Over the past couple of months, I’ve worked on a position paper with a team of people from the German Knowledge Management Association, also called GfWM. The team consisted of practitioners, consultants, and a researcher, with each of us bringing slightly different perspectives to the table. This is not a research paper and our intention was not to write one either. Instead, we wanted this piece to be a call on knowledge management professionals to consider the implications of social media on their daily work and the organizations they work in.
We believe that the application of Web 2.0 tools within organizations has huge potential to leverage knowledge resources. At the same time, we wanted to stress that becoming an Enterprise 2.0 is not merely a question of making use of social media, but adapting the organizational culture accordingly. In order to make our ideas more ‘tangible’, we tried to come up with our own definition of the term Enterprise 2.0 (based on Andrew McAfee‘s work) and identified further characteristics. Additionally, we compared prototypical organizational cultures of an Enterprise 1.0 and an Enterprise 2.0 (based on Edgar Schein‘s work).
