Tom Tom — beating the drum for E 2.0
by Tom Mandel
My post on Tom Davenport’s skeptical response to “Enterprise 2.0″ has drawn an interesting response from Bill Ives on this blog. There is not enough difference among any of us to allow for a real debate, but I want to clarify a point from my post.
I’m a big fan of Tom Davenport. As a commentator on and analyst of organizations and their cultures, I can’t even carry Tom’s gym bag! When I called a point of his “rhetorical,” I wasn’t criticizing him — rhetoric is one of the key tools of all writing. It’s not a bad thing!
My goal was to distinguish between enterprise work and the organization of enterprises. Big changes to the ways people work in enterprises do not necessarily change the structure of those organizations, not in the short run and not necessarily in ways we can predict.
Even if lots of people in an enterprise blog, and its teams use wikis, and everyone benefits from tagging and social bookmarking, and social networks arise to ease collaboration — even with all these things, we cannot conclude that these enterprises will become more “democratic” or “better places to work.” The changes are good on their own, but technology is demonstrably not a route to utopia.
In that sense, I could be thought of as agreeing with Tom Davenport. Change is constant, and it is emergent. New tools do affect the future, but we we won’t be able to measure that effect directly, and the end of hierarchical organization is nowhere in sight.
But, I hope the key takeaway from my post is that we will see the success of Enterprise 2.0 in its wide adoption — not in some change it spurs in global capitalism or corporate hierarchies. In fact, I hesitated before writing this post, because I didn’t want to displace Jevon MacDonald’s post on accelerating Enterprise 2.0 adoption from the top of this blog. Check it out.
