Andrew McAfee’s article about Enterprise 2.0 that appeared in MIT/Sloan Management Review will be available here, free for about a month.
His working papers are here. A few representative excerpts:
An internal blogosphere. I spent time recently at one of the world’s largest technology companies, talking with the people who were responsible for deploying enterprise 2.0 tools, including employee blogs. On the page that listed the most recent blog posts I saw a title something like “Why Our Recently Announced Strategy is Misguided.” I was a little surprised by this, and asked the team if this level of feistiness was rare, and if the people who wrote such posts found themselves in hot water. They assured me that the answer to both questions was no.
Wikis. In the default configuration for mediawiki software, each page has an accompanying ’discussion‘ page where contributors have background conversations, hash out any differences, and together decide what should go on the main page. This arrangement facilitates not only collection of information, but also convergence of opinion. The mass of high quality Wikipedia articles on controversial topics like global warming attests to the efficacy of wiki technology and the dual-page structure.
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I guess its Andrew McAfee day here at the Internet Time bunker. His white paper published today, the Ties that Find supports my belief that ROI is obsolete:
Then Andy draws on the work of Mark Granovetter, the Stanford prof who came up with “the strength of weak ties.” In a nutshell, the Granovetter argument is that your inner circle is not where to get innovation and answers (they are too similar to you.) It’s the members of other networks they belong to who provide fresh perspectives. In Granovetter’s original research, it turned out that no one found a job through a friend; everyone got hooked up to a job opportunity by a friend-of-a-friend, something Granovetter dubbed a “weak tie.”
McAfee’s observation is that to support innovation, social networks need to support weak ties.