Greg Lloyd, President and co-founder of Traction Software, interviews Harvard Business School famous Professor Andrew McAfee about Enterprise 2.0. The interview includes questions from 3 topics that were submitted in advance from the recent Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Tokyo.

Topic #1: How companies benefit from Enterprise 2.0 adoption

- What is Enterprise 2.0 and what is the difference between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0? (starting 1′43″)

- Do you see the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 leading to more intense and effective competition between companies and what are the common behaviors and characteristics of the companies that are successful in applying this technology? (starting 4′14″)

- Could you discuss some of the areas in which companies may gain benefits in being more responsive, in sharing knowledge or in collective intelligence? (starting 6′45″)

- Do your business clients in the United States ask you to quantify the benefit of Enterprise 2.0 introduction and how do you answer that? (starting 8′33″)

- Do you believe that there is a lasting benefit and advantage to be gained by reducing the action time and accelerating decision making and may Enterprise 2.0 technology help? (starting 12′48″)

Topic #2: How business executives respond to Enterprise 2.0

- There seems to be several patterns of communication and collaboration that Japanese companies seem to handle very well. How do these patterns match with what you see in Enterprise 2.0? First, from the US perspective, Japanese companies seem to be very skilled in developing and maintaining valuable long term relationships with their suppliers, customers and partners; they have these co-developers in many cases. How does Enterprise 2.0 help maintain and extend these relationships? (starting 14′08″)

- In your Fast Forward talk, you made a point also of there may be boundaries if for example a company is collaborating with one customer in developing new product, they may be also collaborating separately with a different customer who is a direct competitor. (starting 15′48″)

- A second part on Japanese communications patterns. In the US, Japanese companies are very well known for their early adoption and successful application of management theories such as continuous improvement. Do you believe that Enterprise 2.0 principles can help develop continuous improvement methods in Japan? (starting 16′32″)

- In Japan, enterprises are very nervous about liability, leakage of inside information, protection of personnel data obtained by the enterprises and this can be a very difficult barrier for Enterprise 2.0 collaboration, especially between companies. Based on your experience, how serious do you believe these risks are and how would you advise Japanese companies to evaluate and manage the risk? (starting 17′52″)

Topic 3: Patterns of successful Enterprise 2.0 adoption

- What are the success factors of technology? (starting 21′05″)

- The second area that you addressed in your Fast Forward talk talks about the management practices and management support practices that are important for success. (starting 26′05″)

- The third area that you talked about were the elements of company culture that are important for success. (starting 29′06″)

- There also seem to be some examples that you used on the relationship between bottom up, people at the working level whishing to make things work better with very strong top level management support to break down barriers. You used the example of the US Intelligence community. (starting 31′19″)

The future prospects of Enterprise 2.0

How have your concepts of Enterprise 2.0 changed since you published your paper in 2006? (starting 34′22″)

- You’ve said several times that software and technologies must be easy to use. It’s often a very difficult problem to make things sufficiently easy to use. There are aspects of boundaries and permissions and security and collaboration. How do you see the technologies that support Enterprise 2.0 evolving and changing over the next 3 to 5 years to beat what you think are real business requirements? (starting 36′39″)

Via Traction Software.