Enterprise 2.0 looking more like Enterprise 1.0.....

I read a recent McKinsey interview with Andrew McAfee, Enterprise 2.0 Impresario Extraordinaire, and was rather struck by the similarities to two bygone eras:

Firstly, on Implementation, the fight between bottom up and top down :

....the debate is typically between people who advocate [a top-down approach and those who
advocate] almost a purely bottom-up approach—in other words, deploy the tools, stop worrying about what’s going to happen, and get out of the way as the management of the company and let it percolate up from down below. Or, if you hear about a grassroots effort, encourage it, support it financially, but, again, get out of the way, let the bottom-up energy happen.

The other school of thought says that you need some top-down energy, or at least
signaling—that this is appropriate, we want this to happen, this is in line with the goals of
the organization. And the top-down school of thought says if you don’t have those signals
from the top of the organization, people are going to sit on the fence for a long time and
they’re going to wonder if this is a worthwhile use of their time, if it will increase their
human capital in the organization or not. And until they have clear answers to those
questions, they’re going to do nothing, or they’re going to sit on the sidelines.

I have a lot of sympathy for both approaches. I find myself agreeing more with the topdown
crowd, though. We know how important it is for management to create culture and
to signal what’s valued inside the organization. These tools are not an exception to that; I
think they’re a great example of it.

I'd agree - near 40 years of experience of system implementation (20 of which I've been around in) tells me that top management support is crucial for anything bigger than a few pilots (and I was around in the early "sneak a PC and a LAN in days)

Secondly, on justification of the project he notes a number of old saws:

- Another failure mode [the first was "build it and they will come"] is to be too concerned about the possible risks and the downsides. If we get wrapped up in those, we’re not going to take the plunge and actually deploy any of these new tools and turn them on and encourage people to go ahead.

- A lot of them [CIO's] see their roles as essentially conservative, though. In other words, “My job
is to not increase the risk profile of this organization before everything else.” That’s a legitimate concern, it’s a legitimate job for the CIO, but all my experience so far tells me that Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t increase the risk profile of an organization.

- I haven’t come across people who have done our old-fashioned technology ROIs1 and are happy with it. What I’ve seen instead is organizations that do a bit of thinking about: What do we want to have happen? What business need are we trying to address? What challenge, what opportunity, are we trying to seize here? And then think about which exact technologies they can deploy to help them with that.

My worry about these - conservative CIOs, boring beanies wanting ROI, careful company men - are that they are the standard saws of the vendors trying to knock down perfectly rational client concerns. As he does admit, it is their job to do so. And everybody's been through Web 1.0 where they heard all this before and those that drank too muck Kool Aid got washed away.

As a parting shot, there is also a lot of breathless hyping of the benefits, very little is heard about the downsides of having all your employees connected al the time. The last wheeze in this gig was "Employee Engagement" (see Dilbert cartoon above) and the easiest way to guarantee failure of Enterprise 2.0 is to give people the feeling that this is just a way of getting all those brain cycles they currently spend elsewhere harnessed to the Corporate Mill.