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Well, after a short excursion into language and taxonomy, back to what I said I was going to talk about 3 weeks ago, current Practises and Process. I want to concentrate on processes most of all as there seems to be a lot of talk about E 2.0 being a free for all, just like Web 2.0 and that you need to give people the freedom to do whatever they want with the tools. I am writing this post as I am reading the ‘Enterprise 2.0, Die Kunst los zu lassen’ , edited by Willms Buhse and Sören Stamer with contributions from David Weinberger, Don Tapscott and Andrew McAfee to name just a few of the notable authors.

In it there is a lot of good information and I understand the book is now also translated and printed in English, so no more excuses ;-)

In the final chapter, the editors ask: “Can Enterprise 2.0 also benefit traditional companies? Can its ideas be utilized in more whore traditional companies, whose organization is more strongly hierarchical? […] an unequivocal ‘yes’”, according to the authors.

It got me thinking about that. What about a process-driven organization, that relies heavily on transactions taking place, document centric processes? Can they also benefit? And if they can, then how?

It is an easy case to speak for knowledge workers, say innovation management as a target, where there is a continuous need and already an exchange of information. Also, when talking about new ways to communicate with customers, it makes a lot of sense to allow for additional channels like Twitter, Facebook and others to be opened. However AIIMs Industry Research in 2010 show that between 40 and 50 % of organizations still block access to these tools though. Not a good start.

The second argument according to the editors is to allow for more efficient and effective communication. I go back to my process driven organization as an example. What is in it for them? Invoice processing?  Does that need E 2.0 to work better, more efficiently? I am not sure and although I have read some of the theory about this, what about some real practical examples? How can those kinds of organizations improve their repetitive and document centric processes? And I am not talking switching one annotation technology for another - more Web 2.0 - kind of tool, I am talking about Enterprise 2.0 with all the trimmings that Andrew McAfee has put in his definition.

So this time, no words of more or less wisdom, but a request for the readers of our community to help me out with a genuine question. I will start a subject in the discussion forums as well to help us along the way.

Looking forwards to the discussion.