In 2006, Andrew McAfee’s article on Enterprise 2.0, along with subsequent works, helped organizations think about how people use social software to more effectively share information and connect with one another. With an initial focus on tools (e.g., blogs, wikis), organizations undertaking “E2.0” initiatives began a long journey to improve the way employees build communities and collaborate on business activities. In parallel, early success stories highlighted the need for organizations to address cultural dynamics that often hinder these transformative efforts. While business objectives driving E2.0 projects were often “soft” (lacking measurable ROI), the intent generally could be aligned to overall needs to improve productivity, growth, and innovation. Today, the challenges of culture and metrics remain persistent issues for the industry, but there have also been two significant technology-oriented transitions that are worth noting:
- A shift from tools to platform
- An expansion from platforms to ecosystems
Around 2009, organizations began shifting their deployment tactics away from separate best of breed tools and towards platforms. While specialized tools offered individual value, their collective use resulted in a more complicated infrastructure with redundant functionality over time as vendors added features already existing in other tools. Relying on a potpourri of tools also resulted in an inconsistent user experience and perpetuated the information silos organizations sought to reduce. Adoption of a “platform approach” consolidated tools into a common set of services and infrastructure. It’s important to note that a “platform approach” does not mean a single vendor – the approach pre-supposes an architected framework that unifies tools and applications into a cohesive, modular, standards-based environment that provides for extensibility and interoperability with other systems. Consolidation helps deliver a consistent user experience, aggregate information into an assessable environment, and streamlines operational management while reducing functional overlaps and infrastructure complexity. A platform approach also helps centralize people, content, and data administratively so that policy can be applied consistently.
In 2011, we are witnessing the next market shift – the expansion of vendor and platform capabilities to support a broader array of services important to developers, partners, professional services, system integrators, and ISV’s – as well as new distribution channels (e.g., app stores). Platform ecosystems represent a new level of market maturity. It means that collections of interlocked business models are taking shape around a vendor’s platform to provide greater (and deeper) levels of lifecycle support for solutions enabled by the underlying technology. The shift towards ecosystem means that buyers will assess a vendor’s capability to sustain a thriving ecosystem in addition to the resources necessary to sustain technology advancements. While this trend presents enormous opportunities, it also challenges the original scoping of Enterprise 2.0. E2.0-related solutions were originally envisioned as being better situated towards community and social networking scenarios than more traditional business activities. That’s no longer the case. Ecosystems surround a platform blend into other solutions that may only be tangentially associated with Enterprise 2.0. We now see the result of “social” becoming more generalized in the market through use of hybrid terms to describe transformed business models (e.g., Social CRM, Social BPM, Social Business). This situation reflects the inevitable blending of different ecosystems as Enterprise 2.0 platforms become integrated into more complex, multifaceted solutions.
Cisco Blog » Blog Archive » Enterprise 2.0 Five Years Later: From Tools To Platforms To Ecosystems
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