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Aurilla Aurelie Bechina and Eli Hustad
Figure 1: Spectrum of Web 2.0 fluency (Phifer, 2008)
For a successful deployment and use of Web 2.0 technologies, it is crucial to categorize the Web 2.0
users in order for enterprises to understand how to deal with employees, customers. Psychographics
are essential, because they relate to the user's lifestyle, interests, aspirations and attitudes towards
the use of tool such blogs, wiki, and social networks. It is not the age of the person that determines
the categories but rather the people inclination to use Web 2.0 technologies (Zhiyuan, Meiyan, Yang,
& Shao, 2009).
One manifestation and application of Web 2.0 in the business domain refers to the concept of
Enterprise 2.0.
3 Web 2.0 in organizations-Enterprise 2.0
With the growing recognition that solely technologies have not fully delivered their promises to
improve business performances (Rigby & Bilodeau, 2007), academic and practitioners have shifted
their focus on solving “non technological issues” related to practices, cultures, and organizational
changes (Allen, 2008). Amongst different business processes, Knowledge sharing process within and
across organisations play an important role in fostering the competiveness of enterprises. Knowledge
sharing process is considered as a challenging task, difficult to nurture within an organization. It
requires pro-social behaviour through social processes, for example by cultivating a sense of
community.
The persistent quest to foster collaboration has led strategist’s people to adopt emerging technologies
supporting new networked business structures. Web 2.0, Social software, could become one of the
answers for improving the way people work together and to address some of the knowledge sharing
challenges.
Close studies looking at the use of Web 2.0 communities show that knowledge sharing is the
fundamental nature of such approaches. For example, strong user’s participations have created the
recognized success of some Web sites such as Wikipedia Ebay or Amazon.
With expanding capability to connect people and the need to enable corporate knowledge sharing, it
is important to provide a platform allowing many tools to be selected from. Every organisation has
their own business requirements and therefore, it is important to tailor this social technological
platform (Carla O’Dell, 2008).
Hence, it is crucial to understand the Web 2.0 concept, how a new breed of open, networked
organization—the Enterprise 2.0 and the Intranet 2.0 is emerging and why nowadays it is gaining
attention (Tapscott, 2006a, Tredinnick, 2006). The main focus is on networking, communication,
communities of practices and collaborative platforms.
In the following we will elaborate on these trends to determine the potential role of Web 2.0.
2.4 Enterprise 2.0: A new way to do business
The term “Enterprise 2.0”, E2.0 describes a collection of organizational and IT practices that help
organizations establish flexible work models, visible knowledge-sharing practices, and higher levels of
community participation. An additional interesting feature of E2.0 is the "mashup" - a website or web
application that uses content from more than one source to create a completely new service.
E2.0 refers to the use of social software in order to improve knowledge sharing and foster
collaboration between companies, employees, theirs customers, and partners. To illustrate this
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