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Overview
Harness New Collaborative Technologies for Competitive Gain
Most organizations realize that to succeed in today’s turbulent world, they need to perform as an integrated whole to tap into innovations and good ideas. Yet many still find it difficult to capture the collective intelligence of their employees and customers. Companies don’t know what they know—but they need to learn soon.
Thanks to a new class of collaborative technologies, organizations can now leverage information in valuable new ways, including: capturing accumulated knowledge; connecting employees who need information with the experts who have it; and enabling the best ideas to emerge organically. These technologies—labeled “Web 2.0”—first appeared on the Internet, where they powered successful social communities and collaborative platforms like Facebook and Wikipedia. Web 2.0 tools, practices, and philosophies are now being deployed by a wide range of organizations, making them more agile, productive, and innovative. This is the phenomenon of Enterprise 2.0.
In this compelling book, Andrew McAfee—a veteran researcher and writer on the business impact of technology, and the originator of the phrase “Enterprise 2.0”describes the power of Enterprise 2.0 and shows readers how to harness it. McAfee weaves together case studies, discussions of technological change, and multidisciplinary research to:
Show how early adopters like Google, the BBC, and the CIA have profited from Enterprise 2.0
Specify the concrete business benefits that arise when Web 2.0 technologies are properly deployed
Reveal where the real risks and roadblocks are with Enterprise 2.0, and why most concerns are unfounded
Guide companies through an Enterprise 2.0 deployment
Enterprise 2.0 is written not for technology experts, but for pragmatic decision makers in any kind of organization. Dispensing with hype, it takes a practical look at the competitive challenges facing so many organizations today and explores how they can be met and conquered with the right combination of novel technologies and enlightened leadership.
Synopsis
"Web 2.0" is the portion of the Internet that's interactively produced by many people; it includes Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and prediction markets. In just a few years, Web 2.0 communities have demonstrated astonishing levels of innovation, knowledge accumulation, collaboration, and collective intelligence.
Now, leading organizations are bringing the Web's novel tools and philosophies inside, creating Enterprise 2.0. In this book, Andrew McAfee shows how they're doing this, and why it's benefiting them. Enterprise 2.0 makes clear that the new technologies are good for much more than just socializing-when properly applied, they help businesses solve pressing problems, capture dispersed and fast-changing knowledge, highlight and leverage expertise, generate and refine ideas, and harness the wisdom of crowds.
Most organizations, however, don't find it easy or natural to use these new tools initially. And executives see many possible pitfalls associated with them. Enterprise 2.0 explores these concerns, and shows how business leaders can overcome them.
McAfee brings together case studies and examples with key concepts from economics, sociology, computer science, consumer psychology, and management studies and presents them all in a clear, accessible, and entertaining style. Enterprise 2.0 is a must-have resource for all C-suite executives seeking to make technology decisions that are simultaneously powerful, popular, and pragmatic.