Gaining Value with Enterprise 2.0

Following up on my previous post regarding how Enterprise 2.0 can deliver value to an organisation.

Competitive advantage from better interactions by Scott C. Beardsley, Bradford C. Johnson, and James M. Manyika (Mckinsey Quarterly 2006, 2) has provided very important insight to this question and might have possibly answered a large part of the question. Please try to get your hands on it.

The most interesting point the authors have made is "The old strategies for efficiency improvements don't apply to employees whose jobs mostly involve tacit interactions; instead, company must boost these workers' productivity by making them more effective at what they do. As a result, the company will build talent-based competitive advantages that are difficult for rivals to replicate."

I absolutely agree with the authors on this point and by using enterprise 2.0 technologies, it would allow employees to collaborate and work more effectively. Thus gaining competitive advantage. Everyone knows the importance of gaining competitive advantage and organisations can transform their business all they want but gaining competitive advantage through technology is an expensive and frustrating experience. Unless your organisation is like Google who can constantly innovate, build and deploy innovative solutions for your workforce and customers, otherwise it would be very difficult to gain much competitive advantage.

Many would also have come across the benefits of knowledge management systems (KMS) and how it can benefit an organisation. However, KMS can be hard to build, time consuming and might be very expensive as well. Enterprise 2.0 can deliver the benefits of the KMS, provide collaboration opportunities, can be deployed using the numerous open source applications in the market, integrate publicly available information with organisation specific information and provide employees with an excellent background information to make the most informed decision. The more informed the decision is the likelihood its a better decision and this will allow organisations to gain "baby steps" towards competitive advantage.

I believe this is the spot in which organisations would buy into the idea of Enterprise 2.0 and be willing to spend money on it. Knowledge is power and enterprise 2.0 technologies is just the tool to deliver the benefit. With internet all competitors are on the same level playing ground, the only way to beat competitors is to constantly innovate new products and services, listen to what consumers have to say, feed it back to your organisation and update and upgrade your offerings. Speed is key and enterprise 2.0 delivers it - real-time.