Digital Businesses: Creation of a Research Framework for Organizational Readiness for Enterprise 2.0

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 “technologies are used on organizations' intranet and extranets”. Enterprise 2.0 aims to help employees, customers and suppliers collaborate, share, and organize information via Web 2.0 technologies. Enterprise 2.0 refers to the “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers” (McAfee, 2006).

The Web 2.0 wave has strongly spilled over the corporations' boundaries and created a good deal of discussions about the way businesses have been managed so far and how they will evolve in the future. Under the name of Enterprise 2.0 social media has found its way into many businesses. From many examples we can now see what approaches lead to success. The mistakes that were made at the beginning do not need to be repeated. Some examples of early case studies in the field of Enterprise 2.0 were marked by a bottom-up, unintended approach. Nowadays you will find a strong agreement on a more strategic approach for future initiatives in order to extend the idea towards an Enterprise-wide approach with a transformable scope for the organization.

Organizations saw a lot of activities around blogs and wikis at the beginning. Collaboration and collecting knowledge was the main focus. Some of these activities went very well, but some projects led to great frustration. Connecting people with a Facebook-like social network or using micro-blogging seems to be the approach which works better than other Enterprise 2.0 activities. The activity stream provides the employees with information and gives companies the ability to communicate easily.

Social Media

Social Media these days is having a big influence on people’s personal or professional lives. People all over the world are getting affected by it. This media not only helps individuals in social interaction, but also helps companies in advertising their brand and also establishing relationship with customers where customers are free to speak their mind which is again visible to all other customers. This ability of social media where customers interact with and influence each other has reversed the traditional relationship between company and the consumers where in all the power was with the company. The consumer thought process is gaining visibility as is peer to peer consumer interaction. Social media has altered marketing in terms of not only the scalability of influence consumers have over each other but also the way in which consumers interact, evaluate and finally choose information, and has put them directly into the driver’s seat. This is what Saul Berman et al., call deliver an end-to-end experience for the consumer, without timing, pricing or brand experience breakages or conflicts (Saul Berman, et al., 2007).