Enterprise 2.0: Mining McAfee's Empty Quarter

In his 7 November blog post, Andrew McAfee noted that currently the uptake in Enterprise 2.0 collaboration and participation technologies seems to be confined to two primary user communities he calls “the newbies” and “the techies.” The newbies refer to the pool of younger entrants to the job market who have used Web 2.0 technologies in high school and college years. The techies are typically tech savvy IT staffers and a diaspora of tech advanced people in outposts across a company or organization.

But as McAfee’s chart points out there’s a Montana-sized quadrant of non-adopter knowledge workers out there that have yet to participate in or uptake Enterprise 2.0. The Young Turks might say “so what, we’re taking over now.” Managers might say, “so what, we have email.” But business leaders and highly skilled knowledge workers should care because, as McAfee points out, “a high amount of the company’s accumulated knowledge and expertise resides nowhere else except in the heads of the empty quarter’s inhabitants.” In other words, the Empty Quarter is an untapped gold mine of potential innovation, competitiveness and market value.

The problem is this too much of the gold in the mine (and minds) is trapped under the rubble of corporate email. Email is, as a technology and application, designed as a communication tool.  Unfortunately, it’s also now a document management system, light-weight workflow system, and knowledge workers spend an inordinate amount of time (read money) managing the miasma of content and project flows through various email chains.

In email channels important business thoughts get lost and therefore lack persistence or re-use potential.   Enterprise 2.0 technologies and applications get at the Empty Quarter gold mine by:

• Making the information exchange among knowledge workers more widely visible.
• Allowing for better persistence and therefore re-use of information
• Catalyzing  broader ideation and knowledge transfer
• Accelerating project and collaboration processes
• Characterizing and capturing unstructured information in early stages of project conception before formal project management and content management applications are needed.

The dynamics of Enterprise 2.0 tools and use practices mine the gold (n of the skills and (often tacit) knowledge trapped in the McAfee's Empty Quarter.    Smart companies and knowledge workers will see the use of Enterprise  2.0  as this era’s mining technology of the 21^st century gold rush for innovation and market competitiveness.