Get this right: Enterprise 2.0 is about culture, not technology

It is a common misconception that installing a wiki or setting up a blogging platform automatically leapfrogs your organization as Enterprise 2.0.There are mushrooming examples all around us of companies that have installed a corporate wiki and a blogging platform. However, most of them do not classify as Enterprise 2.0 because the organization wide buy in is lacking. Meaning?

We have all seen organizations in which individuals ‘hoard’ knowledge like its their personal treasure. We have also seen organizations in which the top bosses themselves like to keep the teams ( and individuals) to live their lives in silos(“Hope you did not share this with Tom. Even if they ask you just say you don’t know. After all they have no way to verify if you have this piece. Let Tom’s boss make a formal request to me”). Quite a teams, the teams are willing partners in this exercise(“My loyalty is to my division, after all, my boss decides my annual bonus”). In such organizations, IT initiative in making a knowledge sharing platform available(e.g. a wiki) would just fall flat.

If your CEO has an official blog, and maybe your company uses Twitter to promote itself, but you find that most blogging platforms are blocked at your corporate internet firewall, then having an internal blogging platform is akin to closing all books, but mandating that notebooks are for everyone. Clearly, blogs are about information sharing, and the idea of blocking external blogs and allowing internal blogs is clearly contradictory. Quite a few companies do not understand that. Even if you have no firewall restrictions, but your organization culture does not accept flat format communication such as a blog, then you are possibly not even Enterprise 1.0.

However, if your culture encourages sharing of knowledge and does not build artificial boundaries based on internal information arbitrage, then your organization is Enterprise 2.0 already, even if you do not have a blogging platform or a wiki installed in your intranet environment. Blogs and wikis are just IT tools that enable that culture. Get this right!