Enterprise 2.0 is already happening, you’re just missing it
by Jevon MacDonald
As the Enterprise 2.0 conversation starts to gain ground, a lot of people are starting to talk about Enterprise 2.0 “implementations”, or “social computing strategies” and other big ideas.
Before you do that though, stop and think seriously about how long all that is going to take you to do. If doing something 6 months from now good enough?
My challenge to you is that No, it is not good enough. Why? Because it is already happening.
Facebook started off as the place your college interns were going to find dates, but as you probably noticed: if you aren’t on there yet, you will be soon. Facebook isn’t just about getting dates any more, your employees are building their profiles on it, right there in public. They have to go to facebook, because you aren’t providing an alternative.
Conceptshare, Google Docs, Wufoo, SmartSheet and others are replacing all of your expensive Microsoft Office and other licenses. What you once paid millions for is now being put online, used for free, and is resting outside your firewall.
Gmail is, I am afraid, more than just email. Gmail has GTalk, which is a real-time presence and instant messaging tool. So, everyone who doesn’t have a Blackberry is probably hooked in to GTalk, and because it travels over normal web protocols, you might not even know it’s there. But that’s a good thing in many ways, because it reminds you that the weeks you spent devising an instant messaging policy with the IT department was pretty much useless.
Blackberry Pin-to-Pin
Any employee that has a Blackberry probably has 10 or 20 people on their Blackberry Messenger and they are talking to them constantly. While you are stuck in email, they are passing tiny little messages back and forth that all seem small and irrelevant on their own, but add up to a constant ever-changing conversation that you are missing.
And then, when you think you have it all figured out, Twitter is a weird cross between them all. It’s not Facebook, but it is persona, and it’s not messaging, but it is communication. It’s not direct like a Blackberry message, but instead a Twitter is a broadcast of something you are thinking about.
Am I saying that Twitter is something you need to bring in to your enterprise? No, well.. Not really.
But you would be remiss to ignore the direction that these tools are pointing you in. The most savvy workers are adapting these outside tools to their current work world, and they are getting used to them.
The biggest shift, the one that Facebook has shown most predominantly, is that these things are no longer just geeky pursuits that the guys in your IT department get over-excited about, they are the now part of the social fabric of a huge majority of 20-somethings, and the demographic is growing at an incredible rate.
This all happened in, more or less, the last year, and the rate of change is increasing rapidly.
