Web 2.0 versus KM
There was a great debate at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last year around whether Web 2.0 is really anything new and how much of an impact it will eventually have on organizations as it is adapted and introduced into the Enterprise.
Tom Davenport, one of the mainstay luminaries of Knowledge Management and author of many books on the topic, took the more doubtful or questioning position on the impact that Web 2.0 will have on the Enterprise. Harvard professor Andrew McAfee, who helped coined the term 'Enterprise 2.0', took the more protagonist position. Watch for yourself:
http://www.veodia.com/portal_scroller2.php?portal=1043&user=pargandhi
Here is an example of some of Tom's comments:
http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/davenport/200703/why_enterprise_20_wont_transfo.html
And some of Andrews:
http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/index.php/faculty_amcafee_v3/watching_the_film_of_the_fight/
There are a number of arguments. One is about whether Enterprise 2.0 will democratize the organization; raising the voice and power of the employee versus the top-down hierarchical organization. I personally am not sure this should be or needs to be a goal of Web 2.0 in the Enterprise. The more basic question is whether Web 2.0 technologies will improve the way employees in the organization publish, distribute, share and re-use knowledge?
The answer is of course YES.
Yuo have to laugh however at all the Web 2.0 evangelists out there that naively think Web 2.0 is really anything new? The answer is NO. The concepts of distributed publishing (blogs), collaboration (wikis), online networking (personal web pages, corporate online directories) and personalized news feeds (RSS) have been around since the mid-90's and early days of the internet. All these concepts were successful tools that could be enabled in any Knowledge Management strategy back in the day (and I'm aging myself here). While at Coopers & Lybrand and then PricewaterhouseCoopers, I helped deploy hundreds of collaborative discussion forums via Lotus Notes, and later Lotus Domino on the web. These were asynchronous discussion forums that would allow for all sorts of free-form discussions and collaboration to take place online. Lotus Notes also enabled personalized online published and workflow around that publishing effortlessly, in a way that Microsoft in 2007 has still yet to enable. Of course, beyond Lotus, there were many other web tools and sites available as well to do similar things. Remember eGroups or Delphi Forums (collaborative spaces) or Geocities (personal webpages\sites a decade prior to MySpace)!
For the most part however, I think the main reason Web 2.0 seems so new is that the current generation of young Generation X'ers are seeing this technology for the first time in the broader consumer-based sites like MySpace and Facebook. Sure, of course, there is some new stuff in Web 2.0 too. The viral way social networking sites have been positioned and are taking off, and the ease of Mashups in creating new applications on the fly.
So back to Tom and Andrew's debate. Will Web 2.0 technologies significantly revolution the way knowledge is shared within organizations? The answer is a definitive MAYBE. This is the same issue faced by all of us 10 years ago as we looked to deploy successful Knowledge Management programs in the enterprise. Some will be very successful. And others will not be.
At Enterprise 2.0, I could not help the deja vu of the type of questions being asked from what was asked in the 90's around Knowledge Management.
What does it take to make Web 2.0 successful in the Enterprise?
What types of methods can be used to foster use of Web 2.0 applications?
How is senior management buy-in obtained?
How do you define the value provided by these initiatives?
For what purposes should you target a Wikis, Blog or Collaborative Forum?
And the answers are all the same.
A successful Enterprise 2.0 strategy, just like a Knowledge Management strategy of the 90's, needs to be focused on the business objectives of the enterprise. Wikis and networking needs to be focused on topics and purposes related to business processes or products. There needs to be evangelists or super-users that foster use of the technology and monitor the content. There needs to be leadership and cultural changes that support use of the technology. In some cases, training around it.
If you look at Case Studies of many of the successful Web 2.0 implementations today (successful as defined by not just being used, but by providing value to the organization), they deployed the technology with a specific purpose or focus in mind; sharing information across globally dispersed groups, across industry groups or organizational boundaries; exposing product experts to a broader audience; etc.
Unsuccessful Web 2.0 implementation, just like their KM counterparts, are those than lacked purpose. That put the technology out there in the hopes it would be used and find it's own purpose. The "build it and they will come" approach. One of the main challenges that knowledge management had in the 90's is the same that Web 2.0 has today in translating to Enterprise 2.0; how to avoid "implementing technology for technology's sake."
Many knowledge management initiatives fail when the initiatives selected have longer-term payback, drive soft changes like "trying to create an information sharing culture" and are not that measurable in terms of ROI or tie into revenue. The knowledge management initatives that most often succeed have shorter-term payback with measurable results like improved productivity, cost savings or revenue generation.
As in KM, two approaches to follow are:
1. Define pointed Web 2.0 solutions within the Enterprise where the technology can make an impact to networking, relationships, expertise sharing or finding, improving business processes, etc.
2. Define a top-down strategy for the Enterprise; where core business objectives are identified, KM goals defined for each of those objectives, and then the "right" technology selected to facilitate each of those goals.
You can always deploy a blog or wikis technology in the organization, and see where it goes. But in absence of a direction or purpose, you will most likely just be giving your employees a "cool new tool" to have fun with and may delay the timeframe for extracting meaningful value by a couple of years.
Tom Davenport, one of the mainstay luminaries of Knowledge Management and author of many books on the topic, took the more doubtful or questioning position on the impact that Web 2.0 will have on the Enterprise. Harvard professor Andrew McAfee, who helped coined the term 'Enterprise 2.0', took the more protagonist position. Watch for yourself:
http://www.veodia.com/portal_scroller2.php?portal=1043&user=pargandhi
Here is an example of some of Tom's comments:
http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/davenport/200703/why_enterprise_20_wont_transfo.html
And some of Andrews:
http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/index.php/faculty_amcafee_v3/watching_the_film_of_the_fight/
There are a number of arguments. One is about whether Enterprise 2.0 will democratize the organization; raising the voice and power of the employee versus the top-down hierarchical organization. I personally am not sure this should be or needs to be a goal of Web 2.0 in the Enterprise. The more basic question is whether Web 2.0 technologies will improve the way employees in the organization publish, distribute, share and re-use knowledge?
The answer is of course YES.
Yuo have to laugh however at all the Web 2.0 evangelists out there that naively think Web 2.0 is really anything new? The answer is NO. The concepts of distributed publishing (blogs), collaboration (wikis), online networking (personal web pages, corporate online directories) and personalized news feeds (RSS) have been around since the mid-90's and early days of the internet. All these concepts were successful tools that could be enabled in any Knowledge Management strategy back in the day (and I'm aging myself here). While at Coopers & Lybrand and then PricewaterhouseCoopers, I helped deploy hundreds of collaborative discussion forums via Lotus Notes, and later Lotus Domino on the web. These were asynchronous discussion forums that would allow for all sorts of free-form discussions and collaboration to take place online. Lotus Notes also enabled personalized online published and workflow around that publishing effortlessly, in a way that Microsoft in 2007 has still yet to enable. Of course, beyond Lotus, there were many other web tools and sites available as well to do similar things. Remember eGroups or Delphi Forums (collaborative spaces) or Geocities (personal webpages\sites a decade prior to MySpace)!
For the most part however, I think the main reason Web 2.0 seems so new is that the current generation of young Generation X'ers are seeing this technology for the first time in the broader consumer-based sites like MySpace and Facebook. Sure, of course, there is some new stuff in Web 2.0 too. The viral way social networking sites have been positioned and are taking off, and the ease of Mashups in creating new applications on the fly.
So back to Tom and Andrew's debate. Will Web 2.0 technologies significantly revolution the way knowledge is shared within organizations? The answer is a definitive MAYBE. This is the same issue faced by all of us 10 years ago as we looked to deploy successful Knowledge Management programs in the enterprise. Some will be very successful. And others will not be.
At Enterprise 2.0, I could not help the deja vu of the type of questions being asked from what was asked in the 90's around Knowledge Management.
What does it take to make Web 2.0 successful in the Enterprise?
What types of methods can be used to foster use of Web 2.0 applications?
How is senior management buy-in obtained?
How do you define the value provided by these initiatives?
For what purposes should you target a Wikis, Blog or Collaborative Forum?
And the answers are all the same.
A successful Enterprise 2.0 strategy, just like a Knowledge Management strategy of the 90's, needs to be focused on the business objectives of the enterprise. Wikis and networking needs to be focused on topics and purposes related to business processes or products. There needs to be evangelists or super-users that foster use of the technology and monitor the content. There needs to be leadership and cultural changes that support use of the technology. In some cases, training around it.
If you look at Case Studies of many of the successful Web 2.0 implementations today (successful as defined by not just being used, but by providing value to the organization), they deployed the technology with a specific purpose or focus in mind; sharing information across globally dispersed groups, across industry groups or organizational boundaries; exposing product experts to a broader audience; etc.
Unsuccessful Web 2.0 implementation, just like their KM counterparts, are those than lacked purpose. That put the technology out there in the hopes it would be used and find it's own purpose. The "build it and they will come" approach. One of the main challenges that knowledge management had in the 90's is the same that Web 2.0 has today in translating to Enterprise 2.0; how to avoid "implementing technology for technology's sake."
Many knowledge management initiatives fail when the initiatives selected have longer-term payback, drive soft changes like "trying to create an information sharing culture" and are not that measurable in terms of ROI or tie into revenue. The knowledge management initatives that most often succeed have shorter-term payback with measurable results like improved productivity, cost savings or revenue generation.
As in KM, two approaches to follow are:
1. Define pointed Web 2.0 solutions within the Enterprise where the technology can make an impact to networking, relationships, expertise sharing or finding, improving business processes, etc.
2. Define a top-down strategy for the Enterprise; where core business objectives are identified, KM goals defined for each of those objectives, and then the "right" technology selected to facilitate each of those goals.
You can always deploy a blog or wikis technology in the organization, and see where it goes. But in absence of a direction or purpose, you will most likely just be giving your employees a "cool new tool" to have fun with and may delay the timeframe for extracting meaningful value by a couple of years.
posted by Alan Baren at
11:40 AM
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