures the collective knowledge of the world by providing a platform inwhich everyone can edit or create topics of their interest. Wikipedia is a ‘

multilingual,web-based, free content encyclopedia project. Wikipedia is written collaboratively byvolunteers

;’

From the wiki perspective, structure emerges because of the collective input of many. Inthis paper I further will raise the idea to apply the same perspective on the way businessprocesses are managed. I will introduce the view that processes, rather than content, canbe designed in a freeform and emergent way to improve collaboration andcommunication, whilst addressing issues related to compliance and control.

Enterprise 2.0 defined

Recently, a new term was raised ‘Enterprise 2.0’, which was defined by McAfee as ‘

theuse of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers

’

iii

. The potential of these Enterprise 2.0 technologies is thatthey can ‘

knit together an enterprise and facilitate knowledge work in ways that weresimply not possible previously

.’

A well-known example of such a technology that can be applied in an enterprise contextis a wiki.

A wiki is defined as:

‘A wiki (IPA: [ıwI.kiı] <WICK-ee> or [ıwiı.kiı] <WEE-kee>[1]) is a type of website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove and otherwiseedit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative authoring. The term wiki can also refer to the collaborativesoftware itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a website or tocertain specific wiki sites, including the computer science site (an original wiki),WikiWikiWeb, and online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia’

In wiki environments communities set themselves the objective to structure informationon a given subject: ‘

On each collaboration, an article is chosen by people interested inthe topic, and for a period of time (a week, fortnight, or month) the chosen article isworked on, under Wikipedia's principle of collaborative editing.

’ Communities are notfixed or predefined. Basically anyone can participate in the collaborative effort tocollectively structure the definition of a particular topic.Wikis are not automatically classified as an Enterprise 2.0 technology. It is thedeployment of a wiki in an enterprise context that makes it an Enterprise 2.0 solution.Many more of these new internet technologies exist in today’s market, such as blogs (alsoknown as weblogs) or RSS

vii

. A wiki is just one example of a new technology adopted bycompanies to facilitate companywide collaboration and communication.Traditionally content was managed by fileservers or document management systems.What distinguishes Enterprise 2.0 technologies from these typical document managementsolutions is the term ‘emergence’. Structure is not imposed top down, but structureemerges bottom up.