I was just reading the latest edition of the McKinsey Quarterly and there’s a very interesting article entitled: “Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work.” Surprisingly to me, the author states:

“Web 2.0, the latest wave in corporate technology adoptions, could have a more far-reaching organizational impact than technologies adopted in the 1990s—such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management.”

I say surprising because declaring web 2.0 could have a more far-reaching organizational impact than ERP and CRM is amazing indeed. Imagine if you can the billions upon billions of dollars spent over the last few decades implmenting these behemoth systems by companies throughout the world—and Web 2.0 could be bigger? That is an startling endorsement from a pretty traditional source.

And why on earth would McKinsey think such a crazy thing? Because they rightly see “…Web 2.0 as a way of unlocking participation” and “…the underused human potential at companies as an immense ‘cognitive surplus’ and one that could be tapped by participatory tools.” That is exactly right, as I have (often) said before—all that corporate IP locked in the heads of people throughout every organization with no good way to access it and leverage it for wide-scale productivity improvement.

Not surprising is their finding that as many companies are unhappy with their web 2.0 experimental implementations as are happy. “Many of the dissenters cite impediments such as organizational structure, the inability of managers to understand the new levers of change, and a lack of understanding about how value is created using Web 2.0 tools.” In response, McKinsey outlines six “management imperatives for unlocking participation”–which are certainly all true, but are disappointingly uninsightful or at least mundane. Besides these six, as we will see in the next post, is the unmentioned and most critical imperative–and the one that underlies successful Collaborative Knowledge Sharing.

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