This is another in a series of notes from the 2009 KM World. This is the Opening Keynote: Resetting the Enterprise With 2.0 Collaborative Tools by Andrew McAfee. Here is part of the session description.

“Andrew McAfee focuses on how emergent social software platforms are benefiting enterprises, and how smart organizations and their leaders are making effective use of them to share knowledge, inspire innovation, and enable decision making. He shares strategies, stories, and real-world examples of successful enterprise collaboration using 2.0 tools.”

Andy began with his definition of enterprise 2.0, It is “the use of emergent social software platforms by organizations in pursuit of their goals.”  Here is what I wrote recently. (see What is Your Definition of Enterprise 2.0? Here is Mine.) I think they are very similar. Andy said that now technology is not being used to tell people what to do but instead it is being implemented to let people decide what to do about it. I really like this. He then asked those who find their intranet easier to find stuff than the Web. Five people raised their hands. This is the first time that I have seen anyone raise their hand as I have been asking audiences the same question with attribution after I first heard Andy ask it several years ago.

Andy told a story about the recent time when he was in a rental car that did not work. So he tweeted and asked for help and got 16 responses in a few minutes, most from people he did not know. People do want to help each other. I found this out last weekend when I had a Twitter spam attack and got lots of help to fix it. So he said let’s stop worrying about the risk of social media within the enterprise. People are usually helpful. He finds very few horror stories inside the enterprise.

One difference from the Web is that your identity is traceable within the enterprise so bad behavior will be found out. I would add that you are also working with colleagues who hopefully share a common goal. In fact, I think that enterprise 2.0 can help people be more aligned around common goals. Andy said that enterprise 2.0 has improved his view of humanity.

He then said to avoid the idea that there is one way to do things. Innovation is more the issue now than strategy. There are now chief innovation officers. Crowdsourcing is becoming more common. Companies are now sending problems out on the Web for others outside the enterprise to help them solve the issue. Merck is one example.  The diversity of people looking at an issue increases the rate of solving a problem.

The key is building communities than people want to join and participate.  Verizon has opened up a portion of their web site and let others help them solve customer issues.  Some people are spending a lot of their time for free helping Verizon with customer service.  These people do get status and recognition.

Andy said he used to be against the wisdom of crowds. He thought crowds would get dumber when they got together. Now he has completely changed his mind.  He gave an example where a group prediction market beat an expert and a synthesis of the polls on the electoral college vote spread in the 2008 US presidential election.  The lesson: crowds can be very wise. You should enable peer review and experiment with collective intelligence.

The great benefit of using Enterprise 2.0 is not sharing documents for collaborating. This is helpful but it is not the biggest benefit. Instead it is connecting the dots on issues. He gave the example of the wiki set up by the US intelligence community: Intellipedia. Because of this wiki people now know better who is doing relevant work on topics of interest.  They are discovering useful people on their topics of interest.  There is less parallel play and re-inventing the wheel.

He gave some major benefits from a recent McKinsey study that found increased customer satisfaction, increased innovation, access to knowledge, access to internal experts, and employee satisfaction.  While these results are likely from true believers, the magnitude is impressive.  Adopting enterprise 2.0 seems to be a necessary move.  Now the internal processes of the organization can be supported through technology.

He concluded with some pointers for success.  He twisted this by talking about how to fail.  Declare war on traditional management and technology, Bad idea for two reasons. It is bad marketing and it is wrong.  Allow walled gardens to flourish. Do not have disconnected content and teams. Accentuate the negative.  Do not worry too much about the risks.

Another thing to avoid: Try to replace email.  It will be hard and email does have its uses, especially as a single source.  We tend to overweight the advantages of the technology we are using.  A replacement technology needs to be ten times better than what you are using.  Email is the current technology and is not that bad.  Over night success occurs when there is no existing technology on the issue, examples are Facebook and Twitter.

Another thing to avoid: put into many features. Keep it simple like an iPod, Google, etc.  Technologists love features but users respond to simplicity even it then think they want more features.

Another thing to avoid: Overuse the word “social.” This is not top of mind for senior execs. While I would agree with this I would also not go with enterprise 2.0 with execs. It seems that technology labels are difficult in general. Just promote what it does.