The revised definition of Enterprise 2.0

Dr. McAfee’s revised of Enterprise 2.0 provides interesting insight into his view of Enterprise 2.0. As he is the author of the term, “Enterprise 2.0”, everyone else can only choose to agree or disagree with his authentic revised definition.

Andrew gives examples of E2.0 and examples of what’s not E2.0 and here’s what’s NOT Examples of Enterprise 2.0:

· Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, etc. These are for individuals on the Web, not companies. Some companies use sites like YouTube for viral and stealth marketing, but let's explicitly put these activities outside our definition of Enterprise 2.0.

· Most corporate Intranets today. As discussed earlier, they're not emergent.

· Groupware and information portals. Again, these tools don't facilitate emergence, although this may be starting to change. Groupware and portals also seem to be less freeform than the Web 2.0 technologies now starting to penetrate the firewall.

· Email and 'classic' instant messaging, because transmissions aren't globally visible or persistent. Some messaging technologies do ensure that contributions are persistent.
For me, most interesting are the 3rd and 4th bullet points because they exclude most legacy Groupware applications which many vendors are trying to throw into the Enterprise 2.0 bucket simply to take advantage of the buzz. This mislabeling of products does themselves, their customers and the technology industry a disservice and creates unnecessary and pointless market confusion.

Firstly, the vendors do themselves a disservice because rather than trying to reposition existing products they should continue to invest in R&D and innovation to create new products that are authentically Enterprise 2.0 compliant.

Secondly, their customers are being disserviced because they’re being misguided by trusted vendors with products that won’t deliver the potential benefits of authentic social computing and being sold propositions that won’t stand the test of time.

Thirdly, the technology industry is being disserviced because we are on the cusp of a new era in computing – the Social Computing Era and we, the technology industry should be doing everything we can to accelerate its adoption because its evolution unleash the untapped resource of social collaboration within organizations which is the catalyst for the emergence of the information economy where, as Steve Jurvetson predicts the market trend where value of information traded will outstrip to value of physical goods traded. More importantly, this market is the realization of a more balanced lifestyle for the knowledge worker and their families. The flattening and erosion of non-value-adding corporate hierarchies, dismantling of non-value-adding tiers of middle management and the creation of an economy based on the value creation of knowledge transfer on a just-in-time basis.