Collaboration 2.0 through the New Organization (2.0) Transformation

Introduction

Due to the advent of Web 2.0 technologies in the last few years, new usages of information and knowledge sharing have emerged, i.e. the Enterprise 2.0 (or Enterprise Social Software) which is a new culture of technology usage. Enterprise 2.0 refers to “the use of Web 2.0, emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers” as defined initially by Andrew McAfee (McAfee, 2006) but has since evolved to cover further dimensions and areas of application (marketing 2.0, e-government 2.0, health 2.0, research 2.0, etc). The new generation of hypermodern employees (Generation Y or Gen Y) has developed new habits at work. They use everyday Web 2.0 technologies (blogs, wikis, RSS¹, social networking platforms, folksonomy, podcasting, mashups, virtual worlds, etc) in the private arena and, therefore, consider that such technologies for collaboration and self-organizing are the best means/methods to work. This generation has developed a new type of collaboration practice through intensive Web 2.0 usage, which is emergent (not planned and informal), open (indifferent to the organizational borders) and massive (implies crowds). This collaboration is called Collaboration 2.0 (Coleman & Levine, 2008; § Table 1). Collaboration 2.0 is one of the major activities in Enterprise 2.0.