Enterprise 2.0: How to Manage Social Technologies to Transform Your Organization [Hardcover]

Writing this review has been is one of the hardest things I have had to do. I wanted to like this book, it's a great subject, a knowledgeable an author and great prior reviews. Unfortunately this book does not deliver making this review tough to put together. I would not suggest using this book to introduce Web 2.0 to the business. I know that this review may draw some heat from the other reviewers but here are the reasons behind my review and why I recommend reading McAfee's HBR article rather than investing the time in this book.

The book covers an important topic and a critical time in its formation. What is the impact of social computing technologies like Wiki's, blogs and other forms of social media. McAfee defines Enterprise 2.0 as the use of emergent social software platforms by organization s in pursuit of their goals. (p.71) McAfee says that Enterprise 2.0 is not primarily a technology issue. This is not born out in the text as majority of the book spends time defining the technology behind E 2.0 (chapter 3 and 4) and the capabilities provided by the technology (chapter 5).

McAfee treats E 2.0 technology at a high level. Its is as if, McAfee does not believe a business person would be interested in how the technology works, which makes the web 2.0 technologies seem trivial. If McAfee had expanded the view of technology to include the integration of business processes and information with these technologies he could have provided powerful business based descriptions.

McAfee intended to write a business book about Enterprise 2.0 but he concentrates the vast majority of pages on emergent social software platforms (ESSP). There is little discussion of the business impact of the software, how it applies to major business processes or activities and how these platforms change the way business work at a strategic, market, financial, product, organizational or operational areas. These are all questions business executives have and they are not treated sufficiently in this book. This is one reason why I would not suggest using this book as a platform for launching new social software initiatives.

Business books relies on case studies to illustrate their points and while McAfee has case studies from Google, Serena Software, the CIA, and Vista Print which should provide a solid foundation. However, the cases talk about how these people implemented Espy's in a generic fashion saying that company A implemented a blog to solve their problem. Only the description of Google's adoption of predictive markets constitutes a strong case. The limited use of practical or detailed examples is puzzling, as it does not give the reader access to McAfee's experience and insight.

McAfee further weakens his argument as the book draws on academic frameworks outside of E 2.0 and technology to answer critical issues. Normally, this is where a strong case study would illustrate how people have addressed these challenges. However, McAfee chooses strong academics including discussion of theories of Granovetter (Strength of Weak Ties), Hayek and Harford (Theory of Knowledge), Gourville (Behavioral economics and slow rates of adoption) to make his points. This unfortunately weakens the book's business impact and credibility. Not that the ideas of these thought leaders are weak, its just that they give the book a stronger academic feel than other business books. While the case studies are a good touch, the examples involve implementing relatively generic web 2.0 a wiki for one, a blog for another. While the cases do discuss the results achieved, the cases would have been stronger if the case studies provided more detail about how the cases used these technologies to achieve these results.

Finally the book seems to be stitched together from three separate research pieces. The best part of the book is actually the final chapter. It describes the book that I believe you should have read as it hints at the business, financial and other issues opened by Enterprise 2.0. The tone, content and focus of the final chapter is distinctly different from the rest of the work. If the whole book could have been like the last chapter this would have been one of the best business books of the last three years.

The first five chapters of the book are more descriptive of the phenomenon and suffer from McAfee's desire to assert his brand of the terms Enterprise 2.0 and ESSP. This assertion comes from his frequent use of the first person to define and drive the book forward, I believe this or I see that. This weakens the book and gives it a self-referential style that does not go over well with a business audience.

In chapters six and seven the book branches off into a discussion of the business value of IT and refuting Nicholas Carr's IT doesn't matter argument. This part comes out of the blue and discuses IT in general rather than the specifics of how ESSP changes the definition of IT and its role in the enterprise. Another opportunity lost in my estimation.

The introduction of Web 2.0 and social software into enterprises is a significant opportunity for every organization. This book has the potential to introduce business to these technologies in much the same way that Hammer and Champy set the stage for re-engineering, or Negroponte and the internet. However after thinking about this review for more than a week, I felt that the book does not do this and I cannot recommend it as the way of introducing ESSP's to the enterprise. I do not intent to criticize the author, his knowledge or his experience as I am sure that McAfee knows more about how to make this technology work to create value, it just did not show in this book. Sorry to offer a different view on this book, but I hope that you can see the reasons behind this review.

I was a little concerned when I started reading the book, being that I am a self-proclaimed Enterprise 2.0 "convert", that it may feel a bit like "preaching to the choir." But in reading Part 1, even though some pages are spent on introducing concepts and benefits with which I am already familiar, reading the book has been time well spent. And here's why:

- Andy uses 4 real world case studies that demonstrate how Enterprise 2.0 collaboration methods can be valuable, and if you are involved with trying to drive adoption of similar tools within your organization, these case studies are great examples to recall. Also, the examples of the US government looking to open collaboration capabilities in response to some communication failures that led to 9/11 make for great reading.
- While understanding how various 2.0 style tools work and how organizations have leveraged those tools in the past is important, having the ability to analyze existing organizational inefficiencies and identify effective collaboration methods/tools to aid those problems is where you can separate yourself. Andy provides a well thought out mapping between relationships within professional networks (Strong Ties, Weak Ties, Potential Ties and No Ties) and how Enterprise 2.0 methods/tools can be applied to build/strengthen those ties in ways that can positively impact an organization's issues. So instead of blindly throwing a wiki at a business problem, for example, you'll have the background to identify other potential tools that may be a better fit to help a specific business problem.
- While reading, I thought to myself on multiple occasions, "That's exactly what I have been trying to tell people, but now I have examples, human behavioral studies as evidence and a credible resource as another weapon in telling my story." If you have responsibility for driving adoption of 2.0 tools, trying to make a business case, or approving the business case for evolving an Enterprise 2.0 agenda, this book will be very helpful for you.

I couldn't put the book down getting through Part 1, and I am anxious to complete Part 2 having read that it is even more valuable for Enterprise 2.0 practitioners than Part 1.

A 6-minute video review of Andrew McAfee's book "Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools For Your Organization's Toughest Challenges." Covers book's theme, the SLATES acronym, the use of different E2.0 tools for different types of ties between colleagues, McAfee's cautions, and Model1/2 behaviors and how they connect with E2.0 platforms.

TRANSCRIPT:

I'm John Caddell from Caddell Insight Group [...].

We're here today to talk about "Enterprise 2.0" by Andrew McAfee. He is with MIT, used to be at Harvard Business School. Just switched over a couple of months ago. He writes an excellent blog on IT and business, that I'd recommend you read if you haven't come across it yet. And so, he's just produced his first book. To explain the title, Enterprise 2.0 is a term he coined to refer to using web 2.0 tools like Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and similar tools in a business context.

The book is a lot like a recent book, "Groundswell," that explained to general business people how social tools affected customers and markets and how to use those to communicate and listen. Communicating from inside the business to outside. "Enterprise 2.0" performs a similar task, focusing on using those tools inside the business, more for collaboration and tapping the collective intelligence of employees. And so it takes this marginal topic and moves it to a general management-type discussion. Which I think is really important, to get it out of the IT discussion into the management discussion.

So as part of that objective he does a really good job of explaining how these tools work and also what ties them together because if you think about tools like Flickr or YouTube or a blogging platform or a messaging platform or a wiki there are a lot of differences among those but he's tied together the common threads, using an acronym called SLATES (search, links, authoring, tags, extensions and signals). Signals, for example, like RSS that allows people who follow these platforms without having to log on to them every single hour to see what's changed.

Another important part of the book is in putting the different tools into a context in terms of how useful they'd be for different organizational problems. He uses a bullseye metaphor focused on the strength of ties between colleagues to explain that. At the center of the bullseye are strongly-tied colleagues meaning people who work together in the same department, in the same location, all the way out to the edge of the bullseye. meaning colleagues who have no relationship at all. Different tools apply at different levels of the bullseye. In the center, people with strong ties would use tools like wikis, or collaborative development tools, like Google Docs.

Midway out the bullseye are colleagues with weak ties. People who know each other but don't get together often, who don't talk often, but would like to keep apprised of each other's activities for the purposes of sharing knowledge, best practices, identifying solutions to problems, and so forth. For that ring of the bullseye, Facebook-like tools are very useful.

At the outer edge of the bullseye, where colleagues have no relationship other than that they work for the same company, a prediction market is a useful tool, that gathers people's guesses about the possibility of certain things happening like a certain sales volume being reached or likelihood an innovation will succeed in the marketplace and aggregating that information to get a better answer than any individual would come up with themselves.

He doesn't go overboard in terms of enthusiasm for how great these things are and how it'll change companies overnight, and he has a pretty clear-eyed view of how difficult it is going to be to bring these tools to wide use. It just takes a long time -and he dwells on that at some extent - how long it takes for revolutionary innovations to take hold, and he doesn't think this is any different, though he is optimistic that it'll happen eventually.

And finally in the book he talks about kind of different management models or practices that work well with these tools, and by contrast he talks about typical Model 1 behaviors which are more command-and-control type behaviors, self-protecting behaviors and less-collaborative behaviors, which don't go well with these new tools. To really utilize these new tools, people have to adopt what he calls Model 2 behaviors, which are collaborative, not so much focused on self-protection but looking out for the best interests of the company. Quite a different model than what most people have seen where they work. And I think that heaps underline the challenges in getting these systems adopted and in wide use.

It's an excellent book, very well-organized and well-written. It takes an important topic and brings it into the mainstream. I really enjoyed it and I think you will too.