Featured Blog: Andrew McAfee

This is the second in a series of articles in which E20portal.com will be featuring some of the best blog's from the world of Enterprise 2.0.

Andrew McAfee is an Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He coined the term 'Enterprise 2.0' in the Spring 2006 MIT Sloan Management Review article: Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration. Andrew discusses the impact of information technology (IT) on businesses and their leaders at his influential Harvard Business School Blog.

	Andrew P. McAfee
	Associate Professor of Business Administration
	Andrew McAfee joined the faculty of the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School in 1998. His current research includes an exploration of how Web 2.0 technologies can be used within the enterprise, and what their impact is likely to be.

We have selected five of Andrew's most informative and thought-provoking blog posts from the past two years. In these featured entries Andrew explores alternatives to overloaded email and discusses the organisational challenges of technological and cultural change. The posts can be read in full by following the title links below . . .

Harbors in the Ocean of E-mail

June 16th, 2008

"E-mail is clearly 'in the flow' for most modern knowledge workers. For many of them, it seems, it in fact_ is _the flow. But so what? Why is a lot of e-mail bad? If consequential things happen frequently and a knowledge worker needs to be aware of them in order to do her job, isn't e-mail as good a vehicle as any to communicate these important developments?"

In this post Andrew discusses the problem with using e-mail for all communications, and how Enterprise 2.0 tools can be used to work collaboratively without emails and attachments. Expanding on a recent New York Times article and research from the Information Overload Research Group he explores the concept of 'in the flow' tools and techniques for team collaboration.

A Technology Flip Test: Introducing Channels in a World of Platforms

January 15th, 2007

"The writer and and cultural observer Stanley Crouch, when asking his audience to consider a given issue, sometimes proposes a 'flip test' in which important elements of the status quo are reversed. It's an effective way to unmask hidden assumptions and double standards. And it can work quite well for questions around technology."

Andrew challenges conventional thinking in this insightful post by reversing important elements of the Enterprise 2.0 debate. He asks us to "imagine that current corporate collaboration and communication technologies were exclusively E2.0 platforms - blogs, wikis, etc. - and all of a sudden a crop of new channel technologies - email, instant messaging, text messaging - became available.", he then discusses his observations and potential results.

From Freeform to What Form?

June 27th, 2006

"Some wiki enthusiasts I've talked to are adamant that the technology should remain a blank slate--- a completely freeform collaboration environment. The only 'rule' is complete equality: anyone who can see the content can edit the content, any edit can itself be edited by anyone, and any edit can also be undone (or re-done) by anyone. As I've discussed before, while this sounds like a recipe for anarchy it's actually often a path to emergence."

Andrew's definition of Enterprise 2.0 includes the term 'freeform'. In this post Andrew explores the upsides and downsides of a completely freeform environment and how it relates structure and the "desire for control".

People, Computers, and People People

December 15th, 2007

"HR executives see all the bad things people can do, so I was expecting them to have a similarly cautious reaction to E2.0 (which is a concept at the intersection of people and computers). Instead, I found the group to be truly excited about the possibilities offered by emergent social software platforms."

Andrew compares reactions from HR executives and IT executives in this post discussing how Enterprise 2.0 is "at the intersection of people and computers" and how "people people were more optimistic about E2.0 than the computer people". He covers typical Enterprise 2.0 concerns including security, trust, benefits and risks and how these are viewed within large organisations.

The 9X Email Problem

September 29th, 2006

"Email is virtually everyone's current endowment of collaboration software. Gourville's research suggests that the average person will underweight the prospective benefits of a replacement technology for it by about a factor of three, and overweight by the same factor everything they're being asked to give up by not using email."

In this post Andrew expands on research investigating why so many new consumer products fail to catch on with their intended audiences, despite the clear advantages they offer over what's currently on the market. Applying this concept to the Enterprise 2.0, he observes that E2.0 tools may need to be 9x better than email to convince us to use them for collaboration.