Two Sides of Enterprise 2.0

Optimize on September 01, 2006

The bulk of this article is a wide-ranging Q&A with Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee and J.P. Rangaswami on the advantages of using emerging technologies that facilitate collaboration, such as blogs, wikis and tagging. Many companies are currently evaluating these so-called Web 2.0 techs. Rangaswami has successfully introduced several of them at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort, where 4,000 employees actively use wikis, and RSS is used to transmit research to outside partners. Among their key points: The CIO's role in rolling out these techs is that of evangelist and enabler, rather than the traditional gatekeeper and information architect. Playing the role of devil's advocate or (his term) "pragmatic killjoy" on the final page is Babson College's Thomas Davenport. Some of his points: Companies don't really want their employees to say exactly what they think. Tools like blogs can be tremendous time-wasters. The world (and certainly the enterprise) is a naturally hierarchical place.