OK, so this is a full year old, but I hadn't seen this blog entry by Andrew McAfee from Harvard Business School until now. Arguing that the raw materials necessary for Web 2.0 were in place years before critical mass was reached, McAfee says,
"Programmers could build fully-functional wikis, blogs, tagging systems, and prediction markets by carving them out of solid COBOL and serving them through the first Netscape browser. They'd be clunky, but they'd work. And I bet they'd draw users, too, because they'd tap into our desire to use technology to interact with each other, and also tap into the good stuff that emerges when we do so. As I wrote earlier, I think of Web 2.0 as the era when technologists really woke up to this; Enterprise 2.0 will be the era when business leaders join them."
McAfee goes on to make some really interesting comparisons between SOA and Enterprise 2.0, demonstrating in the process that SOA is just another attempt in a long line of similar attempts at reducing the complexity of enterprise integration. McAfee's point is that SOA requires an imposed structure up front; whereas, Enterprise 2.0, which McAfee defines as the "use of freeform social software within companies," allows systems and repositories of knowledge to emerge over time.
A couple of things are interesting to me in this blog entry. First, SOA, which, by this point, is an extremely overloaded term, is really just an attempt at solving an age old problem using the same ideas that have been tried before only with new technologies. And all of this is orthogonal to the new world of Enterprise 2.0.
Second, Enterprise 2.0 ,along with Web 2.0 and social media, is not about the technology, but about the current changes on the business side of the enterprise. Business executives are starting to see, one by one, the power of stepping back and reevaluating systems and methods of governance in light of their ability to encourage emergent behavior within their organization.
Don't get me wrong, the technology is important, and there are clearly a whole host of new technologies that have made our experiences with Web 2.0 and now Enterprise 2.0 more enjoyable; but the crux of these recent shifts in thinking is really about
- the desire for,
- the freely available means to experience
- and the willingness of various levels of management to explore new forms of governance which foster
emergence.
Technorati tags: SOA, Enterprise 2.0, Emergence, Social Media, Web 2.0, governance del.icio.us tags: SOA, Enterprise 2.0, Emergence, Social Media, Web 2.0, governance