Live event: Andrew McAfee and Thomas Davenport debate the merits of Enterprise 2.0

On Monday at 10:00 AM EST, I will be moderated a live videocast debate from Boston on the merits of Enterprise 2.0 between Andrew McAfee and Thomas Davenport. The two professors have differing opinions on the whether the emergent technologies of Enterprise 2.0--such as blogs, wikis, predictive markets, social networks--will have a profound effect on how companies work.

McAfee is an associate professor at Harvard Business School, and coined the term "Enterprise 2.0." Davenport is a professor at Babson College, currently fills the President's Chair in Information Technology and Management.

Davenport maintains that Enterprise 2.0 isn't worthy to be characterized as a major shift in how organizations will work. "Most of the barriers that prevent knowledge from flowing freely in organizations – power differentials, lack of trust, missing incentives, unsupportive cultures, and the general busyness of employees today – won't be addressed or substantially changed by technology alone. For a set of technologies to bring about such changes, they would have to be truly magical, and Enterprise 2.0 tools fall short of magic," he wrote on his blog for the Harvard Business Review.

McAfee responded in his HBR blog, "I’m not as sure as [Davenport] is that power and capabilities are not going to be somewhat redistributed. As Victor Hugo said, 'One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.' "

The event is co-sponsored by BSG Alliance and Veodia, which is providing the live videocast. The debate is taking place prior to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.

You can watch the live debate videocast here.