1.) What is your name?

Stephanie Booth

2.) Who are you and what are you doing?

I’m a Web 2.0 Strategy Consultant from Lausanne, Switzerland. I help my clients learn about social media and understand how it impacts what they are doing, and how best to use it to reach their goals.

3.) How did you get to the E2.0 topic?

Ten years ago, I became fascinated with the way the internet was connecting people and changing the way we communicate. I soon started blogging and became a very active online citizen. I spent a few years working in a big company and quickly understood that the online tools I was familiar with could help the organisation work more efficiently, and make the employees’ lives better. After a couple of years as a teacher, I became a full-time Web 2.0 consultant focusing, amongst other areas of interest, on the use of social media in the enterprise.

4.) What is your understanding of the core concept of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

Enterprise 2.0 is as much about introducing modern tools in the workplace as addressing cultural, management, and strategic issues. Web 2.0 tools connect people directly and tend to chip at The Machine. The core principle would be relaxing command-and-control, which goes with empowering employees and putting the humans back in charge (vs. The Machine).

5.) What are the main potentials of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

Given the right context and commitment, E2.0 ideas can lead to increased visibility and findability of knowledge internal to the company (what some would call “better Knowledge Management”), less silos and duplicate (or even contradictory) projects, more organic connections across hierarchies, increased employee satisfaction and recognition, better use of ressources (intellectual, skillsets) already present in the company.

What I see as the most important potential of introducing this new mindset in the enterprise is making companies and organisations better places to work in, for employees and managers. There is a huge amount of waste of human resources in the business world due to unhealthy or even toxic work environments. By reconnecting people through their human-ness, E2.0 has the potential for helping make workplaces healthier and more enjoyable, in addition to the more purely business benefits.

6.) What are the main challenges and threats of the Enterprise 2.0 idea?

I think the main challenge to E2.0 is the command-and-control culture, which goes hand-in-hand with the blame culture: if something goes wrong, it has to be somebody’s fault, so to avoid being the one at fault, one takes steps to control people or processes around oneself as much as possible.

On a more concrete level, resistance to change is clearly an issue. When introducing new tools, processes, or mindsets, one needs to be very attuned to what is going on psychologically with the people involved. Resistance is normal, and forcing through it is usually counter-productive. Understanding the context and the company culture in which one is introducing E2.0 tools, methods and mindsets is crucial.

Luckily, E2.0 can be introduced gradually in a given setting. The software involved is usually cheap (if not free) and readily available. It is possible to stage series of small-scale experiments or encourage individual initiatives by making top-down buy-in explicit. E2.0 does not have to be a revolution.

7.) Please give us three tags that describe your person and work best?

culture, strategy, enthusiastic

8.) Please give us three links to articles/contributions that describe your views best?

9.) Please give us three names of colleagues that you would refer to as brother-in-spirit?

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