Connecting the Dots in the Enterprise

In a Spring 2006 MIT Sloan Management Review article, “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration,” Andrew McAfee first started to popularize the term “Enterprise 2.0” to describe the use of Web 2.0 collaboration technologies such as wikis and blogs within organizations. McAfee, now a principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Digital Business, has since continued his research into business use of what he calls “emergent social software platforms,” which by now range from wikis and blogs to Facebook and Twitter.

McAfee recently wrote a new book called Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges (Harvard Business Press, 2009). MIT Sloan Management Review senior editor Martha E. Mangelsdorf spoke with McAfee about his book — and his latest thinking on Enterprise 2.0. Here are a few excerpts from the interview, edited for clarity.

In your new book, you write about how Enterprise 2.0 tools fit into social network theory — and about strong ties, weak ties and people we don’t have ties with at all. Can you say more about that?

The book’s discussion of social network analysis grew out of a frustration I had trying to explain why managers should be interested in Facebook. When I started using Facebook, I realized it was a powerful tool for business purposes, but I couldn’t communicate that well to executive audiences. So I was really frustrated — and then I realized that, when I was a doctoral student, I’d read a wonderful paper by Mark Granovetter,“The Strength of Weak Ties,”that actually provided a great way to explain the benefits of tools like Facebook.

The paper is really counterintuitive. We rely very closely on our strong ties — our close colleagues. But Granovetter emphasized that if we want novelty and innovation, our weak ties, or our more distant colleagues and acquaintances, are actually the place to go first, because they have by definition less overlap with our knowledge base and our social network. Weak ties are hugely valuable.

There’s also another great body of social network literature that talks about the tragedy of not having a tie at all. That’s what happens when social networks are isolated from each other — and there’s what’s called a structural hole between them. Then there may be great work going on in both networks, but they’re not going to be aware of each other, and there’s going to be no cross-pollination.

And that is a place where a weak tie could be a bridge between the two networks?

Exactly. The ability to span networks is hugely valuable. Historically, it’s been done by people whom social network analysts describe as brokers or connectors — people who know everybody and what everybody is working on. Organizations have relied on them really heavily, especially for innovative work.

But Enterprise 2.0 technologies give all of us new tools for managing weak ties and developing new ties. Now when I talk to executives about Facebook, I say: This is a weak tie mechanism. If you believe in the strength of weak ties — that weak ties are really valuable to you — then Facebook is an incredibly valuable tool, because it’s great for keeping up to date with what your weak ties are doing. Historically, we’ve had lousy technologies at that level.

The same thing is true at the level of potentialities. A blogosphere where everybody is narrating their work is a great way to find people whose work you should know and to convert potential ties into actual ones. That’s terribly important to do, and it’s historically been done only by these connectors and brokers.

In your book, you give a number of examples of organizations that are using these Enterprise 2.0 tools. Some of them are ones readers might expect, like Google Inc. using prediction markets internally. But some of them are kind of surprising. I think I was particularly surprised to read about the way the American intelligence community — including organizations like the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency — is using Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

That’s a huge surprise, because one of the last places I would expect to see this kind of free-form, collaborative use of technology is within any organization as large, bureaucratic and conservative as the U.S. intelligence community. It’s a community of about 200,000 people spread across 16 distinct federal agencies that each has some intelligence and analysis responsibility, without, I think it’s fair to say, a deep and rich history of collaboration and information sharing.

In fact, The 9/11 Commission Report was really explicit that the failure to connect the dots among the available pieces of intelligence was a massive failure on the part of this community leading up to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. And the commission was fairly clear that it’s not hard to imagine how those attacks could have been prevented had we been able to pattern-match across all the available pieces of intelligence.

In the wake of that report, people within the U.S. intelligence community took a good, hard look at themselves and the ways in which they had been trained and taught to share information. Some very brave people said: We need to change this very radically. And one big element of that change is to deploy a set of Enterprise 2.0 information technologies across all community members, no matter which agency you sit in. For example, you’ll have access to one Intellipedia wiki, not a wiki for your little group or for your organization — but one that goes across the whole U.S. intelligence community, which already had a secure intranet in place. There’s also a single blogging platform that cuts across the whole community, so if I’m in the CIA blogging away and you’re in the National Security Agency, you can read my blog.

Now this is a massive departure from the way the intelligence community used to deploy technology and a massive departure from its entire organizational culture, which had been explicitly about sharing information only on a need-to-know basis. In the wake of 9/11, that switched over explicitly to a responsibility to share information with colleagues, and the intelligence community deployed tools that did a wonderful job of helping people discharge that new responsibility. And I got a lot of anecdotal evidence when I was doing my research that this technology is allowing people to interact in new ways and, maybe even more importantly, to find each other across this huge, sprawling community in ways that were just not possible before.

What are some of the benefits that, say, the intelligence community gets from this?

The main one they get out of it so far has been the ability to find not so much other pieces of information, but other brains all the way across the community. When I started my research on Intellipedia, the U.S. intelligence community’s equivalent of Wikipedia, I thought that the benefits would be like what we see with Wikipedia itself. When we’re looking for information, the most readily accessible good resource about topic X is there in Wikipedia, and it’s where we go to start our research.

What I learned instead was that, although there are good articles in Intellipedia, more fundamentally, because everyone’s contributions to Intellipedia are attributed rather than anonymous, if you’ve done something smart, I can find not only what you’ve done, but I can find you. The point is, I would never have found you within the intelligence community without the new tools.

Right. And then, if you’re my counterpart in another part of the intelligence community, maybe I’ll start a conversation with you.

Maybe I’ll do that via phone, maybe I’ll have lunch, maybe I’ll do it via e-mail, in these very old-fashioned ways, but the point is that conversation just would not have been initiated in the past, because the organization didn’t know what it knew. It didn’t know who knew what.

I would have to assume there would be big security concerns for the intelligence community about the use of these new tools within the community.

I would’ve assumed that too. But the community has decided the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 tools outweigh the risks. They’re not blind about the risks — they couldn’t be — and they’re a very security-conscious, conservative organization that has been burned in the past by information leaks — and burned in the not-too-distant past. The best I heard it explained to me, though, was when one of my contacts there said: We have historically believed that if we share too much information, people die. On 9/11, we learned that if we don’t share information well enough, people die.

When I talk to corporations, none of them has the same level of security exposure and downside that the intelligence community has. I find it very illustrative. If the U.S. intelligence community has found the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 tools greater than the risks, who would come to a different conclusion?