Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
matrix of individuals, who may not even be co-located at one site but who
all need to share information to drive decisions. In response to these
challenges Pfi zer needed to introduce new tools to mitigate the ineffi ciencies
associated with a geographically distributed team, specifi cally support for
virtual working and collaboration.
During the fi rst half of the last decade, 2000-2005, a new class of tools
had emerged on the web that were enabling users to create, share and
comment on web content without the need for technical skills such as
HTML. These tools became referred to as Web 2.0 and evolved to power
the social computing revolution we see now. As Web 2.0 culture developed,
it rapidly became apparent that solutions such as wikis, blogs, social
networking, social bookmarking, RSS, etc., which were supporting
collaboration on the web, could equally be employed within business to
solve the type of challenges described above. Andrew McAfee coined the
term Enterprise 2.0 to describe this utilisation of Web 2.0 tools within the
enterprise [1]. Web-based examples such as Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter,
Delicious, Blogger, Google Reader, etc. readily demonstrated that they
could provide a solution to the collaboration and virtual working
challenges businesses were facing. However, it also was very apparent that
the user drivers and working practices associated with the success of these
systems were very different to those seen within most places of work.
Some examples of these differences are outlined in Table 13.1. As a
consequence it was clear that if they were going to be successfully utilised
to solve the virtual working and collaboration challenges Pfi zer was facing,
then it was necessary to experiment in order to understand how these
differences affected deployment and integrated into colleagues' workfl ows.
Many of the best tools available around 2006/7, and still even now,
had a narrow focus on performing a single task and do not suffer from
Comparison of the differences between Web 2.0 and
Enterprise 2.0 environmental drivers
Table 13.1
Web 2.0
Enterprise 2.0 Comment
User
Millions
Hundreds
On the web only a small
percentage of the total user
population needs to adopt
a tool to achieve network
effect. Within a business
you may need the majority
of users to become involved
to see the same benefi ts
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