Enterprise 2.0 Conference - Moving from the Tacit to the Explicit

It’s good to meet face to face once in a while. While the focus of Enterprise 2.0 is on the collaborative and social computing technologies and tools that foster and enable collaborative work and interaction.  The attendees at the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week in Boston, enthusiastically expressed their penchant for in-person interactivity too.
Jessica Lipnack,  CEO of NetAge, in the final wrap up session , indicated she’d never gotten more business cards exchanged at a conference. This is a group of folks that want to connect!

Andrew McAfee, credited with articulating the definition of Enterprise 2.0 in a March 2006, MIT/Sloan Management Review  piece,  gave an overall assessment for the E2.0 attendees. For McAfee, both the technology and the market definitions have made enormous headway in only 15 months.  But there’s still not enough real-life examples and “how to” stories to guide implementation of both the technologies and the practical use and acceptance in business practice.  Or, as Peter Rip now of Crosslink Capital, said at last October’s Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco, “there’s a lot of ‘what’ but not enough ‘how’.”

So McAfee issued a challenge and call to action to begin assembling Enterprise 2.0 case studies and success stories, and jumped in to be the first volunteer towards this effort.  I couldn’t agree more, but I spoke with McAfee and conference chair Steve Wylie, with a note of caution that lot of enterprise users at the conference were still grappling with the problem set not the results yet.  One way to keep the momentum going from the conference would be to aggregate the problem sets as well as successful case studies.   Creating a collaborative mechanism for both case studies, and early definition of the problem sets would be a good thing for attendees and the E2.0 conference advisory board to jump on.

At a high level,Enterprise 2.0 is about moving the enormous value of the tacit assets of the knowledge worker into explicit assets embodied in completed projects, innovation and problem solving for businesses and organization. (see earlier blog post on “Collaboration – So What?”)

But as someone from the podium mentioned. “You don’t know what your knowledge workers know.”  And, I might add, you don’t know who they know either. Each knowledge worker is a mechanism to the network effect in and of themselves.  In essence, the value is not just tacit, but contextual. Even though an employee may have a role and a job title, his or her knowledge and skill set could be far reaching, well-networked, and only in the context of a business problem can it be manifested to full value.  The collaboration and social computing tools are meant to “unchain” those tacit values.

I'll be commenting on some of the solutions and conference workshops in the next few blog posts.

 

 

Comments

[Andrew Trickett]

Well done for recognising that, it is the social networking option that can help bring the tacit knowledge that knowledge workers hold out in to the open. I have just finished working with a firm of lawyers and the biggest problem that I had was convincing them that larger and better databases were the answer. I introduced them to the idea of boundary spanners and it was interesting that when I did some research on this within the firm the vast majority of people recognised who these people were and did go to them to find out that all important contextual information rather than trying to find it on a document management system or an intranet. Another issue as one of the commentators mentioned - think it was Thomas Davenport was that ocacsionally talking is working - because yes you are developing the social networks to receive reciprocal altruism in the future.

I'd be interested in following your progress in this respect or if you want to bounce some ideas off me - let me know.

[Patricia Fitzpatrick]

McAfee's MIT Sloan Management Review article can be obtained at http://sloanreview.mit.edu/smr/issue/2006/spring/06/