Social media has transformed the consumer world and is now crossing the firewall into the enterprise. New forms of knowledge sharing, collaboration and community building may be the biggest thing to hit enterprise IT since the introduction of the PC.

1. The New Enterprise
Collaboration Imperative
How Leading Brands Achieve Tangible Business Results
Via Social Computing
Frank Jurden
VML Strategy and Insights
February 2008

2. 2The New Enterprise Collaboration Imperative
Social computing in the enterprise, so-called
“Enterprise 2.0”, has arrived. In a variety of sectors,
it is transforming how companies support custom-
ers, how they collaborate with trading partners
and how they enable high-performance teams
across continents.
For professional services organizations and
their teams of globally distributed knowledge work-
ers, social computing appears as a welcome cure
for the ills of “old-school” collaboration approaches:
those document-centric, proprietary, static and
heterogeneous systems that infiltrated IT organiza-
tions over the past two decades.
Taking a page from innovations in the
consumer space, enterprises are embracing person-
centric platforms that are socially connected and
self-organizing. Industry watchers see this as more
than a fashion; these trends signal non-trivial shifts
in enterprise IT strategy and architecture.
The New Enterprise
Collaboration Imperative
How Leading Brands Achieve Tangible Business
Results Via Social Computing
Frank Jurden
VML Strategy and Insights
February 2008
Architecturally, these emerging solutions exploit
the Lego®-like architecture of web services, enabling
frictionless interconnectivity on both sides of the
firewall and rapid-fire deployment of new capabili-
ties and mash ups.
Strategically, the shift is toward decentralized
networks, toward delivering value to knowledge
workers via emergent communities and ad hoc
collaboration, and toward providing new mecha-
nisms for cataloging, discovering and crowd-sourc-
ing corporate intelligence. All in a near-real-time,
free-form and ad hoc manner that more closely
parallels the offline collaboration process.
The business results are impressive: business
agility improves, time-to-solution decreases, produc-
tivity measures move up, customer satisfaction
metrics improve.
Mainstream IT managers are taking note of
these trends, and their budget decisions reflect their
Social media has transformed the consumer world
and is now crossing the firewall into the enterprise.
New forms of knowledge sharing, collaboration and
community building may be the biggest thing to hit
enterprise IT since the introduction of the PC.

3. 3The New Enterprise Collaboration Imperative
growing endorsement: nearly three in four IT execu-
tives plan to maintain or increase spending on Web
2.0 technologies in their organization, especially
initiatives that support collective intelligence and
peer-to-peer interactions.1
The Strategic View
So what? What is the relevance of these trends for a
global organization? We see three reasons why large
organizations should give serious considerations to
the promise of Enterprise 2.0.
Structural Bonds. Teams matter. With knowl-
edge workers distributed across time zones and
continents, global organizations could create a
new approach to collaboration that transcends
organizational silos. Next-gen collaboration creates
new “structural bonds” across organizational and
geographic boundaries, tying together firms in ways
that go beyond email and voice mail. Accenture,
McKinsey, IBM, Microsoft, Ernst & Young and other
leading firms exploit these types of bonds to drive
cohesiveness among business units, customers and
partners.2
These are real-world examples of the busi-
ness benefit of structural collaboration.
These bonds would include appropriate integra-
tion of select systems, business process and cultural
practices in ways that enhance client service and
virtual-team delivery. Even the IT development
process required to prepare for these new systems
would foster a closer sense of community and
collaboration among far-flung sister companies.
Relationship Capital. Relationships matter. The
competitive strength of successful organizations
lies in the peer-to-peer relationships within and
between organizations, among account managers,
executives, engineers and the like. This is one of the
central themes in Jim Collins’ Good to Great: it’s not
the celebrity CEO that creates the category-leading
firm. Rather, it is the culture of connectivity among
leaders and managers – so-called “Level 5 Leader-
ship” – that provides the foundation for superior
performance.3
Specific to enterprise IT, former U.S. Secretary
of Labor Robert Reich argues that relationship
capital is…
“…one of the most important and yet most
neglected areas of capital formation. Compa-
nies need to utilize IT so that everyone in an
organization can take maximum advantage of
everybody else … because all other entry barriers
are dropping so fast, we need IT systems that
rapidly connect the right people to each other so
that there are real synergies.” 4
We in the ad agency business are acutely aware
of the value of relationship capital; agencies across
the globe also clearly recognize the urgent need for
individuals to self-organize in support of business
opportunities, in connection to professional events
and in support of expert-to-expert interactions.
Crowd Sourcing and Intelligence. Intelligence
matters. However, the cumulative expertise and
creativity of a firm is often underutilized and largely
inaccessible to other employees in the firm; it’s
disconnected, not easily discovered or distributed,
scattered across servers, and desktops.
When new needs for intelligence arise (as when
a firm has a new business opportunity), a firm’s
ability to leverage intelligence could be charitably
described as inefficient, relying on manual search
across disconnected silos, phone calls to old
colleagues, or – the solution of last result – a plead-
ing email to the company address book.
What intelligence is discovered via these
processes is often irreproducible for the next
opportunity given its idiosyncratic paternity. When
1
How Business Are Using Web 2.0, McKinsey & Co, 2007.
2
Best Practices Report Card, Information Technology Services Marketing Association, 2006.
3
Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Make The Leap…and Others Don’t. Harper Collins, 2001.
4
Robert Reich, The Economics of People, CIO Insights Online, December, 2006.

4. 4The New Enterprise Collaboration Imperative
history lessons have taught us anything, it’s that
technology alone, in isolation from the unique
business processes of a given firm and its institu-
tional patterns and practices, is a necessary but not
sufficient solution to the problem of competitive
advantage. Success lies in cleverly matching virtual
teams with a suite of tools that fit their habits, need
states and motivations.
The lesson here is that organizations should not
rush starry-eyed into any large-scale IT migration,
believing that blogging and wikis, for example,
are the answers to all corporate ills. Collaborative
systems that democratize content creation (viz.,
blogs and wikis) are only a partial solution as only
a minority of users actually create content.6
(See
Figure 1.)
organizational insight doesn’t accrete with succeed-
ing new-business opportunities, consistency and
quality of work suffer.
On the Pitfalls of “Big Bang” IT Initiatives
The promise of Enterprise 2.0 is alluring and the
adoption of these capabilities is well underway.
But before running headlong into a “big bang”
IT initiative, firms would be wise to examine the
lessons from previous IT revolutions (e.g., the
mainframe-to-desktop shift, the ERP shift, etc.). The
history of enterprise IT is littered with attempts
at large-scale transformations boldly begun, but
that ultimately fell short due to poor planning,
cost and timeline overruns, frustrated users, and
kludgey system design. True successes are the
exception more than the rule.5
If these expensive
The Typology of Participation
Percent of Web Users by Type of Activity
Figure 1
Base: US adult online consumers / Source: Forrester Research (2007)
Inactives
None of these•
activities
53%Spectators
Read blogs•
Watch peer-•
generated video
Listen to podcasts•
33%Joiners
Use social•
networking
sites
19%
Collectors
Use RSS•
Tag Web pages•
15%Creators
Publish Web•
page
Publish or•
maintain a blog
Upload video•
to sites like
YouTube
13%
Critics
Comment on•
blogs
Post rating•
and reviews
19%
5
Nicholas Carr, Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage. Harvard Business School Press, 2004.
6
Charlene Li/Forrester Research, Social Technographics, April, 2007.

5. 5The New Enterprise Collaboration Imperative
Best Practice: IT Capabilities for the
Social Enterprise
The issue of social computing in the enterprise,
therefore, is a more complicated and nuanced one,
depending in equal measure on identifying and
deploying IT infrastructure in a strategic fashion, as
on identifying and mapping the business processes
and cultural implications these systems are meant
to affect.
Moreover, the infrastructure requirements
of social computing themselves are multifaceted,
deriving utility not from a single “killer app” (e.g., a
blogging platform or a community tool) but rather
from an integrated suite of capabilities that address
compelling business needs.
Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School
has examined social computing in the enterprise7
and identified the IT capabilities of successful
collaborative systems:
Unified search across all content stores and•
user profiles
Frictionless user-controlled authoring, publish-•
ing, commenting and editorial processes
(blogs for dynamic content and wikis for less
dynamic content/reference materials)
User-generated linking among user profiles•
and assets (by affiliation, auto tagging or
declaration)
Tagging and taxonomic solutions covering•
both user profiles and assets (by affiliation,
auto tagging or declaration), both user gener-
ated and imposed
Extensions via open APIs, service-oriented•
architecture and the like
Signaling and syndication systems like RSS to•
notify interested parties of fresh content and to
share data across platforms and devices
Deploying all these capabilities within a firm
is time-consuming and labor intensive; clearly the
shift will not occur overnight. Firms planning to
embrace Enterprise 2.0 to the fullest will need to
secure a programmatic IT road map as well as an
unwavering executive commitment in order to make
the leap to social computing.
On the Future of Enterprise 2.0
The outlines of the future of enterprise IT are
emerging and that future will be unquestionably
social; what remains unanswered is just how broadly
social computing will be adopted. The innova-
tive and early-adopter firms that embraced social
computing are now realizing the benefits as well as
the limitations of a new enterprise IT paradigm.
Yet despite its early success, Enterprise 2.0 must
move beyond these early adopters if it is to evolve
from fashion to the de facto standard. Like the diffu-
sion of any disruptive innovation, broad adoption
will require appealing to the distinct and distinctly
pragmatic needs of later adopters.8
The value propo-
sition of Enterprise 2.0 must therefore evolve from
the allure of tools themselves to the demonstration
of tangible business value via peer-to-peer interac-
tion and emergent forms of knowledge sharing.
7
Andrew McAfee, Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring, 2006.
8
Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers, Harper Business Essentials, 1991