The second speaker today was Associate Professor Andrew McAfee, talking about the state of the Enterprise 2.0 meme. He’s going to talk about three items on the report card:

• Awareness = A … Grade = A. Most of the awareness is being driven by students. Social software is different from CRM, ERP and other things, which are “anti-social”. Allowing people to build a network of colleagues and peers is good. Getting more and more people on social software is a good thing. Freeform authoring is important … it means that we don’t have to assume what people know in advance or what they want to do. Users can generate meta-data immediately and as a by-product of their work. Emergence is important too.
• Technologies and Tools = A- … Grade = A-. We’re making excellent progress, with lots of innovation and trials of new things. Startups are doing good things, and incumbents have not been slow in rolling out legitimately new tools and approaches (and walking away from inherently more structured and imposing structure). Good progress at rolling enterprise needs, eg, integration with identity management and directory systems. Dangers … watch out for feature creep and less than ideal ease of use, and note that these technologies are not being deployed in a vacuum … email is used by 100% of people today. Andrew calls this the 9x problem of email.
• Communicating Specific Results and Benefits = C … Grade = C. There are still too few case studies of success / war stories of Enterprise 2.0. We need to expand these significantly if we are to get traction with decision makers in organizations. We shouldn’t keep reaching back to the same old case studies / benchmarks / stories from the trenches. Andrew advocates that we shouldn’t go for ROI studies — they are dis-believable. What we can do is to talk about what happened in organizations as a result of rolling out the technologies.

Andrew’s proposal: What we need to do is to create an Enterprise 2.0 repository for Enterprise 2.0 efforts. Key considerations … we need to throw the gates open as wide as possible (emergent, widely accessible, etc.), we need to disclose where the information is coming from (it’s okay for the case study to come from a vendor, but it should be disclosed), we need ground rules (eg, like Wikipedia has for its online encyclopedia). Finally, Andrew volunteers to participate in this effort, but we need a couple of technologists / vendors to step forward and provide the technical infrastructure.