“There are three schools of thought about what’s going on here,” says Andrew McAfee, the high-profile Harvard University associate professor who is now both researching and spearheading the new phenomenon that has become known as ‘Enterprise 2.0’.

First, he says, Enterprise 2.0 could all amount to nothing: “It’s just hype; move along people, there’s nothing to see here.” The second school of thought is that it is important but it is in the same category as electricity or the telephone: “It’s useful to have, but it’s not something that enables us to differentiate ourselves from our competitors.”

Or third, Enterprise 2.0 could be something more significant altogether: “It’s going to make a real difference. It’s going to make us very different from each other. It’s a disrupter”.

There are many in the business world, and in corporate IT, who will favour either the first or the second interpretation.

But McAfee himself clearly favours the third way. Along with other key pioneers in social networking, such as Tim O’Reilly (who ‘leads’ the Web 2.0 movement) and Euan Semple (who pioneered the BBC’s use of social networking technologies), he believes that simple, collaborative technologies, such as wikis, blogs, social tagging and group messaging, are not just for consumers, but can improve creativity, productivity, collaboration and visibility within an enterprise.

While not everyone will necessarily agree that the impact of Enterprise 2.0 will be as disruptive as these pioneers believe, many do expect dramatic take up of such technologies. “Social networking has not taken off in the enterprise, but its one of the biggest opportunities. It enables you to do what you do in the analogue world. It’s very powerful,” says Ray Lane, the former chief operating officer of Oracle and now a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. “There’s a lot out there for consumers that we’d like to use in business.”

O’Reilly, CEO of technical publisher O’Reilly Media, believes that many people have misunderstood both Web 2.0 and its importance to business. “People got hung up on wikis and blogs, etc. Web 2.0 is about network effects, and in particular, network effects around data. Enterprises own huge databases, but often they haven’t figured how to make them better by user participation.” Amazon, notes O’Reilly, figured out how to harness user participation to exploit what was initially just a huge catalogue of books.

This insight also helps to explain why a search company such as FAST is putting such emphasis on Enterprise 2.0. Relational databases, explains FAST CEO John Marcus Lervik, are heavily structured, and difficult to change. But using search technology, data is flexible, schema-less and can easily be tagged by the end users. “It makes the user experience much better.”

McAfee’s contribution to the development of Enterprise 2.0 has been to introduce some academic rigour and clarity to the issue. First, he offers some clear (although inevitably disputed) definitions. Enterprise 2.0, he says, is “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners.”

“Emergent” is a key word, and refers to the way in which adoption of the technologies and practices is not imposed or structured from above, but is at least semi-spontaneous and self-organising.

McAfee has coined the acronym SLATES to describe the six components of an Enterprise 2.0 technology: Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions and Signals. In practice, this means employees or partners can create a loose body of knowledge using simple authoring tools, and this knowledge is easily searched; they can readily create navigational links and pointers; they can tag any piece of information to help themselves or others retrieve it easily, or link it to other information; they can make ‘extensions’ – for example, by saying, if you found this useful, then you might also want to see this; and they can send out signals when something is interesting – for example, with an RSS feed.

But how disruptive and useful is this technology? Any disruptive technology should be valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable, says McAfee.

The first test (valuable) is passed fairly easily in some cases, because there are so many examples of Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 technology working extremely well: without wiki technology, for example, Wikipedia would have been impossible.

The second test is rarity – which McAfee defines as the rarity of successful examples. Research shows that while many organisations have put tools in place, getting people to actually use them can be difficult. “It takes a lot of energy to get this stuff to work.” It can involve coaching, rewarding, leading by example and setting expectations.

A third test is inimitability. McAfee’s research shows that while the software is easy to buy, successful examples are extremely hard to copy. “Best practices do not diffuse,” says McAfee.

Finally, is it non-substitutable? Again, Wikipedia serves as an example of a service that could not have been produced in any other way.

Even McAfee concedes, though, that the benefits are not, as yet, clear. “All we have are anecdotes, case studies and a lot of hope.”

Further reading in Information Age

Search as a platform