The dynamics of Enterprise 2.0--follow the ants

Rod Boothby has an interesting post on how the social dynamic of work is changing due to the influence of the Web and related technologies. 

There is something very interesting happening in the field of enterprise technology. I called part of it Web Office. Ismael Ghalimi called it Office 2.0. Ross Mayfield calls it Social Software in the Enterprise. Dion Hichtcliff calls it Enterprise Web 2.0.

Most famously, Dr. Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School called it Enterprise 2.0 in an article published in MIT-Sloan.

I'll add in another moniker for describing the shift, partly driven by enterprise technologies--Work 2.0. After all, it is the social dynamics of work that are changing as the result of a confluence of technologies, the need for speed, globalization and decentralization.

Rod cites Steven Johnson's book, Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software, which posits that the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts, driven by simple interactions among a group, such as ants, that evolve from the ground up without a centralized controller but some standards for interaction. Rod concludes:

Enterprise 2.0 is about building tools that end users can leverage to build their own solutions. Out of those highly customized end-user built combinations of people, process and technology, will emerge better business practices. Better because they will be more intelligent, more flexible and they will generate more long term competitive business advantage because they will generate more innovations. To be truly useful, these tools have to plug into the back end of any corporate entity. Critical features will include audit trails, access control, version control, authentication, provisioning and backup. The best Enterprise 2.0 systems out there will have thought through these issues.