Critical Success Factors in Enterprise 2.0: The Importance of Business Performance

Enterprise 2.0: Current Challenges

Andrew McAfee (2009) wrote in his Enterprise 2.0 book about one of the big shifts witnessed from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 which was “the realization that software could be social – that in addition to making individuals more productive and automating away their roles in a process, software could and should be used to let people find one another and form communities” (p. 139).

Several years before, in the spring of 2006, the same McAfee published in the MIT Sloan Management Review magazine an article entitled Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration. The article, taking on the example of the investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) to reflect on the use of Web 2.0 tools inside organizations, is generally viewed as the text that coined the Enterprise 2.0 expression. And it opened up with a question: “Do we finally have the right technologies for knowledge work?” (McAfee, 2006, p. 21). That article is said to be one of the first case studies that shows how the use of software—in the particular form of social software—could help an organization work and share knowledge in a more efficient and human way.

Several years have passed now but the concept, its frontiers, advantages and challenges are still being discussed and researched, as more and more companies use the so-called social tools internally and report their experience and results.