Blue Ocean Strategy talks about creating brand new markets and making your competitors irrelevant. I think its a great concept and surely doable. However, doesn’t mean that you buy the book, read it and process it, you would be able to come out with a great strategy that will make competitors irrelevant and make heaps of money. Its just not that simple.
While your organisation is working on that, Enterprise 2.0 can help pool together all the tacit knowledge held within your organisation and get people together to collaboratively work on a strategy. Many strategies were created within boardrooms with senior executives using their perceived perception of the company’s operations to formulate a strategy. However, with senior executives being far from the actual front line, they might be out of touch with the reality of the company.
Enterprise 2.0 can capture this tacit knowledge through wikis, blogs and funky tools - the best part of it all, you can search for it. It can also provide a platform that allows a bi-directional communication that allows some employees to provide feedback on the strategy thus ironing out any loose ends.
Having said all these, the culture of the company plays a key role in the success of this and Enterprise 2.0 experts must be hired to provide the implementation strategy, change management advisory, provide education to employees and evangelise the power of Enterprise 2.0.
A collaborative, supportive and transparent organisation can help provide that competitive advantage many organisations have seek for.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Mark Thwaite // May 23, 2008 at 11:39 pm
“collaborative, supportive and transparent” — yup, that’s good. More organisations need to realise that a good percentage of their people are going to be intelligent and creative, are going to have good ideas about how to do their own jobs better, and how the whole shebang could run more effectively from their perspective. This cognitive surplus (Clay Shirky’s phrase) needs to be put to much better use by most all orgs. If it was used, the benefits could be enormous. Why have bored, negative staff when you can have engaged people?
2 Sean // May 24, 2008 at 9:59 am
Mark, can’t agree with you more. Cognitive surplus does need to be tapped in a greater way but not all of it for sure.. everyone needs a break. Implementation of Clay’s idea would actually be quite a mammoth task though. It involves changing people’s life and much more. I’m just not sure how feasible and doable.
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