Writing the book on Enterprise 2.0

McAfee: I start with four case studies about organizations facing challenges or missed opportunities, and hopefully those big challenges or missed opportunities will be pretty familiar to the reader. Then, I get into Web 2.0 and the significant improvement in technologies available for collaboration. I show how, in each of the four cases, the organization grabbed some portion of that toolkit and made it work, helped address the challenge they faced.

I present a framework for thinking through what Enterprise 2.0 can do for you and how to think about it. At the end, I present some guidance about deployment--once you’ve made your decision, what you need to do to ensure a successful rollout. The book concludes by looking into the future a little bit and making some hopefully grounded predictions about where all this is headed.

HM: OK. What about those predictions?

McAfee: My broadest prediction is that these tools are going to increase differences between companies. In other words, there is a school of thought that says that technology is the great competitive leveler. Because you can buy SharePoint and I can buy SharePoint—or you can use Twitter and I can use Twitter—therefore we become more alike, and the differences between companies go down over a time. Everything I’ve seen, and all my research, points to exactly the opposite conclusion, which is that even though you and I might have access to the same raw material and technology, we do really different things with it. You might be a lot more successful at SharePoint than I am for technical, cultural, organizational—all kinds of reasons.

What I see happening is that technology may increasingly separate winners from losers in competitive battles. These technologies are only going to accelerate that trend because they actually are fairly difficult to do well, but if you can pull it off, they give you very valuable capabilities related to innovation and collaboration and collective intelligence. Those are things that help differentiate a company from its rivals. So, I’m pretty confident that this whole Enterprise 2.0 movement is not going to make companies more similar; instead, they will differentiate them more sharply.

HM: So, you’re quite confident that the Enterprise 2.0 movement is a fundamental shift in the way that organizations can share knowledge and gain collective intelligence and ultimately increase the bottom line?

McAfee: I am very convinced of that. I am also convinced that not all organizations are going to share that view. Even if they do, not all of them are going to be equally capable at deploying the new technologies and the new styles of collaboration and getting people to change the way they work. However, for the ones that actually can get through that process, I think some brilliant capabilities await them.