What is enterprise 2.0?

“The main objective of a 2.0 business is to generate spaces in which people can realize their personal projects on a collective basis: a distributive network that encourages new relations without being bound by centralized decision-making and in which those on the periphery are just as important as those in the middle.”
Chapter 11, Sustainability 2.0.

According to Harvard Business School Professor Andrew McAfee in his article called Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration in the Sloan Management Review, enterprise 2.0 is the implementation of the attributes and characteristics of Web 2.0 in business. It represents a new way of working within corporations, by which new technologies and business practices permit workers to surpass the limits imposed by the communications tools offered by the earlier model.

He then supplements his definition by means of the acronym SLATES, which describes the functionalities that define an enterprise within this new context: search, links, authoring, tag, extensions, signals.

As a result, an evolving enterprise would go from vertical hierarchies to an horizontal organization, from bureaucracy to agility, from scant to high flexibility, from protection of knowledge to transparency, from a centralized model to a distributive one.

In the book, we also provide with some key tags to bare in mind when deciding to evolve into enterprise 2.0: openness, simplicity, bonds and dynamism.

But this whole new scenario does not necessarily include a social conception beyond the technological transformation. Jevon McDonald, from The FASTForward Blog, explains:

“Enterprise 2.0 has given us the beginnings of a technical framework for a new type of organization, but it has not provided us with a conceptual model that is robust enough to create a more complete business design.

We need to move past this isolated and highly technical thinking towards a larger conceptual model which can be referenced to make both technical purchasing decisions, but also strategic business decisions.”

Like this, he introduces some questions he believes can help redefine the notion of enterprise 2.0:
- How do the roles of People in an organization change?
- What is the role of Technology in this new organization?
- How is the idea of Process affected?

Of course, there is also the intriguing clue we brought up in Sustainability 2.0 as to where this new model will have an impact on sustainable practices and responsible-thinking. We leave this issue open for future discussion.