When people talk about Enterprise 2.0, are they all talking about the same thing?
Andy McAfee: One of the things I tried to do early on was nail down what I hoped would be a tight definition for Enterprise 2.0. Other people are trying to use the same phrase to mean everything interesting that’s happening with IT. For me, Enterprise 2.0 represents the use of emergent social software platforms. Here’s what I mean. If I send Tom an e-mail, you don’t know about it and you can’t access its contents; it doesn’t add up to anything valuable at the enterprise level. A platform, on the other hand, is a digital environment where the content persists and grows over time, and can be consulted by the rest of the organization. Social means that the information is contributed by people as opposed to being generated automatically. And emergent implies that these systems are trying hard to not dictate structure or workflow so users experience it as being fairly close to a blank slate, but the structure does appear over time. Tom Davenport: Well, I guess the only real difference I hav
