Enterprise 2.0 – social networking in business
I want to draw attention to a new book – Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges, by Andrew McAfee (Harvard Business Press).
He discusses why email is still the king of communications technology in organizations, and has not yet been challenged by more modern social networking tools.
A review in the Financial Times by Richard Waters summarises my own feelings about the book:
McAfee correctly identifies the biggest reason for slow adoption: the resistance of individual workers to new ways of doing things that do not yield substantial and clear advantages to them. If e-mail gets the job done, why look further?
(…) There are other, deeper reasons behind the delayed arrival of Enterprise 2.0. As McAfee rightly says, Web 2.0 technologies are inherently egalitarian – they rely on treating each contribution equally, regardless of corporate hierarchy. That makes them a threat.
Organizations that want to use such tools need to change their culture to accept that people at all levels can make contributions to debate and discussion.
This book is definitely well worth a read.
