Is “E2.0” for large companies only?

Hmm. Good question. In general, I agree with you, but… I think there’s a very nuanced issue lurking here. I have often remarked to my colleagues on the conference circuit that the word “enterprise” in “Enterprise 2.0” is ill defined.

I am (via my employer, and our customers) biased towards the mammoth end of the spectrum. At the E2 conference in Boston in 2008, there were about 6 people from CSC attending. Just prior to the Town Hall, wrap-up session at the end of the conference, we shared our concerns over a cup of coffee that most of the examples, stories and use cases discussed had felt very “small” to us — we define “enterprise” to mean “a company with more than 10k employees and revenues measured in billions”. Anything less than that is what feels to us like an “SME”. We then went into the Town Hall meeting, and one of the first people to stand up and make a comment was a woman who said. “The conference has been too oriented on huge company examples, stories and case studies, and I’d like to see more stuff relevant to the SME’s of the world”. I’m ashamed to admit that I burst out laughing, as the ironic comparison to our musings on everything feeling too “small” mere minutes earlier was just too good to be true.

I don’t know that I would agree with you that it’s all about dah money, though (although that’s certainly true and a good point, to some extent). I would also suggest that the BENEFITS of E2 are proportional to the size of the group — larger groups exhibit more powerful network effects, and the return on that investment is inherently higher.

I also think that a rigorous definition of the word “enterprise” needs to find a way to recognize “distance” as a factor. The more “distance” between collaboration partners, the more value an E2 approach can add.

Consider: I don’t have an urgent need for clever collaboration if I can lift my head from the screen, look across the room, and talk to you. Whilst I can certainly still get value from E2 in that sort of circumstance, the “value” variable has a different number in it than in a circumstance where the person I need to collaborate with is on another continent.

But the interesting thing about that observation is that it’s a dimension of the problem that is orthogonal to mere “size” (as in headcount). A tiny, 10 employee company that is very geographically dispersed has a different set of demands from a 100 employee company that is geographically co-located in a very traditional manner. The former is “big” in terms of the “distance” variable and therefore has more to gain from E2, potentially.

All of which is just a (typically) long-winded way of saying: I agree, but I think the deeper problem is that we use the term “Enterprise 2.0” without really knowing or agreeing on what an “Enterprise” is. Sorting that out might be helpful.