CTO Blog
I wrote a blog post entitled ‘we want web 2.0, whatever that is’ a couple of years back, which drew attention to the challenge of hype with new technologies and their capabilities as laid out by Tim O’Reilly in his original definition of web 2.0. My plea was for people to appreciate the entirety of Tim’s thinking, in order to really grasp the very profound concept he was trying to identify. Instead, what I saw at the time were a lot of moves by people and product vendors to make anything and everything some part of the web 2.0 bandwagon in the belief that would encourage people to try, buy or use their product.
Today its possible to apply the same concern to ‘clouds’ and in so doing, once again miss the very real point which is: any real form of clouds, involves sharing at some level or other. That may be by some form of virtualisation at the technology level, but the real impact of this is in the new business solutions that can be conceived. If you introduce web 2.0 in a product, people can behave very differently because they have new ways of sharing too – usually called collaboration or social networking. This makes for a really powerful transformation mix. Tim O’Reilly didn’t quite see all of this, but he did visualise the impact of a business change. In 2006, he added to his original seven statements that defined web 2.0, a definition of a business model based on applying the web 2.0 values to form very different enterprise capabilities.
However, it was left to Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School to come up with and popularise the concept of enterprise 2.0, which describes how a business is able to use web 2.0 tools and techniques to change its ways of working. I have heard various ways to describe enterprise 2.0 and although they may be slightly different, they are all recognisable as being sufficiently similar to say that we now seem to have a working, or workable, common understanding of the term. Yet just at the moment when we seem to have a consensus – and I’ll come on to this in a moment – Andrew McAfee seems to have decided that we need to redefine the term and what it stands for! I need help to understand how to apply this new thinking (outlined in his blog under the title ‘enterprise 2.0 version 2.0’.)
In spite of this, ten different well known people in some top business schools across the USA got together to write a chapter each around a single common framework and explain exactly what clouds and web bring to business. The opening and closing sections of the piece are penned by Geoffrey Moore – famous for his work on technology adoption in Crossing the Chasm, the Concept of S Curves. This represents a remarkable uniformity of opinion and approach, reflected in the title of the book entitled: ‘Business Network Transformation’ (edited by Jeffery Word). It’s already listed on Amazon, even though it has not been released. The best way I can describe what this is all about is to quote the synopsis on the flyleaf:
This book is about the evolving nature of global business and the ways that a company’s network of relationships (with suppliers, customers and other partners) is being reconfigured to derive competitive advantage and increased profitability.
Business Network Transformation is a true market movement and isn’t something that can be ignored. As the pace of business change accelerates and businesses become increasingly connected, business networks provide the new source of competitive advantage for companies. We are now witnessing a global transformation into dynamic and orchestrated business networks in which each entity is focussed on its key differentiation while collaborating with others in its network to deliver shared business value, speed of innovation, and costs benefits.
Companies rely on partners not only to take on non core activities so that resources can be funnelled into innovative activities, but also to collaborate with them for new product development and new ways to enter attractive markets. Globalisation and deregulation are empowering companies to discover innovation and talent from all corners of the world and to enter emerging high growth markets that require new partnerships. Companies in the value chain must act as one entity to serve the end customer, who is armed with more information and has more choices than ever before.
The basic outline comes across as somewhat obvious in terms of the ability to make use of the connectivity and interactivity that now connects everyone and everything together. But the devil is in the detail of each chapter and its part of the overall framework. Does it describe Enterprise 2.0? Well I don’t know, now that Andrew McAfee has changed the rules. But what it does do is provide a convincing approach to getting real business value from the new technologies and for that reason it’s got to be on the right track!
About the author
Capgemini Global Chief Technology Officer, Andy is a member of the Capgemini Group management board and advises on all aspects of technology-driven market changes, together with being a member of the Policy Board for the British Computer Society. Andy is the author of many white papers, and the co-author three books that have charted the current changes in technology and its use by business starting in 2006 with ‘Mashup Corporations’ detailing how enterprises could make use of Web 2.0 to develop new go to market propositions. This was followed in May 2008 by Mesh Collaboration focussing on the impact of Web 2.0 on the enterprise front office and its working techniques, then in 2010 “Enterprise Cloud Computing: A Strategy Guide for Business and Technology leaders” co-authored with well-known academic Peter Fingar and one of the leading authorities on business process, John Pyke. The book describes the wider business implications of Cloud Computing with the promise of on-demand business innovation. It looks at how businesses trade differently on the web using mash-ups but also the challenges in managing more frequent change through social tools, and what happens when cloud comes into play in fully fledged operations. Andy was voted one of the top 25 most influential CTOs in the world in 2009 by InfoWorld and is grateful to readers of Computing Weekly who voted the Capgemini CTOblog the best Blog for Business Managers and CIOs each year for the last three years.
One of my concerns about Enterprise 2.0 is that it’s going to be one of those terms that quickly becomes devalued as vendors rush to attach it to whatever products and services they’ve got coming through the pipeline. But I’m more worried about the stubbornness of organisational decision making – the habits of thought and action that tend to ensure each new generation of business technology ends up decorating the mess that’s already evolved. Same-old same-old thinking will erode the value that Enterprise 2.0 undoubtedly offers.
Already the concept of cloud computing – which of course goes all the way back to the original idea of time-sharing – is being used to indulge decision makers’ love of procrastination. Unsure about retiring an expensive system? Of course you are! So why not defer that decision by using the infinite promise of the cloud to keep it up and running at a low(ish) maintenance cost?
Concerned about the swathes of storage being used for all that unstructured data generated by today’s essentially conversational apps? Now you can forget about your buckets overflowing, because the cloud embraces us all.
Concerns about security and continuity pursue would-be cloud solutions at every turn. But business leaders also need to question the sagacity of paying for bloat – especially at a time when they’re meant to be focused on improving their processes, cutting waste and getting closer to the customer. Unless decision makers take a firm hold on their responsibility for the apps portfolio, and start to question the ubiquity of unstructured data, “Enterprise 2.0” will be more about shunting than sharing.
McAfee should not attempt to perfect his Enterprise 2.0 definition. May 2006, is when he defined it first.Whatever anyone defined 3 years back in IT is now either dead or very different.For me,the 2.0 discussion got over with the Financial crisis.
In line with other things in IT let us move on to a new name.Here is a suggestion. How does Collaborative Enterprise sound.
More thoughts here http://blog.gandalf-lab.com/2007/10/collective-business-intelligence-and.html
ah now that’s two posts near to my heart in the abuse of terminology to sell existing products! yes i feel as strongly as you do on the stretching of the terms till they become meaningless, and on the casual use of the terms by some members of the technology industry with out the bother of really understanding them.
For me the 2006 original use of the term was thought provoking and intelligent, today three years later a lot has changed and i regard this on one hand as having produced a workable use of technology for business and on the other as inviting still further leading edge thinking on how the flow of new tools can be used.
The term Web 2.0 refers to a perceived second generation of web development and design, that aims to facilitate communication, secure information sharing,interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web.Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and applications; such as social-networking sites,video-sharing sites,wikis,blogs, and folksonomies.
and once again we started with the clear o’reilly seven principles of what web 2.0 meant in 2004 though the most well known version was in 2006 and sparked of the Andrew McAfee concept of Enterprise 2.0!
Cloud computing has probably done more benefit for small companies, like dating startup of ours http://hintcafe.com , than big corporations. Cloud computing has enable the small companies to host and provide enterprise level services without purchasing, developing and maintaining huge infrastructure. One can develop a new idea for search engine using Yahoo BOSS API or develop a new phone application using Twilio cloud API. Its the brave new world where small companies have a chance to have their voice heard.
Yes – it really does level the playing field as it moves the success factor to ‘using’ available resources both technology and of partners/ suppliers well from the previous generation which has been based on ‘owning’ resources. All of which means quick and smart now is the advantage over big and stable.
The thing about mashing up cloud computing and enterprise 2.0 sw is that where cloud computing has done a world of good for emerging growth companies and eased the financial strain of corporations, web 2.0 is under the stigma of being inexpensive and easily replicated. Dont know if keeping the two separate would be a better approach.
Business Network Transformation is a continous evolution of business in response to market dynamics. This lifecycle of this transformation has reduced significantly in recent years thanks to technology such as Web2.0 and cloud. The potential for suppliers and customers to colloborate and deliver value is massive. BNT promises to be the answer to increasing productivity which inturn underpins economic sustainability. Would be interested in seeing how businesses adopt technology to drive BNT.
I frequently comment that technology now touches almost every aspect of business, and thats not the same as IT which was working in limited areas of the business around back office processes and cost reduction.
The use of technology to trade the market better is the key shift but for many IT staff this seems to be a threat and not an opportunity