The Enterprise 2.0 won’t transfer organization as professor Tom Davenport depicted in his blog[1]. I agree his argument in terms of the enterprise 2.0 technologies alone won’t change organization culture. Actually the corporate hierarchy structure and current culture are the killers of enterprise 2.0. The fears of lost control of communication within the organization , the worries of the accuracy of information captured and shared by the employee and the concerns over employee’s time spending on the socializing on non-work related topics are the main hurdles from management.
Recent Ontario government banned employees from using Facebook on workplace PCs, then the City of Toronto and the Conservative Party of Canada followed. This incident is the reflection of the management concerns over social networking impact in organization culture.
The big concerns from IT department are the security, lack of expertise with Web 2.0 products, reliability of Web 2.0 tech, loose standard of Web 2.0 and the difficulties of integration with existing system. The security issue may be the biggest barrier for large organization to implement Web 2.0 in its intranet because of the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, TrueSecure certification, and the PCI standards. People behave differently inside company web and public web.
Although it’s not a sufficient case study, one project shows regarding the content and writing styles of message there are significant differences[2]. Guideline for enterprise 2.0 is needed as the Wikinomics author Don Tapscott presented drivers need traffic rule.
[1] Why Enterprise 2.0 won’t transfer organization, http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/davenport/2007/03/why_enterprise_20_wont_transfo.html
[2] Toni Koskinen, Social Software for Industrial Interaction, ACM Digital Library, OZCHI 2006 Proceedings ISBN:1-59593-545-2