Introduction

The American alligator may be considered an anomaly of Darwinian evolution. It weighs four hundred pounds, has a brain the size of an olive and a relatively mediocre sense of sight and hearing. Yet, it has been a card-carrying member of the ecosystem for two hundred million years. It’s survival secret? Some very sophisticated sensory capabilities that can detect the smallest movement of its prey in water and a bite that can exert two thousand pounds per square inch of pressure.

Like the alligator, there are a lot of technology solutions in large enterprise IT ecosystems that survive on brute force and the ability to do a few functions extremely well. Several of these solutions have survived for many years and are an indispensable part of the enterprise environment. New technologies that fail to recognize the dependency on legacy technologies and can not integrate with them are easily marginalized in the enterprise ecosystem. Can disruptive technologies such as Enterprise 2.0 be successfully deployed in such IT environments? Yes. However, they have to crawl before they can walk or run and more importantly they have to co-exist with the alligators.

M. R Rangaswami from the Sand Hill Group uses a broad definition of Enterprise 2.0 to include “a new set of technologies, development models and delivery methods that are used to develop business software and deliver it to users”. Andrew McAfee from Harvard Business School, credited with coining the term “Enterprise 2.0”, has defined it as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers”. A raging debate on the subject has attracted a lot of attention with some really well thought out arguments on what Enterprise 2.0 really means.

Notwithstanding the controversy around a precise definition for Enterprise 2.0, it broadly encompasses the adoption of next generation technologies and processes in the enterprise. The key word is adoption. The pertinent question is – can these new technologies, development models and delivery methods create a fundamental change in the IT environment? Is their value compelling enough to motivate a change in individual behavior? That brings us to the second key term – the individual.

Time magazine recently announced You as person of the year for 2006. This sums up the single most important business requirement for technology adoption in the enterprise (or anywhere else for that matter). Enterprise 2.0 technologies have a few characteristics that can set them up for success in the IT environment of the future. They are as follows:

1) The Walk-Up User Interface: Zero training is a perquisite for rapid adoption by knowledge workers. These technologies have had their origins in the consumer space and are much better designed for deployment without training.

2) The Collaboration Blueprint: Wikis and blogs are designed for globally dispersed knowledge workers and easier to manage than email threads. The adoption track record of these new collaboration technologies overshadows that of groupware solutions that originated in the enterprise. Enabling technologies have also evolved to support egalitarian communication needs.

3) The “You” Demographic: Bulk adoption of technologies requires a critical mass of users that embrace the technology. The new crop of recruits entering the workforce can be described as the “You” generation. These workers will expect Web 2.0 technologies not unlike the way their grandparents expected telephones in the workplace.

Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review has argued that the adoption of new collaborative technologies is not a sure bet as they are dependant on managers and professionals who have the business knowledge but very little spare time to implement them. This argument may not hold for very long when users see the immediate benefit of collaborating across time zones and locations without reviewing endless streams of email.

The execution and implementation of Enterprise 2.0 solutions will require a new breed of service providers who understand enabling technologies for You. Earlier this year Vinnie Mirchandani founder of Deal Architect, coined the term “appligator” to describe specialized system integrators implementing innovative technologies. System integrators who have proficiency in next generation technologies such as web services and service oriented architectures will have an advantage in the enterprise.

In addition to having a deep understanding of technologies, developmental models and delivery methods, the providers of services will also have to be well versed in the human factors associated with user behavior in a legacy IT environment. Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, an investment bank in London estimates that 2500 out of 6000 employees use a wiki to communicate and collaborate. A key part of the adoption story was a focus on the user experience. As an example, they pre-populated the wiki with content relevant to users before going live to make users instantly productive.

The business enterprise values execution, predictability and consistency of performance. Large IT environments represent a disembodied nexus of processes and technologies and services that were implemented to get the job done in time and under budget. Some really innovative technologies have gone the way of the Betamax format. Some archaic solutions that work well will persist like alligators in the ecosystem.

While it is intellectually stimulating to engage in a “longbow versus crossbow” argument on which technology is better, most business managers will focus on what tools will help them win the war. What is different in the contemporary enterprise is the value placed on individual adoption and empowering the knowledge worker as a means of achieving business results. The real question is not whether the enterprise is ready for 2.0. It is whether the enterprise is ready for You.