Enterprise 3.0

I recently had a chance to participate in Andrew McAfee's panel on Enterprise 3.0.  Since I am still wrapping my head around Enterprise 2.0, the concept was a bit of a stretch for me.  Still, it was great to hear the ideas of everyone on the panel and some of the folks in the audience (MIT CIO Symposium).  Before I go back to my day job I thought I would jot down my thoughts on the subject.  There's one point in particular I am still noodling on.

Dr Edward Curry made a fantastic case for connecting stovepipes of data.  His assertion was that distilling meaning from the stovepipes will be the key enabler for Enterprise 3.0.  Linked data technology will change the way businesses interact with data.  He did a great job differentiating between documents (2.0) and data (3.0).

The highlight of the panel, for me anyway, was Ralph Swick, who made the pitch for using semantic web techniques to manage data in formats geared for interchange.  At times it was hard to see the difference between semantic web and enterprise 3.0.  I don't entirely agree.  I just can't see enterprises throwing much energy (and money) behind the semantic web until the ROI picture becomes more clear.  Perhaps its gaining ground on the web, where there's more data, but not behind the firewall.

My position was that Enterprise 3.0 will be dominated by context and insight.  Many of the E20 tools we use now are feeding data silos.  I gave an example of an E20 pilot we are doing with the internal software development community.  The platform wasn't even really up before developers were asking to integrate the conversations into their development tools, or the other way around.  Microblogs and wikis are great tools, but they are endpoints. 

The point I am still noodling on is my assertion that search will be the primary driver of Enterprise 3.0.  We're starting to make progress with a new search engine from Attivio.  We're actively looking for opportunities to pull structured and unstructured data together to form insights (I hate the word "mashup").  The next wave will be the intersection of contextual data + transactions with search driven insights.  I gave the example of sentiment analysis - today our marketing teams use tools to measure the mood of social interactions around different elements of our brand.  Meanwhile, the sales teams are using standard CRM tools to manage their accounts.  Sales is already asking to enrich their tools with new collective intelligence data; think salesforce.com Chatter.  Enterprise 3.0 is when we start pushing sentiment data - our brand, customer's brand, competitive products - into their main workstreams.   Using this example, sales would be able to interact around marketplace changes for our products or their customers. 

Enterprise 3.0 is little more than a concept right now.  Leave it to MIT to coin the phrase before the dust has even settled on Enterprise 2.0.