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I received emails asking for more clarification about the difference of Enterprise Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. I created a pic (see below) that I hope will help.

First, let me attempt to relate Enterprise 2.0 to Ford, the car company. We could draw parallels to Enterprise 2.0 and what Henry Ford did with manufacturing. In this case we could say Ford created an 'assembly plant 2.0' which changed the core of the whole organization; organizational processes & relationships with said processes, the workforce, their roles, relationships with partners and customers, and how all of these parts interact with each other. This is a stretch but what I am trying to convey is that the core of the enterprise, down to how its business & peoples operate, changes and doesn’t resemble that of the organization before. This change resembles more of a social diagram tied together by Web 2.0 social tools and loosely coupled web apps capable of being composed or customized by each node at a moments notice to respond to whatever need arises using inputs(data & information) from around and out of the network.

[...pause after that mouthful...and we're back...]

In this stretch example, the change creates a Ford company that looks and operates much differently (better) than other enterprises around it still assembling cars the pre-Ford way. This is due to the relationships between the people, data, and the collaborative nature of the new organization.

I expanded a portion of this new picture to incorporate the two facets of Web 2.0 (The social collaborative paradigm shift & the Web 2.0 technology enablers that make this possible), how these once implemented correctly make up the Enterprise Web 2.0 infrastructure, and lastly how with the addition of a Enterprise collaborative paradigm shift, all make up Enterprise 2.0.

You’ll notice that the nodes here state ‘The User’ but this user could be one person, a team, or even a business unit. The connecting lines can be thought of as the social construct or Web 2.0 paradigm that I talked about in the last post, and the Web 2.0 bubbles as Web 2.0 technology enablers connecting Users with systems and other Users.

So, simply stated (I hope) Enterprise Web 2.0 is a technology solution made up of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 is the organizational paradigm shift that leverages these solutions which, by EW2.0's very nature, must be deeply embedded in the organization to work, creating a much different 2.0 organization as a result. This transition takes time as the whole organization re-roots strategically around the embedded Enterprise Web 2.0 infrastructure. Now one could raise the point of why go through all of this -- benefits of Enterprise Web 2.0 adoption? But this is an entirely new post all of its own. Here are a couple of posts that might help if interested.

• The Age of Customization: Enterprise Web 2.0 is the perfect pair of pants!
  
• Enterprise Mashups and Total Cost of Ownership
• Enterprise 2.0 meme map

A lot of people ask me about the definitions and or differences between Web 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. So here are some of my thoughts simplified for a blog post.

Web 2.0 – There are two parts to this one which will make sense when I get into the difference between Enterprise Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

1. Web 2.0 – the user-driven paradigm shift. Youtube, blogs, wikis, RIAs with greater self-service capabilities… all of these are examples of a paradigm shift from older HTML static, mostly one way communication of ideas and information to a new User-Driven web model which enables you and me to more easily contribute content, share information and collaborate with each other through the web.

2. Web 2.0 - technology enablers. This user-driven shift has been made possible in part by new or now accepted technologies and techniques which have gained greater penetration as web application tools. Such include: Ajax, proprietary RIA tools like Flex and Lazlo and now Silverlight, Service Orientated Architecture (SOA), Ruby on Rails and other lightweight dev models, Web Services like REST and RSS, Mashups (data and visual) and Tagging. Of course this is not an exclusive list but I think you get my point.

Enterprise Web 2.0 – the Web 2.0 technologies mentioned above put into practice in the enterprise. For example: richer, more productive customer self-service apps, inter-department collaboration through bogs, and wikis. But simply ‘slapping’ these technologies into a rooted organization will not bring about the same successes and value that Web 2.0 apps have enjoyed in the public domain. Enterprises have too many constraints and need a mind and culture shift along with deep embedment of these 2.0 tools into its processes to have any kind of a definable impact.

Enterprise 2.0 – The Enterprise 2.0 is analogous to #1 above in that it represents a user orientated paradigm shift of the enterprise makeup itself. It embraces the decentralized organization built around disparate data and information with users empowered to create new information built around and on top of others ideas through sharing, and collaboration. An organic organization loosely designed and constructed to empower knowledge workers to do what they do best by giving them what they need, when the need it and how they need it by enabling them with 2.0 technologies and nurturing this new paradigm mind set internally. Here enterprises reap the benefits of 2.0 through network effects from its user’s contributions and collaboration and realize success that increases proportionally as more users contribute to the organism creating a potentially indefinable value proposition to stakeholders.

Each of these could be expanded in much more detail but why make it more complicated as this? If you have any thoughts please feel free to share or contact me. That is after all the point.

As "tacit" interactions replace more routine business activities and the scale and complexity of many corporations creep upward, the need to manage collaboration is growing. According to McKinsey, nearly 80 percent of the senior executives surveyed in a 2005 study said that effective coordination across product, functional, and geographic lines was crucial for growth. Yet only 25 percent of the respondents described their organizations as "effective" at sharing knowledge across boundaries.

Since the worth of a knowledge worker is what he/she knows or knows how to locate, there is a need to increase the pool of knowledge and sources in order to increase value. This relates to knowledge management as well--this is a corporate approach to identifying knowledge, who knows, and what can be archived.

The Tacit work is, to a great extent, self-managed. He or she is expected to know how to organize and manage his/her work. He/she is also expected to have knowledge or know where to find it. This means the Tacit worker comprises of four subgroups which can be mapped against their respective daily tasks. For relevance, the respective tasks have been expanded to include more specific tasks one would perform using software and Web-based tools.

Building (Developers) Create solutions that meet changing business needs by leveraging existing enterprise, partner, and public resources.

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  • Build self-service web apps
  • Build Bill access & payment
  • Build integrated on-line CRM/ERP apps

Acquiring knowledge (Data Gatherer) Need fast views of disparate information the majority of their time in the office, are very mainstream in their office looking for data.

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  • Search and retrieve disparate enterprise information
  • Build analysis report views
  • Share views with other team members

Designing (Power User) Builds situational solutions to further streamline daily tasks and shares these with others.

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  • Create presentation mashups
  • Create next-gen portals and light analytics views
  • Share views with team members

Making decisions (Knowledge Worker) Mild Analytics, Information search and data manipulation. Planning.

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  • Real-time & tailored information sharing
  • Compose various data views
  • Make decisions based on real time information