Enterprise 2.0, Social Business, And Work Media

Andrew McAfee will be keynoting the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week, and sets that up by noting that it’s been five years since his paper of that name was published in the Sloan Management Review.

Next week the Enterprise 2.0 conference will take place in Boston, a little more than five years after my article of the same title appeared in Sloan Management Review. It’s fair to say that the use of emergent social software platforms (whatever you want to call it) has become a mainstream business phenomenon.

Which is heartening, since I’ve devoted a fair amount of my bandwidth over the past five years to understanding and talking about this phenomenon.

Well, this post is about ‘whatever you want to call it’ and I want to call it work media. But let’s go back, and review the past five years, or so.

Unmentioned in McAfee’s piece is the fact that the Enterprise 2.0 conference was originally called the Collaborative Technologies Conference for two years, 2005-2006. I was an advisor to the folks that dreamed up the conference back in 2004. Following the growing use of the Enterprise 2.0 term, the Collaborative Technologies Conference’s name was changed in 2007. I served on the program committee until 2010, and launched the LaunchPad and innovation awards for the conference.

But, I departed from the Enterprise 2.0 fold some time ago, arguing that the term is too restrictive. For a few years I was a vocal advocate for the term social business (see Andrew McAfee on Social Business versus Enterprise 2.0, One More Time), but that term has lost what distinguished it from Enterprise 2.0, aside from the avoidance of the way tired ‘2.0’ suffix.

And worse, social business seems to have been coöpted by consulting firms hoping to recreate top-to-bottom reorganization of businesses by consultingologists (see Social Business And The Retreading Of Failed Business Metaphors).

I introduced the term work media to peel away the remnants of old thinking about the application of modern social tools in the business context. I wrote about this in passing a few months ago (see Work Media, Systems Of Engagement, Or Social Business?).

The upshot? Enterprise 2.0 — like Web 2.0, that it is modeled on — is an attempt to differentiate a class of technologies and practices based on being unlike a pre-2005 1.0 generation of tools and techniques. Everything prior to 2005? 2006? Prior to 2000? However, the world has moved along considerably in that period of time, including innovations like tablet computing, the growing dominance of the cloud, and the rise of streaming based technologies like Twitter. Presumably these weren’t envisioned in Enterprise 2.0, except in the most general way.

And social business is a term that lifts ‘social’ from social media/networks, and encourages us to metaphorically imagine businesses operating in a more social way. One of the problems with the term is that it implies that businesses aren’t particularly social unless they adopt these new tools and tricks, which is problematic even if not intended that way. Secondly, social business has another meaning outside the US, meaning a business dedicated to social causes. As I said in Social Business And The Retreading Of Failed Business Metaphors, the social business moniker has been taken over by consulting companies, and like knowledge management and enterprise reengineering before it, social business is going to be associated with a lot of expensive flops.

So I am proposing the term work media to characterize a class of stream-based social tools that are being applied in the business setting. It’s a much more limited and less grand term:

from workmedia.ly

Work Media: social tools designed for the enterprise but based on the patterns of interaction, influence, and communication from social networks of the open web.  Work media tools share a number of characteristics, most centrally the streaming metaphor of Twitter and Facebook, with short updates from a variety of sources cascade into each user’s dashboard, from which each can derive a networked gestalt of the world. Work media is altering the DNA of business.

It’s a more focused term, just dealing with the tools and not the metaphysics of management intentions in the changing world we are in. Don’t get me wrong: it’s fine to wonder about what management is supposed to be doing, and how workers are supposed to make sense of their role in the changing business context. I just think we need a simple term for the tools being adopted today and a validation of the fact that the tools can be productively discussed independently of sweeping enterprise reformulation or reconsideration.

That’s what I would be talking about if I was speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. But I am not speaking.

McAfree gives us a hint about his keynote, and it doesn’t look like he’ll be talking about work media:

In my short keynote at the conference, I’ll look back at the past five years and also look ahead. I’ll spend some time talking about what I see as the two biggest threats to E2.0: old-fashioned bosses and newfangled computers.