December 4th, 2006
Enterprise 2.0 meets spying 2.0
Harvard Business School Associate Professor Andrew McAfee was encouraged by the news in Clive Thompson's New York Times story "Open Source Spying." Spying 2.0 is using social media, such as blogs and wikis to create more agile and effective information resources that can be used and shared among intelligence and law enforcement agencies. The U.S. intelligence community is experimenting with Intellipedia, a Wikipedia-like wiki used by 16 agencies.
McAfee has written extensively about Enterprise 2.0, describing as using emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers. He thinks the government efforts to adopt Enterprise 2.0 concepts makes for a good case study. In his post, McAfee highlights several key points, such as the efficacy of link-based search, the frustrations of technically friendly newbies entering old-school computing environments, resistance by middle managers, the huge role of top management, the importance of many types of contribution, the advantages of an Intranet over the Internet and the ability for new connections to form.
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
