Because B2B or any collaborative interaction between multiple companies (banks needing to share information/transactions or hospitals needing to share and transfer patient data) the EA needs to include both companies and may need to model the industry (including government mandated laws or reimbursement qualifications or negotiated rules).

These examples would be larger than the subset of the organization. Would this be your whole-of-enterprise? It fits the IEEE1471/FEAR definition.

This is expanding the original intent of the term “enterprise” hijacked for E2.0 and may need to be a separate post.

Interestingly, there’s a high risk that ‘organisation’ can become a term-hijack for ‘enterprise’: there are circumstances in which they can be the same, but they’re not synonymous terms.

‘Organisation’ is a structure with a legal or similar boundary – in effect, a governance boundary. For example, a company or corporation is a legal entity; likewise a club or society, though more of the ‘laws’ may be self-chosen in that case.

By contrast, if we use the IEEE1471/FEAF definition, ‘enterprise’ is _any_ grouping of people who collaborate towards an shared purpose and set of goals and objectives: the boundary is not one of governance, but one of common purpose – which are _not_ the same things.

An enterprise can be any subset _or superset_ of the organisation. From a business perspective, there are at least three layers of enterprise that are supersets of the organisation: partners/supply-chain; customer-base (and, in an E2.0 context, reviewers/critics); and broader community (e.g. reputation-management / CSR). Crucially, it is only when the enterprise in scope is equivalent to or a subset of the organisation that the organisation has ‘control’ – i.e. the possibility of governance by decree or diktat. For anything with a broader scope, or whose scopes intersect (e.g. employee as customer, or as concerned citizen), governance can _only_ be by via negotiation, not diktat. That this is uncomfortable for many business-folks (especially those brought up in the ‘scientific management’ tradition) is irrelevant – except that many will either try to cling on to ‘control’ where it is not available, or play ostrich and assume that the organisation _is_ the enterprise. The result of the latter is organisation-centric ‘business architecture’ that has no connection with the real world – i.e. the ecosystem in which the organisation operates – usually leading in the mid- to longer term to failure of the organisation. In other words, exactly the same problems as those of IT-centrism, but at a larger scale.

It’s for such reasons that I’m so insistent on the need for whole-of-enterprise architecture, where ‘the enterprise’ in scope is always at least one layer larger than the organisation. Although an EA assessment should preferably cover a broader range, even a one-layer difference between the two should usually be sufficient to highlight potential governance-problems and suchlike in the interactions between the organisation and its environment.

Enterprise (Architecture) has been around a very long time. To apply a Version 2.0 to it conveys that EA has only been around since IT (and only in Internet format) for a growth of only 2 major releases is short-sighted.

Instead of fighting the battle of what E2.0 is, what should E2.0 software interpretation be called? It will be like trying to change people from calling it Swine Flu to H1N1 but it can be done.

ROI is important. Many people tend to look for a big bang for the buck instead of viewing the possibility of the business direction the strategy can apply to enhancing the customer experience to build customer loyalty (ok, this is very difficult if not impossible with government). Even for government, it will help form (and keep informed) the “tribe.”

Back to the main point of this article (term-hijacking). “Enterprise” needs to represent the organization which includes so many other aspects (like business and technology). Any subset of “enterprise” (such as software) needs to contain a name that represents a “subset” of the enterprise.

Many thanks indeed for engaging in this – I hadn’t expected this much of a response! Some specific comments:

Dennis – yes, I’ve no doubt that this sounds much like 2006 etc. The point I’m aiming to make here is that the same questions keep coming up not because of the technology, but because of the ‘hijack’ of the term, preventing any proper resolution of the discussion. I’ll post on this again later today.

Ron – I too have ‘IT roots’: my formal background is graphic design (at which I’m lousy, to be honest ), but as one of the people who invented desktop publishing (way back in the distant days half a decade before the Mac and PageMaker) I’ve done my time on megabytes of assembler and the like, and pretty much anything IT-related in the subsequent decades. Despite Richard’s valid complaint, I do find the ’2.0′ moniker useful: it’s fine saying ‘Next Enterprise’, but we need to know what it’s ‘next’ from! For example, I do find Tim O’Reilly’s distinctions between ‘Web 1.0 and ‘Web 2.0′ ( http://oreilly.com/lpt/a/7425 ) useful – in fact it’s the _comparison_ that is more useful than (arguably arbitrary) ‘Enterprise 2.0′ _definition_.

Martijn – I agree strongly about the difficulty of ROI and the like, because much the same applies to enterprise architecture. But I’m somewhat careful to avoid that issue here, because ‘E2.0′ is not my main field, and I’m well aware that I don’t have the specialist knowledge and experience to comment on that aspect. All I’m really focussing on here is the dangers of a ‘term-hijack’, of which using ‘Enterprise 2.0′ to mean solely the software aspects of a much broader theme is just one example.

Mark – we’re not disagreeing on the value of the software, and the way in which the technology enables new types of conversations. One of the key themes in the knowledge-management field is that we don’t know what we know until we get to use it – i.e. that much knowledge is context-dependent; your point about the importance of experimenting with the technology fits into much the same domain of contextual-dependent knowledge. (The same applies to requirements, for example – often we only know what we need when we see it, or see enough to notice its absence, hence the importance of iterative Agile-style development compared to one-shot Waterfall.) So yes, “There just aren’t enough learnings yet” – we do need to keep learning, always.

Once again, thanks very much all!

In the early stages of web 1.0, people didn’t build use cases to use the internet. The early pioneers built sites and discovered use cases after the fact. Then after Web 1.0 starting building momentum, people found purpose, built ROI frameworks, architected web sites, and developed best practices.

So in the example of Enterprise 2.0, the technology is driving new people behavior at least until the use cases are better defined.

Until you experiment with the technology it’s hard to develop the people part of the Enterprise 2.0 (and I agree it’s most important). There just aren’t enough learnings yet.

Great post!

Andrew’s definition seems to me to implement a rather uncontrollable environment from an enterprise point of view. Speaking IT-wise: impossible to automate

In my opinion, it’s not about software, it’s just freely and globally available software that enables people to engage in Enterprise 2.0.

Frankly, I’m missing the (measurable!) benefits (and concerns) of it for any business. Nonetheless I’m convinced that the current (near?) real-time global connectivity between you and me and us and them will change the world as we know it

It’s all going to go towards MDM and BI to try and catch ‘them unstructured comments’. Pretty much like chasing your desired one in the dark, and waking up the next morning <– don’t quote me on that

Enterprise 2.0 can’t be implemented within your enterprise – it wil just happen