At the height of its power in the late 1980s, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) had more than 120,000 employees worldwide. They were connected by Easynet, the largest private network in the world at the time, and by VAX Notes, arguably the world’s first Enterprise 2.0 tool.
In the more than 10,000 communities of VAX Notes, DEC employees collaborated and shared information on everything from product development to marketing programs to personal hobbies. As one VAX Notes user said, “No longer should a network be considered as the collection of machines and the wires that connect them, but rather as the collective intelligence of the people the network brings together.” 1
This has been true since the advent of the modern corporation when, for the first time, a vast number of people were brought together to work, in specific functions and specialties, for a common purpose. Andrew Carnegie may have nailed the most important success factor for any corporation or organization, then and now, when he said: “The only irreplaceable capital an organization possesses is the knowledge and ability of its people. The productivity of that capital depends on how effectively people share their competence with those who can use it.” 2
The adoption and adaptation of Web 2.0 tools for business use, which has resulted in a proliferation of Enterprise
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09Sep
[ON magazine, Number 2, 2008]
ENTERPRISE 2.0 McAfee and Davenport REVISITING THE DEBATE
Enterprise 2.0 is truly a transformative technology or just an incremental evolution of collaborative tools, Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport resume the conversation.
On June 18, 2007, at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, Andrew McAfee, the associate professor at Harvard Business School who coined the term in 2006, debated the merits of Enterprise 2.0 with Thomas Davenport, who holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College. A year later, ON was curious to see if the two had reached any agreement on what Enterprise 2.0 is and whether it truly represents a powerful new IT toolset. The following are edited excerpts from their conversation.
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a brain would be if it were made of hardware and wire instead of flesh and nerves…. Suppose that we consider the basic operation of all thinking: in the human brain it is called learning and remembering and in a machine it is called storing information and then referring to it…A machine can handle information; it can calculate, conclude, and choose; it can perform reasonable operations with information. A machine, therefore, can think…. Mechanical brains are one of the great new tools for finding out what we do not know and applying what we do know.”
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