This week’s QOTW comes from the June
10^th entry of Prof. Andrew
McAfee’s blog at the Harvard Business School.
It actually contains a few different quotes from other people as well. So, here’s
an excerpt of what Prof. McAffee had to say about “Enterprise
2.0: The State of the Meme”

A very thoughtful email I
got from reader TR made a great point: “Wikis/Blogs etc. are effective
because they're simple and people can get things done quickly. I know this is a
simple point, and I know you've made it (when describing Wikis), but what if
this point overwhelms all the others in significance?”  Indeed, what
if?  I love writing about highfalutin concepts like emergence, but
it's important to not lose sight of the fact that people use these tools
because they work for them, and they work in large part because they're so easy
to use.  We should all tape to our walls wiki inventor Ward Cunningham's driving question:
 ”What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?”
 Doing so might help us overcome our innate desire to use technology to
impose structure, and also help companies deliver IT more cheaply.

I really like this quote because it validates
the “2.0” portion of Enterprise 2.0, in that Web 2.0 is really about empowering the end-user and making access
to information/interaction on the web as easy as possible. Similarly, Enterprise 2.0 is not
just about SOA
or SaaS, but
it’s also about empowering the enterprise user with the right tools to do their
job as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Especially in this day and age,
where almost every department/group uses some kind of web-based or web-related
technology for their daily work, aren’t there too many occasions when the main
user is left “helpless” because the IT department just doesn’t have the time to
help them figure out the million dollar, enterprise-level, super software that
does everything except make it easy to update the information that you really
need to have appear on the page?

Remember how search engines initially
started to include more and more options on their search page?
First, they turned into search + news pages; then into full blown portals; and then some even went on to become early “community sites”? And what did users
want to do? Well…SEARCH!!! And in the end, we all know who eventually came out on
top of the battle of search engines, don’t we? Now, what do you see on their main
search page? Simplicity…

In the end, it’s not about the bells
and whistles or the “enterprise-level” tag. It’s really about who’s using the
application and whether you’re empowering them with it or merely putting a
stumbling block between what you need them to do and what they are actually
going to be able to do. And that’s where I believe Enterprise 2.0 can make the difference.