McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 Economics
by Joe McKendrick
Bill Ives and Sandy Kemsley have posted thorough reviews on Andrew McAfee’s (the patron saint of Enterprise 2.0) keynote at FastForward ‘08 on what’s happening in the Enterprise 2.0. You can catch the essence of McAfee’s talk from Sandy and Bill.
McAfee brought up an interesting point about something that has not been discussed enough up to this point — the role of incentives in encouraging Enterprise 2.0 use. Namely, that any incentives should be “soft” incentives, and the movement would be well served if collaboration were written into employee evaluations. (Hmm. How ’bout a nice pat on the back?)
Alas, however, the challenge is that companies will talk a good game about being all hip and collaborative and Web 2.0-ified, but when it comes down to the carrots and sticks to make it all a reality, they won’t do it. That’s because many managers work and are paid to work within siloed domains.
Getting Enterprise 2.0 technologies in the door and accepted is a challenge within itself. McAfee says even those most enlightened vendors and end users find it “hard to build good technology that is uncluttered, avoids feature creep, avoids love affairs with bells and whistles.” Managers, he said, “want to use technology to get through “pre-existing worklflows.”
And that is a challenge to gain acceptance of Enterprise 2.0 in the entreprise, which in turn will show up in job descriptions and incentive plans.
Where to start? Look for current technologies or processes that are causing people to scream in pain. “If people aren’t frustrated with what they’re doing now, getting them to move and change their work practices is going to be even more difficult.”
Moving to new technology approaches is a very painful process in and of itself, even if the move is to lightweight and collaborative applications. But this pain should be outweighed by the current pain being felt. That’s today’s challenge, McAfee said.
