Page 349 - Using MIS

Q6 What Is an Enterprise Social Network (ESN)? 317

by traditional social media, including blogs, microblogs, status updates, image and video shar-
ing, personal sites, and wikis. The primary goal of enterprise social networks is to improve com-
munication, collaboration, knowledge sharing, problem solving, and decision making.

Enterprise 2.0

In 2006, Andrew McAfee wrote an article about how dynamic user-generated content systems,
then termed Web 2.0, could be used in an enterprise setting. He coined the term Enterprise 2.0
as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and
34
their partners or customers.” In other words, the term Enterprise 2.0 refers to the use of enter-
prise social networks.
McAfee defined six characteristics that he refers to with the acronym SLATES (see
35
Figure 8-10). First, workers want to be able to search for content inside the organization just
like they do on the Web. Most workers find that searching is more effective than navigating
content structures such as lists and tables of content. Second, workers want to access organi-
zational content via links, just as they do on the Web. They also want to author organizational
content using blogs, wikis, discussion groups, published presentations, and so on.
According to McAfee, a fourth characteristic of ESNs is that their content is tagged, just like
content on the Web, and these tags are organized into structures, as is done on the Web at sites
like Delicious (www.delicious.com). These structures organize tags as a taxonomy does, but,
unlike taxonomies, they are not preplanned; they emerge organically. In other words, ESNs em-
ploy a folksonomy, or a content structure that emerges from the processing of many user tags.
Fifth, workers want applications that enable them to rate tagged content and to use the tags to
predict content that will be of interest to them (as with Pandora), a process McAfee refers to as
extensions. Finally, workers want relevant content pushed to them; or, in McAfee’s terminology,
they want to be signaled when something of interest to them happens in organizational content.
The potential problem with ESNs is the quality of their dynamic process. Because the ben-
efits of an ESN result from emergence, there is no way to control for either effectiveness or ef-
ficiency. It’s a messy process about which little can be predicted.

Enterprise 2.0
Component Remarks
Search People have more success searching than they do in
nding from structured content.

Links Links to enterprise resources (like on the Web).
Authoring Create enterprise content via blogs, wikis, discussion
groups, presentations, etc.

Tags Flexible tagging (like Delicious) results
in folksonomies of enterprise content.
Extensions Using usage patterns to oer enterprise content via tag
processing (like the style of Pandora).

Figure 8-10 Signals Pushing enterprise content to users based on
subscriptions and alerts.
McAfee’s SLATES Model

34 Andrew McAfee, “Enterprise 2.0, version 2.0,” AndrewMcAfee.org, May 27, 2006, accessed June 25, 2014, http://
andrewmcafee.org/2006/05/enterprise_20_version_20/.
35 Andrew McAfee, “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration,” MIT Sloan Management Review,
Spring 2006, accessed August 2001, http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/files/saleablepdfs/47306.pdf.