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Recently there's been increased noise around Work 2.0. The term began surfacing in 2007 and described the efforts of quite a few software companies to develop the next sticky tech that would replace the niche filled by Microsoft Office. I've been wondering a lot about what we're supposed to do with all these terms: Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and Work 2.0. Now Web 2.0, in my opinion is on its way out. You're starting to hear talk of Web 3.0, which to me sounds a lot like a shark jumping over itself. The phrase was bound to crumble beneath the struggle to infuse it with tangible value propositions for the Enterprise.
Don't get me wrong, Web 2.0 as a transformational force is doing just fine. I just don't think it will be referred to by that moniker for too many more cycles. "Social Networking" after all is a lot easier to conceptualize and ultimately, monetize.
In the past 12 months a concrete distinction between what it means to be Web 2.0 and what it means to be Enterprise 2.0 has emerged. That difference of course, is price. When I think of Web 2.0 applications I think of cheap-to-free services that are adopted virally or rather I should say socially. Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and newcomers like Hunch, Vark and the dozens of ancillary applications that support Twitter including TwitterGadget. These products often have dubious business models, but general consensus is slowly emerging that the best of them do in fact make us more productive.
So what's Enterprise 2.0? That's Jive's Social Business Software, Telligent's Community Servers, Cisco Telepresence, Attensa's Enterprise RSS, Alfresco's Enterprise Document Management and many more. Most of this stuff isn't free, but these tools offer transformative opportunities for aligning knowledge worker interaction, engaging customers, partners, and even the media.
If Web 2.0 is about the people and Enterprise 2.0 is about organizing them, then what is Work 2.0? In September of 2007 Dan Farber wrote "It’s really about 'Work 2.0,' changing the way people work, especially with collaboration technology as a foundation, beyond having a group of people in different locations working from Starbucks and sharing documents." And of course, Bill Jenson wrote his opus on the subject over 7 years ago (though he updates it regularly). His argument is simple, corporate social networking is key to increasing the ROI that knowledge workers realize from their employers in exchange for the employee investing their assets ("time, attention, energy, ideas, knowledge, passion and social networks") in the enterprise.
Here's my take: Work 2.0 describes the lesser-defined middle passage between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. While Web 2.0 informs how we socialize online and Enterprise 2.0 enables organization and management of knowledge workers, Work 2.0 is more about the bottom up actualization of knowledge workers. In a previous post, I wrote about how as a business analyst I had redesigned how my team managed testing scripts in an effort to save time. That's Work 2.0. Much like those other two-dot-oh's its supported by a social movement just as much as it is by technology. It's about knowledge workers owning their productivity and the Enterprise supporting those who support themselves.
Who knows if any of these terms will stick in the long run. Arguably Work 2.0 has been around long before there was a name for it. Maybe its a synonym for innovation or just hard work. What is worth noting is that we as a society are connected to our friends, coworkers, competitors and customers in a truly transparent and conversational fashion that isn't going away any time soon. The organizations that have embraced and continue to embrace this new paradigm are those that will see real innovation and progress even in these uncertain times.
