In lay man's language it is about open communication in an enterprise. The assumption here is, more the information is shared among the colleagues , teams , customers , vendors etc. in an enterprise ; the less information will be shrouded. Verbosity is the need of E 2.0 , and when information is free and shared among the colleagues people can react more quickly on it.
This will create a treasure of Intellectual property for an Organization and people will also be more productive. It main characteristics are :
a) Flat organization , b)Ease of Organisation Flow , c) Agility and Flexibility , d)user driven technology , e)Bottom up , f) Distributed , g) Transparency
Drivers :
To implement E 2.0 in your organization you need to fuel it with - Web 2.0 technologies , demand for socialization of enterprise applications and business culture willing to adopt and make full use of E 2.0.
Web 2.0 is the term used for set of tools/applications which allow for user participation. The most common and popular example of such tools can be - Wiki , socialtext , microblogs (Twitter) , Jive , sharepoint , Lotus connection , facebook etc. Wikis , blogs and social text are now main tools used to develop applications for communication and marketing in the enterprise.
This leads us to the second driver of E 2.0 - the socialization of business applications , moving from data centric models to people driven applications. Applications in which user participation is required to run them and its regular use builds into a full grown product. Its not code and data fed by programmers which builds the application but the information which is shared by people in it.
The third Key to enterprise 2.0 is - Business culture , it is mostly overlooked but is the most important driver for E 2.0. For centuries corporates have been following the Feudal system of Hierarchies - workers (cattle class) ; lower management , higher management , top management , directors and what not management. Its very difficult for them to appreciate the open dialogue among workers. Transparency is the word more often used than practiced , E 2.0 will create transparency among workers. It is very difficult to dictate and monitor each and every word which employee says/writes on blogs. Until the management understands that it is not promoting Anarchy but transparency it will be very difficult to use and implement it.
Very true about management getting onboard. The problem too often is that the management wants to adopt the cool, new 2.0 technology to show that they are au current, but then they don't understand how to quantify the benefit of people sharing information within (or beyond) the organization. The balancing act is admittedly a very difficult one: to set parameters for the topics and purpose of the discussion, while not making the general employee population feel corraled or constricted to the point that they are only sharing what is pre-approved.
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