Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business
March 8, 2013
There are certain timeless truths to the Enterprise – a desire to sustainable achieve its purpose, in an atmosphere of constant change and uncertainty. Another timeless truth has to do with the fact that Innovation provides a distinctive advantage.
We continue to learn more about what makes enterprises function better, the psychology of customers, the power of networks etc.
Every so often technology comes about that allows us to incorporate these new understandings into business designs.
Sometimes the confluence of these various drivers – new understanding and technology is such that it creates opportunities for radical innovation in business designs. Now is one such moment.
The Social Dimension of the enterprise is one such, where it is now possible to truly incorporate Social Elements, such as reputation and trust, the power of relationships etc in business designs. Portals, Content Management, Knowledge Management etc all fell short in being able to realize the Social Architecture.
Business has always been social. Historically it could ignore the human/social dimension when other models still worked. Now they do not in most cases, so we are paying attention to the social dimension, and technology is making it possible to realize those aspects.
There are a number of ideas in the new Business and Enterprise Designs, which are not just technology related such as Enterprise 2.0 nor Social. There are many more concepts being integrated.
The terms ‘social business’ or ‘enterprise 2.0’ are indeed buzzwords. They often do more injustice in the sense that they distract from realizing systemically robust solutions, that are focused on business and get obsessed with technology and marketing-speak to the point of being gimmicky and cutely prescriptive.
Fluid flows of intangible resources across the enterprise, easy and rapid re-configurability of designs, open and transparent models, etc – all contribute to the ability to innovate and build more powerful designs.
And, it has long been determined that the underlying foundation of such an enterprise is Social and Collaborative. That will always be the case even when Enterprise n.0 comes along and people tire of Social-X.