Web 2.0 and the Enterprise

In this blog I have made several points that are reinforced by this McKinsey interview of Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His new book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges, explores the ways that leading organizations are bringing Web 2.0 tools inside.
I highly recommend you give a listen.

The points I found reinforced:

Top down versus bottom up
I've been in the top down crowd, working with executives to encourage them to use Web 2.0 tools and technologies, with varying degrees of success. Lately I have been recommending Twitter as an educational channel and using it effectively as such, but I do get a lot of push back. As Mr. McAfee notes "...what you see is—particularly for longer- tenured workers, particularly for older workers—this is a big shift for them, changing their current work practices and moving over to Enterprise 2.0" and, therefore, the longer tenured workers of the world don't particular warm to the subject.

Faking it
One of the things that makes Mr. McAfee pessimistic makes me so as well.
"When the blogs read like press releases and when they don’t, for example, turn
on the commenting feature on their blog, so that it’s just another megaphone for an
executive to shout at the organization. " He adds: "There are plenty of those out there already, and people don’t react too well to that."

Organic vs. processed information
If you are in middle management, particular marketing communications, and "view your job as one of gate keeping or refereeing information flows, you should be pretty frightened by these
technologies, because they’re going to greatly reduce your ability to do that."

Listen to what he has to say.