As those of you who’ve been keeping up with my work for the AIIM E2.0 Community blog know, I’m in the middle of a series of posts that started with my core beliefs about E2.0 and am working through each of them in turn to explore their implications for E2.0 strategy and practice.
In this post I’ll be looking at my third core belief: E2.0 requires fundamentally the same core operating principles and business practices that ensured success for E1.0.
Déjà vu all over again
We all remember the heady days of the Internet boom, where tech startups went from skunk works operations to multi-million dollar IPOs in no time with little more than a slick web presence and killer industry buzz. At the time, it seemed like these companies represented a wholly new kind of business, one that rewrote the rules of success, profitability, and value, fueled by the radically new medium of the Internet.
As we all know, this vision of Internet startups turned out to be completely false. Once the tech bubble burst, the wheat was separated from the chaff pretty quickly, and the determining factors for success were no different than they had always been: a solid business plan, the ability to monetize services and products, superior customer engagement, and so on.
I think we’re in an analogous position with E2.0, and it’s up to us as practitioners to temper the wild enthusiasm for E2.0 (which can easily lead to the pursuit of E2.0 for its own sake) with a dose of operational reality.
As I pointed out in the last post, all the best aspects of E2.0—collaboration, communication, connection, transparency, engagement—have been part of business as usual for the best companies for years now. Of course, they did so without the benefit of the technologies we have now; but let’s not forget just how radical today’s operational plumbing (like phones and reliable postal mail) once were, because in the not-too-distant future our innovations will be considered little more than plumbing as well.
What won’t ever be plumbing, however, are the principles at the heart of E2.0, which were there during E1.0 and will be there for E3.0 and beyond. If we keep that truth in mind, we can approach E2.0 with the right mix of vision and reality, enthusiasm and pragmatism to be successful.
The final word
So much for the continuity between E2.0 and E1.0. In the next post I want to look more closely at what makes E2.0 tick by examining my fourth core belief: E2.0 is not fundamentally about the relationship of technology to people but about the relationship of people to people.
In the meantime, as always, jump in and get the conversation started—I’d love to hear what’s on your mind.
#E20