Where can Enterprise 2.0 lead my organization to ?
Recently Sean and I have started refining our approach to Enterprise 2.0. Yes, we already know most of the problems within the Enterprise, and how information chaos within an organization can be turned into a advantage for companies to achieve competitive advantage in the marketplace through the use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. We also know how various principles of Enterprise 2.0, when planned and executed properly, can lead organizations to achieve the benefits that proponents of Enterprise 2.0 have been preaching.
In fact, we know so many of these benefits now, that a number of blogs online started to surface regarding the stagnation of Enterprise 2.0. The problem being that no success stories have yet to surface yet on a satisfiable frequency in my newsreader everyday. Why??? How else is a company going to penetrate into a marketplace where there are more theorist that actual practioners? How else is a C-level going to buy in to your Enterprise 2.0 pitch?
This prompted a rethink on how these benefits can be perceived. The benefits, collectively packaged, actually lead to two of the most important corporate thinking in today’s business environment.
Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) & Innovation Management
In a highly evolving market today (which also couples with highly volatile operating environments for some), organizations can no longer rely on cost-cutting to sustain growth today. With cost-cutting becoming a norm these days, organizations are finding it harder and harder to distinguish itself from competitors.
The concept of CE comes in at the angle that every employee in an organization should be innovative driven to help corporations to gain in edge in the marketplace through creation of new corporate ventures / products / business processes.
CE works in par with distributing value co-creation in an organization, as the two actually preaches about delegating innovation / value creation down the value chain internally in an organization. The creation of corporate activity, nonetheless, is very difficult since it involves a radical change in internal organization behavior patterns.
So how do you actually make an employee to be interested enough to take his/her own initiatives to innovate for the company? Can Enterprise 2.0 help ?
Enterprise 2.0 does not preach to know-it-all regarding this. However, the tools when employed with proper change management / people strategy, can be an extremely powerful enabler towards harnessing the sort of environment that encourages CE at all levels. Enterprise 2.0 preaches about “breaking the silo” and “breaking the barrier”. CE preaches at a high level, that all employees be driven to help the company drive business growth, and not only executing day to day job functions. The two ideas coincide with one another.
A transparent enterprise through the use of Enterprise 2.0 principles and technologies, coupled with an environment that promotes innovation at all levels (including reward schemes), may as well promote CE and innovation faster that you think.
Promotion of transparent collaboration and harness of corporate talents promotes CE. Higher penetration of CE fosters faster innovation. Faster innovation of new products/business processes/corporate ventures will help organizations better compete in the marketplace (or even creating new marketspace for some organizations), and potentially lead to long term sustained growth for the organization. This is a cause-effect chain that makes a lot of sense to me.
As stated in Andrew McAfee’s Investing in IT That Makes a Competitive Difference, investing in the right technology can yield a significant performance difference for an enterprise.
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